Arts Listings

Two local singers who are starting to make their mark in the national and international opera world will come back to Oakland as featured soloists in Friday’s Oakland East Bay Symphony concert, conducted by Michael Morgan at the Paramount Theater in Oakland.  

Soprano Hope Briggs grew up in the Bay Area, has lived in San Francisco and Berkeley, and was a Metropolitan Opera national finalist in 1997. 

She appeared in Busoni’s Dr. Faustus with the San Francisco and Stuttgart operas, and in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera with Festival Opera in Walnut Creek. After her Oakland performance she will be going to Frankfurt, Germany, to sing the role of Dona Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a role she will repeat for the San Francisco Opera in July 2007. 

Kalil Wilson, a tenor whose family lives in Oakland, is an alumnus of the Young Musicians Program at UC Berkeley and the Oakland Youth Chorus. 

Though he is only 24, he has won many competitive scholarships and awards, including first place in the Palm Springs Opera Guild of the Desert Vocal Competition, second place in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Western Region Auditions, and first place in the Los Angeles Young Artists of the Future competition.  

He is now a Gluck Foundation Fellow in the UCLA Music Department. This summer, he is to sing the title role in Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring at the 2006 Aspen Summer Music Festival. There last season, he sang the lead tenor role of Egeo in Cavalli’s Giasone. 

Briggs and Wilson will sing Dvorak’s Stabat Mater with the Oakland Symphony Chorus. Stabat Mater is a moving choral piece written by Dvorak during a time when he had lost all three of his children in a short period of time. He used the composition to work through his own grief by attempting to understand the suffering of Mary contemplating the crucifixion of her son.  

Also on the program will be the operatic overture to Mozart’s rarely performed Lucio Silla. The performance is at 8 p.m. For more information, call 444-0801 or see www.oebs.org