MEET THE ARTISTS

JAMES MEENA, Conductor

Artistic Director James Meena continues his twenty-second season with Charlotte’s opera company. Mo. Meena’s guest conducting engagements have included the Washington Opera, the Pittsburgh Opera, L’Opera de Montreal, New York City Opera, Michigan Opera Theater, Festival Puccini Torre del Lago, Teatro del Giglio Lucca, Teatro Pavarotti Modena, Teatro Ravenna, Teatro Sociale Rovigo, the Arizona Opera, Edmonton Opera, the KBS Symphony Orchestra in Seoul, South Korea, the National Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of China, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Cairo Philharmonic in Egypt, the Grand Rapids Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, the Toledo Symphony, the Orchestra of the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Sicily and the Orchestra Regionale Toscana in Florence, Italy.

Pre-covid, he made his debut in the historic Teatro Antica in Taromina Sicily and the Teatro Greco in Siracusa leading Puccini’s Turandot.

For more than a decade he was Resident Conductor of the Toledo Symphony, General Director of Toledo Opera and conductor for the Cleveland/San Jose Ballet. His commitment to new works include Opera Carolina premieres of Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree and Susannah, Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner, Derrick Wang’s Scalia/Ginsburg, Adolphus Hailstork’s Rise for Freedom and this season’s The Falling and the Rising by Zach Redler and Jerre Dye, as well as Charlotte debut performances of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin Rachmaninov’s Aleko, Puccini’s Il Trittico and La fanciulla del West, Verdi’s Nabucco, and Otello. Maestro Meena has conducted legendary singers Renee Fleming, Denyce Graves, Roberta Peters, James McCracken, Vivica Geneaux, Diana Soviero, Mignon Dunn, Marilyn Horne, Sherril Milnes, Jerry Hadley, Jerome Hines and Marcello Giordani.

PETER BOON KOH, Director

Boon Koh is a director-actor who is comfortable on- and offstage. He has directed Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites for Balance Arts Opera Berlin, and assistant-directed Carmen for Singapore Lyric Theatre. He also directed the sold-out production of Michael Chiang’s Army Daze and Once Upon A Time.

He is equally at home on film, and has enthralled audiences in post-screening talks at the Berlin International Film Festival with Eric Khoo’s Wanton Mee, and through his performance in films such as Boo Junfeng’s Apprentice and Khoo’s 12 Storeys at leading festivals around the world.

He is a StorySlam champion of the prestigious storytelling competition run by The Moth, a renowned New York-based group dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling and has been part of their GrandSlam lineup.

A Master of Arts in Communication Management and a multiple award-winning journalist, he has spent more than a decade telling stories through print for the leading national daily in Singapore, The Straits Times. He is a teaching licentiate of London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art (Honours), and as a certified trainer in Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis, has trained a wide range of professionals including singers and actors.

He commutes between Kauai and Los Angeles, and has been seen on American network television shows such as 9-1-1 with Angela Bassett and Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sunnyside with Kal Penn, as well as on the big screen in Everything Everywhere All At Once with Michelle Yeoh and James Hong. He is an Upright Citizens Brigade Scholar currently working on his solo show.

Jacques Offenbach

(20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the Romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.

Born in Cologne, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach showed early musical talent. At the age of 14, he was accepted as a student at the Paris Conservatoire but found academic study unfulfilling and left after a year. From 1835 to 1855 he earned his living as a cellist, achieving international fame, and as a conductor.

In 1858, Offenbach produced his first full-length operetta, Orphée aux enfers (“Orpheus in the Underworld”), which was exceptionally well received and has remained one of his most played works. During the 1860s, he produced at least 18 full-length operettas, as well as more one-act pieces. His works from this period included La belle Hélène (1864), La Vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867) and La Périchole (1868). When he died in Paris at the age of 61, the Times wrote, “The crowd of distinguished men that accompanied him on his last journey amid the general sympathy of the public shows that the late composer was reckoned among the masters of his art. He is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.