Conductor

Chorus Director

The celebrated San Francisco Opera Chorus performs an intimate concert on Sunday, November 23 at 2pm in the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater. Chorus Director John Keene leads the members of the Company’s full-time chorus, and Associate Chorus Master Fabrizio Corona accompanies at the piano for this afternoon of choral music.

EPSG:4326

San Francisco Opera Chorus in Concert

San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center

He’s arrogant. He’s disobedient. He’s becoming the most powerful being in creation, and he’s about to wreak havoc on heaven.

Based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, The Monkey King makes its much-anticipated world premiere at the War Memorial Opera House. This new, action-packed opera combines high-energy music and text with puppetry, dance, Peking opera, and Buddhist sutras to tell the tale of the Monkey King’s beginnings.

The Monkey King is a beloved figure and has inspired countless interpretations in popular culture. A monkey born from stone, Sun Wukong (the Monkey King) is determined to find immortality for his tribe. Many scoff at his aspirations, but he is set on proving them wrong with his signature cunning and charm. He wins every battle against legendary warriors, but the respect he longs for is always out of reach. What will it take for the gods to recognize him as an equal?

Award-winning director Diane Paulus and puppeteer Basil Twist conjure up a whimsical world of gods, tricksters, superheroes, and rebels. Huang Ruo’s soaringly beautiful, energized score and David Henry Hwang’s incisive libretto blend traditional Chinese and contemporary Western styles into an extraordinary work that gives new voice to this enduring story. Carolyn Kuan makes her Company debut on the podium.

The Monkey King

War Memorial Opera House

The Knights of the Holy Grail are in decline. Their ruler, Amfortas, is ailing from an unhealable wound. While the knight Gurnemanz wistfully recalls the prophecy of a guileless youth who will restore the order, he refuses to believe that the naive, young man before him could be that savior. And so the youth, Parsifal, leaves on what will become a journey that will bring him full circle back to the knights.

For the first time in 25 years, Wagner’s final opera returns in a brand-new San Francisco Opera production. Matthew Ozawa— whose work was last seen in the acclaimed Orpheus and Eurydice—directs this meditation on compassion, focusing on the intersection of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions in a mythical world of knights and sorcerers.

Music Director Eun Sun Kim continues her exploration of Wagner’s works through this sublime score, brought to life with a cast of Wagnerian superstars joined by the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Chorus, and Dancers.

Parsifal

Joseph De Rocher has been sentenced to death for murder. Armed with her faith, Sister Helen Prejean is accompanying him on his journey to execution. Faced with the raw pain of the victims’ parents and the despair of the murderer’s mother, Sister Helen’s faith is tested in ways she never could have imagined.

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the San Francisco Opera world premiere, Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking returns to the stage where it all began. Based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir of the same name, the opera is a searing portrayal of grief, anger, and compassion, hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a masterpiece” in 2000. Since that auspicious premiere, Dead Man Walking has become the most widely performed new opera of the 21st century.

Heggie’s dramatic, lyrical score takes us deep into the humanity of an unthinkable reality. Leonard Foglia’s acclaimed production highlights the emotional nuance and moral complexity at the center of Sister Helen Prejean’s journey. Patrick Summers conducts.

Dead Man Walking

Our final Chamber Series concert opens with Aaron Wyatt’s Cirrus, a moving exploration of the relationship between modernity and the natural world and the beauty of ordinary things. Meyer’s unique composition style makes his String Quintet a must-hear. The program concludes with Beethoven’s acclaimed Septet in E flat, a work so charming that many regard it as the finest septet ever composed.

Chamber Series: Serenade

Government House, Western Australia

Gossip is Rigoletto’s stock-in-trade. As the court jester to a womanizing duke, there is plenty of scandal to go around, and his sharp tongue keeps him in gainful employment. But underneath the caustic barbs, Rigoletto is devoted to his daughter, Gilda, whom he keeps shielded from the lascivious eyes of the duke. When a nobleman lays a curse on Rigoletto for his cruel humor, the jester has no idea how far he is about to fall.

As Rigoletto’s life unravels, his desperation intensifies, underscored by some of the most lyrical, heartfelt music ever written for the stage. Verdi’s operatic masterpiece is a study in dualities: cynicism and tenderness, hope and despair. This production echoes these contrasts with its richly designed renaissance couture set against a striking backdrop inspired by Giorgio de Chirico.

Music Director Eun Sun Kim leads the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and Chorus in a continuation of her multi-year exploration of the works of Verdi.

Rigoletto

Charm and innovation collide in Brahms’ String Sextet No.2. The grand orchestral experience is distilled to a single ground-breaking movement in Schoenberg’s boundary-pushing First Chamber Symphony. A suite of dramatic and vivid string quartets showcases the creative talents of Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin.

Chamber Series: Rapture

Amidst a terrible storm, Idomeneo promises the god Neptune that he will sacrifice the first person he sees if he and his crew survive the tempestuous waters. Arriving to shore, his relief at safe passage quickly transforms into horror as the first person he lays eyes upon is his own son, Idamante.

Idomeneo

Rent is overdue, and the poet Rodolfo’s manuscript is reduced to kindling. But as the fire in the hearth dwindles, passion burns brightly amongst a group of young friends.

La Bohème

As free as a rebellious bird, it is hard to escape the magnetic allure of Carmen. Entranced by her passionate seguidilla, the soldier Don José descends into a dangerous spiral of desire.

Carmen

Isolde has been captured by Tristan, who is delivering her as a trophy to his uncle, King Marke. She seeks death for them both, but when her maid swaps out the intended poison with a love potion, so begins an epic romance.

Tristan and Isolde

In a dystopian future, women are forced into childbearing servitude by an extremist theocratic regime. Escape is nearly impossible—but Offred, a handmaid, is determined to find a way back to her child, no matter the cost.

Based on the landmark novel by Margaret Atwood, this intense operatic drama gives voice to a terrifying, fictional world that is becoming increasingly prescient.

The Handmaid's Tale

King Gustav III secretly harbors a love for Amelia, the wife of his closest advisor and friend. When a visit to a fortune teller confirms that his love is reciprocated and reveals a plot against his life, the seeds of his undoing take root.

Lavish costumes adorn masked courtiers as they gossip through the political machinations of eighteenth-century Sweden. Leo Muscato’s direction makes this new-to-San Francisco Opera production a must-see return to Verdi’s thrilling drama.

Un Ballo in Maschera

A joyous wedding celebration takes a shocking turn when the darkest of family secrets is revealed and a young bride has an impossible decision to make.
Acclaimed by the The New York Times as a “masterpiece,” Innocence takes us to the limits of a family’s ability to deal with tragedy. In a gripping one-act drama, Kaija Saariaho and Sofi Oksanen unfold a harrowing story of emotional shock and surprise in which our understanding of innocence and guilt is continually upended.
Premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2021 and making its American premiere in San Francisco, Innocence makes clear the power of the opera stage to tell emotive stories impossible in any other art form. Saariaho specialist Clément Mao-Takacs leads an international cast of singers and actors in this towering work performed in multiple languages.

Innocence

Infiltrate the castle. Rescue the princess. Bring her home. That’s the mission that unites two unlikely allies: a dashing young prince and a bumbling bird-catcher, armed only with a set of magical musical instruments. Their journey into a world of sorcerers and serpents, spirits and secrets, takes an unexpected turn in The Magic Flute, a fairy-tale quest for love and wisdom.
Mozart’s final opera comes alive in an acclaimed, inventive production from Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade, conjured from the topsy-turvy delights of silent cinema, 1920s cabaret, early Hollywood animation, and the illustrator Edward Gorey.
Music Director Eun Sun Kim takes us on a humanistic journey of awakening with some of the most sublime music ever written by Mozart.

The Magic Flute

With no money, no confidence, and no hope of winning the hand of the alluring hotel owner Adina, the young waiter Nemorino entrusts his chance of romance to a quack salesman and a dubious bottle of. . . magic elixir.
Passions bubble to the surface in Gaetano Donizetti’s effervescent comedy The Elixir of Love, a quest for passion and romance on the sunny Mediterranean Riviera.
Director Daniel Slater and designer Robert Innes Hopkins create a sun-soaked world of pleasure where cocktails flow freely and hot-air balloons glide across the sky—a harkening back to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, brought to musical life under the baton of conductor Ramón Tebar in his company debut.

The Elixir of Love

Writing is the preservation of identity in the new opera Omar from Grammy award-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens and composer Michael Abels. A true story of an indomitable faith enshrined in a two-hundred-year-old autobiography in an opera acclaimed by The New York Times as a “sweeping achievement.”
In the early 1800s, Islamic scholar Omar Ibn Said is forcibly taken from his village in West Africa and sold into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. Attempting to flee, he is imprisoned in Fayetteville and taken to the plantation of another slaveholder, eager to convert him to Christianity. There Omar records his story in Arabic, transforming his world into an expansive canvas of text and faith, profoundly realized in Kaneza Schaal’s transcendent production.

Omar

He arrived from her dreams to save her from a nightmare. Trapped in a scheme to frame her for her brother’s disappearance, Elsa von Brabant prays for a savior to rescue her. And one appears: a knight conveyed by a beautiful swan. He has only one request: that Elsa must never ask his name.
Can Elsa trust her life and love to a stranger whose mysterious identity is eating away at her? Lohengrin marks the beginning of Music Director Eun Sun Kim’s journey through the works of Richard Wagner, creating a new generation of Wagnerian experiences that will speak to the soul of our collective humanity.

Lohengrin

A device brought the world to our fingertips, connected us in unparalleled ways, and streamlined communication. But for the man behind the machine, life was far from streamlined.
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, by acclaimed San Francisco composer Mason Bates and Pulitzer-winning librettist Mark Campbell, comes home to the place where it all began.

Under the baton of Michael Christie, Bates' score takes us on an operatic journey through the fragmented memory of love, betrayal, obsession and death, weaving together classical lyricism and a techno soundscape informed by the audio of early computers.

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

Familial revenge runs deep in Giuseppe Verdi’s towering opera of grand passions stymied at every turn. Music Director Eun Sun Kim continues her Verdi cycle with Il Trovatore, a work of sublime arias, passionate ensembles, and the rousing Anvil Chorus.
Sir David McVicar’s incisive, visceral production, rooted in the haunting imagery of Spanish painter Francisco Goya and the power struggles of the Spanish War of Independence, returns to San Francisco.

Il Trovatore

It's been three years since she passed. Now on the Day of the Dead in 1957, a lonely, ailing Diego Rivera makes a final wish: to see his wife Frida Kahlo once more. And the underworld heeds his call.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego

Half-spirit and half-mortal, the Empress lives in fear of a curse: If she doesn’t acquire a human shadow in three days’ time, the spirit world will reclaim her—and turn her husband to stone. Strauss’ rarely performed masterpiece returns for the first time in over 30 years in a vibrant production designed by acclaimed artist David Hockney. Former San Francisco Opera Music Director Sir Donald Runnicles conducts.

Die Frau ohne Schatten

Each night, the young Cio-Cio-San looks out over the port of Nagasaki, eagerly waiting the return of her husband, U.S. Naval officer Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton. Alongside her is their young son, Trouble, who has never met his father. But disappointment is about to sail across the horizon when Pinkerton arrives with his recently wedded American wife. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts a new staging of Puccini’s heartbreaking drama from director Amon Miyamoto, who reimagines this classic through the eyes of Trouble.

Madame Butterfly

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

The concert program highlights the San Francisco Opera Chorus under the direction of San Francisco Opera’s new Chorus Director John Keene.

San Francisco Opera Chorus In Concert

Taube Atrium Theater

What death has stolen, the musician Orpheus is determined to bring back. With Love as his guide, Orpheus journeys into the underworld to save his wife, Eurydice. But there is one condition: he must not look back at her until they return to the mortal world. Orpheus and Eurydice returns in a fully staged production for only the second time in the Company’s history. In this new production, director Matthew Ozawa joins award-winning choreographer Rena Butler to take us on a heartfelt journey into the stages of grief.

Orpheus and Eurydice

Fame. Power. Fortune. Violetta Valéry has it all as Paris’ most admired courtesan. But never has she allowed herself to experience true love. All that changes when a naive young man enters her Paris salon and offers her a romance full of tenderness and compassion. But can their love ever be free from the social stigmas of her past?

La Traviata

Oracle Park

Outside, scaffolds rise in city squares as priests, nobles, and political prisoners face the merciless blade of the guillotine. The aristocrat Blance de la Force had hoped the convent would serve as a sanctuary. But now, death is at the sisters' doorstep. And one by one, their faith will be tested.
Francis Poulenc’s profound drama returns to San Francisco in honor of the Company’s U.S. premiere of the work in 1957. Olivier Py’s award-winning staging pairs striking tableaus with Poulenc’s haunting, poetic score conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

Dialogues of the Carmelites

She loved him at first sight. But Onegin, an aristocrat obsessed with appearances, could never be happy with a country girl like Tatyana. Or so he thought. Emotions run high in Tchaikovsky's drama Eugene Onegin, based on Alexander Pushkin's deeply human story.  Gorgeous sweeping melodies melt the heart, making this one of opera's most romantic masterpieces—from Tatyana's ardent letter scene to the intense final duet as Tatyana and Onegin fight for their emotional lives.

Eugene Onegin

She was his queen. He was her downfall.  San Francisco Opera's 100th Season begins with John Adams' thrilling new opera, commissioned for the Company's centennial and conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

Antony and Cleopatra

His music has brought to life witches and war lords, monarchs and matadors. Next summer, San Francisco Opera celebrates the extraordinary breadth of Giuseppe Verdi. Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts a concert that recognizes the beginnings of her American journey: She made her U.S. debut with performances of Verdi’s Requiem and La Traviata. Kim leads the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and the San Francisco Opera Chorus in a night of arias, duets, and orchestral and choral numbers, with four thrilling singers headlining the evening: soprano Nicole Car, tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz, baritone Etienne Dupuis, and bass Soloman Howard.

Eun Sun Kim Conducts Verdi

A Love That Tears A Dynasty Apart The noble Jia family may have finally found the solution to its age-old debt: She’s young, she’s beautiful, and, most importantly, she’s wealthy. There’s only one problem. She’s not the woman of Bao Yu’s dreams. Adapted from a classic of world literature, Dream of the Red Chamber is an opulent exploration of love, lust, and political intrigue in imperial China by composer Bright Sheng and Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang.

Dream of the Red Chamber

A jack-of-all trades, the wily barber Figaro has a scheme for anything. Moved by the distress of two young lovers separated by the curmudgeonly Doctor Bartolo, Figaro pulls out his bag of tricks. But will Figaro’s scheming allow Rosina to escape the clutches of her ward into true love’s embrace with Count Almaviva?

Rossini’s exuberant comedy features some of the most joyful music in all of opera. From the famous overture to the irresistible “Largo al factotum,” this masterpiece of comedic writing has delighted audiences for over two hundred years.

In director Emilio Sagi’s flamenco-inspired production, sun-bleached buildings are the backdrop to colorful costumes as the characters’ plans for escape become more and more outrageous. Benjamin Manis returns to conduct this effervescent score.

The Barber of Seville

In a brutal world where revenge is enacted with the axe, Klytämnestra has murdered her husband Agamemnon. Their daughter Elektra is consumed by her grief and is fixated on vengeance against her mother. Justice must be served.

San Francisco Opera’s production, praised by the San Francisco Chronicle as “extraordinary” and “stunning,” brings us to a modern-day museum and an exhibit on Elektra. A young woman grappling with her own life is pulled into the ancient narrative in this ingenious production by Keith Warner—a taut psychological thriller in which the past and the present become one.

Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducts Richard Strauss’ expressionist masterpiece, replete with one of the largest orchestras in the repertoire. The intense emotions of this Greek tragedy are rendered on a vast scale by Strauss’ massive soundscape and a score that winds up the dramatic tension with an intensity that can only lead to one horrific outcome.

Elektra

He accepts the chance to lead the Republic of Genoa with the hope of uniting his family. But on the very day Simon Boccanegra is elected doge, tragedy strikes—his beloved dies, and his infant daughter vanishes. Now, 25 years later, Boccanegra is a seasoned leader balancing opposing political factions. As he works to bring stability to a fractured republic, fate gives him one more chance at the family reunion he’s longed to secure. 

Simon Boccanegra is both an intimate story of love, loss, and reconciliation, and a larger political allegory for a divided Italy aching for unity. For Verdi, peace can only be achieved when broken bonds are mended—whether between father and daughter, or rival factions of a splintered nation. 

Music Director Eun Sun Kim returns to her exploration of Verdi with this powerful score, filled with some of the most stirring music he ever composed.

Simon Boccanegra

Just 18 years old, and already the Queen of France, Mary Stuart is poised, politically savvy, and confident in her divine claim to the Scottish throne. However, the Scotland she returns to bears little resemblance to the one she left behind as a child, and she will need every ounce of resolve to hold onto her crown.  

In Mary, Queen of Scots, composer Thea Musgrave brings one of history’s most captivating figures to the stage with a score as bold and compelling as its heroine. As Mary navigates a treacherous political landscape, she leans on her closest advisors: her calculating half-brother James, Earl of Moray; the enigmatic Earl of Bothwell; and her charming, but weak-willed future husband, Lord Darnley. Slowly, but surely, each man’s hunger for her power reveals itself in increasingly manipulative ways, and Mary must outmaneuver one betrayal after the next.

Making her company debut, Clelia Cafiero conducts this co-production with English National Opera by director/designer Stewart Laing sets 16th-century intrigue against a backdrop of contemporary Scottish life and sectarian violence, lending fresh resonance to an almost 500-year-old story.

Mary, Queen of Scots

Manon is young, beautiful, and has a taste for the finer things … which is why her family is sending her to a convent. En route to her new life, she falls for the handsome Chevalier des Grieux and they run away to Paris, the city of love. But their youthful ardor is threatened by fatherly disapproval, and Manon finds herself with a choice to make: wait alone in poverty or embrace the wealth of a new lover? 

Manon composer Jules Massenet’s soaring score captures the intensity of young love as Manon and Des Grieux’s relationship endures twist after turn. Manon must navigate a path that careens between the radiant glow of love and the allure of wealth.

Music Director Eun Sun Kim’s conducting and Vincent Boussard’s cinematic production design brings the drama of Manon into emotional relief. The shimmering stage illuminates both the Champagne effervescence of Paris and the sensual idealism of young love.

Manon

It’s a busy day in the manor house as the staff prepare for the marriage of the wily valet Figaro and his quick-witted fiancée, the maid Susanna. But the head of the house, Count Almaviva, wants Susanna for himself—and he’s used to getting his way. With the help of the slighted Countess, Figaro and Susanna work to turn the manor upside down in order to exchange their holy vows of matrimony. 

You can’t help but fall in love with Mozart’s endearing comedy of schemes and disguises. But hidden beneath its lighthearted façade is an exploration of the social constructs of power and class. At every turn, the servants are one step ahead of the Count.

Set at the birth of America, San Francisco Opera’s production highlights the deconstruction of class within a recently-built manor house. Scaffolding, blueprints and the dust of recently plastered walls pervade Erhard Rom’s set design, suggesting a new world emerging that challenges old ideals.  

Conductor Sebastian Weigle makes an exciting house debut on the podium.

The Marriage of Figaro

Political tensions are high in Rome in June, 1800—and the opera singer Floria Tosca gets caught in the crosshairs when her lover, the painter Mario Cavarodossi, aids an escaped prisoner to safety. When the tyrannical chief of police Baron Scarpia pulls Carvardossi in to be interrogated, Tosca must decide whether she’s willing to sacrifice her honor to save her love.

Tosca returns to the War Memorial Opera House in this beloved San Francisco Opera production. Puccini’s tragic masterpiece has one of the most tightly-wrought opera scores, ratcheting up the already high-stakes drama at every turn. Can our heroine escape Baron Scarpia’s lascivious power? Can she find a way out of the trap closing in on her? 

Director Shawna Lucey and designers Robert Innes Hopkins and Michael Clark take us around Rome to the three distinct locations of Tosca: the towering sanctuary of Sant’Andrea della Valle, Scarpia’s oppressive lair in the Palazzo Farnese, and the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo where the story will come to its dramatic conclusion. Clelia Cafiero takes the podium to conduct one of Puccini’s most celebrated works.

Conductor, Chorus Director

John Keene

Events

Upcoming events

May 28 - Jun 21, 2026

The Barber of Seville · San Francisco Opera

7 - 27 Jun, 2026

Elektra · San Francisco Opera

12 - 27 Sep, 2026

Simon Boccanegra · San Francisco Opera

Sep 20 - Oct 4, 2026

Mary, Queen of Scots · San Francisco Opera

Oct 15 - Nov 1, 2026

Manon · San Francisco Opera

Past events

Nov 23, 2025

San Francisco Opera Chorus in Concert · San Francisco Opera

14 - 30 Nov, 2025

The Monkey King · San Francisco Opera

Future and recently performed repertoire

Conductor in String Sextet No. 2 by Brahms

West Australian Symphony Orchestra

Conductor in Chamber Symphony No. 1 by Schönberg

West Australian Symphony Orchestra

Double Bass in String Quintet by Meyer

West Australian Symphony Orchestra

Double Bass in Septet in E flat major by Beethoven

West Australian Symphony Orchestra

About

John Keene hasn't added a bio