Pocket Opera, the Bay Area’s premiere chamber opera company, has offered accessible and audience-friendly performances for over 40 years. It presents the Bay Area’s finest singers and, with Pocket Philharmonic’s 5 to 12 players, perform lively, professional, entertaining productions. Performances are fully staged and performed in intelligible and singable English translations by Donald Pippin, the company’s Founder and Artistic Director Emeritus.
The audience experiences full operatic works, including some welcome rarities, on an intimate scale unique to Pocket Opera.
The company has been an integral part of San Francisco’s cultural fabric well in advance of its formal founding in 1977. Pippin’s English translations of operatic works have delighted and entertained San Francisco audiences since the mid-60s, at venues ranging from the Hungry I and Opus One in North Beach, to the venerable Old Spaghetti Factory.
The company performs La Bohème at the jewel-box Gunn Theater at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco this Sunday.
Puccini’s masterpiece features four young bohemians – a poet, a painter, a musician, and a philosopher – are struggling to survive in Paris, when one freezing Christmas Eve a knock on their door changes their lives forever. The beauty and pain of young love is set to glorious music.