Imagine, if you will, a place where you do the same work as the people around you but you're mostly invisible to the people you work for.  You may get a call with a few hours notice that you're needed to come in and sight-read a performance of a difficult opera. You do...

Chuck Bontrager, Steve Roberts, and Don Stiernberg

While it might not be a surprise that an opera such as Bel Canto uses unfamiliar folk instruments, this fall/winter we are lucky enough to also have exotics in the pit for The Merry Widow.  Meet our very first tamburitz...

Channing Philbrick, Co-Assistant Principal Trumpet, doubles in Bel Canto on trumpet and pututo, a maring conch shell fitted with a wooden mouthpiece.  Its otherworldly sound arcs out over the audience like an ancient siren.  Composer Jimmy Lopez owns the two pututos Ch...

Bel Canto composer Jimmy Lopez heavily features our Lyric Opera Percussion section who fly from instrument to instrument banging, bowing, tickling, whapping with super ball mallets, and coaxing out sounds ranging in timbre from eerie to exotic. In some cases they are b...

Before our exciting world premiere of Bel Canto on December 7, author Ann Patchett graciously took time out of her whirlwind evening to talk with us.  

Ms. Patchett is not only a novelist, but owner of the independent bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, w...