"You get to enjoy that really amazing experience of the audience responding to to what you've offered. But you cannot bite it. You have to you have to keep a distance from it and and be privileged to be...
"I did resonate with how his family labeled him a peculiar kid. I experienced that growing up, not from my family, but the neighborhood."
"A singer goes through so much; they have such a big job to do. And I respect what they go through. I can't do it. Yet there are things that the pianist does which is equally impressive and important for me."
"Early on we decided we didn't want to be soap-boxy and so we wanted to kind of enter into a space that allowed for allegory and some sense of magic or something that almost like Aesop's fable."
"I really enjoy getting to know people and places and operas and productions that differ from each other because it makes me feel like my life is richer."
A great way to become familiar with a composer's work is to perform it. Zachary Gordin, the General Director of Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, is intimately familiar with the work of composer Jake Heggie. Arguably Heggie's best-known work...
"I think it was the start of me becoming more interested in works that had explicit theatrical elements and a legible kind of quasi-narrative element. And it was really a chance for me to really see how versatile I could be as a performer."
"I do believe that there is still beauty and there is beauty we don't even know about yet from this pandemic...it's only just creeping out of the ground right now."
"I think people can see in art a reflection of themselves and of the moment that we live in. I think people will see in Onegin the difficulties we've been through in the last sixteen months."
"I think what Dionysus and Dracula both try and show through being the stranger and the outsider is that we are all the same basically. "