Freedom, Equality and Pride: Beethoven’s 9th and Copland’s Lincoln Portrait
Celebrate Dawn Harms’ farewell as Music Director
Program
Ethel Smyth 🏳️🌈 - Overture to The Boatswain’s Mate
Aaron Copland 🏳️🌈 - Lincoln Portrait
Ludwig van Beethoven - Symphony no. 9
Featured musicians
Dawn Harms 🏳️🌈, Music Director and Conductor
Melody Moore 🏳️🌈, soprano
Nikola Printz 🏳️🌈, mezzo-soprano
Brian Thorsett, tenor
Hadleigh Adams 🏳️🌈, baritone
Berkeley Community Chorus
Masterworks Chorale
🏳️🌈 Part of BARS LGBTQ Composer and Performing Artist Series.
About the artists
Soprano Melody Moore has performed with many of the world’s top opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, English National Opera, and the Washington National Opera. She has starred in and recorded several operas with European orchestras, including Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Golden Girls of the West, Il Tabarro, Cavalleria Rusticana, and Othello.
Moore’s appearances with the San Francisco Opera include Dialogues of the Carmelites and the title role of Tosca. She has performed with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, and this is her third appearance with BARS. Most recently, she performed a selection of arias in a tribute to the diva Renata Tebaldi.
Moore was a former Adler Fellow and was a ‘Merolini,’ a participant in the San Francisco Opera’s prestigious Merola Program. You can learn about her recordings on Pentatone, and read about her journey as a lesbian singer in OutSmart Magazine.
Artistically fluid mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz uses music to communicate who they are, and not just what they can do. Recent performance highlights include the title roles in Carmen and Dido and Aeneas with Opera San Jose, as well as starring in a new opera about lesbian tennis player Billy Jean King with Opera Parallele and performing as soloist in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with the San Francisco Ballet. Nikola is a current Adler Fellow and a Merolini.
An accomplished aerialist, Nikola has also developed and performed on spinning trapeze in both grand concert halls – including Davies Symphony Hall with the San Francisco Symphony – and in smoky cabaret clubs. Nikola also enjoys subverting gender norms.
You can catch a video of Nikola singing the lied Morgan while performing trapeze, and read their interview in the San Francisco Opera blog.
Tenor Brian Thorsett has been seen and heard in over 100 diverse operatic roles and in over 250 works as a concert singer. His voice has also been featured in films and commercials. Brian is currently Associate Professor at the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech and previously served on faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.
Brian is a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Glimmerglass Opera’s Young American Artist program, the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme at Aldeburgh, England, and spent two summers at the Music Academy of the West.
Brian has previously performed with BARS on two occasions, in Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Satie's Socrate, and an aria from Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (based on the works of Gertrude Stein).
Baritone Hadleigh Adams is a native of New Zealand, and equally at home on the opera stage and in concert. Recently, he was a part of the world-premiere performance of John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra with the San Francisco Opera, and played the lead role of Hawkins Fuller in Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers with the Florida Grand Opera. On the concert platform, he has performed with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Houston Symphony, and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, among others.
Hadlaigh previously performed with BARS in Jennifer Higdon's Dooryard Bloom. He is also a former Adler Fellow and a Merolini. You can catch Hadleigh at the San Francisco Opera in June 2024 where he will play the role of Ormonte in Handel's Partenope.