Donizetti: Don Pasquale

Cast:

Norina
Jaeeun Shin | YeonJae Cho

Ernesto
Luis Anthony León | Philippe L'Esperance

Malatesta
Andrew Stack | Yihe Wang

Don Pasquale
Wanchun Liang

Notary
Libang Wang | Jawoon Koo

SYNOPSIS

Act One
Don Pasquale, an old bachelor, is in search of an heir. His nephew, Ernesto, refuses the marriage he has arranged because he is in love with the young widow, Norina. Don Pasquale decides he himself will marry and cut Ernesto out of his will, much to his nephew’s despair. Don Pasquale calls on his friend Dr. Malatesta to help him find a bride. Dr. Malatesta and Norina plot against Don Pasquale to teach him a lesson.

Act Two
Malatesta introduces his sister 'Sofronia' (Norina in disguise)  to Pasquale as a suitable bride-to-be. Malatesta's cousin acts as the Notary and officiates the wedding. Ernesto is called to be a witness and Malatesta reveals the plot to him. The moment the ceremony ends, Sofronia announces that she is now in charge of the household. She plans to hire servants, redecorate and go out on the town. Pasquale is stunned by the change of character, and Sofronia declares that Ernesto is to be her escort, further infuriating Pasquale. 

Act Three
As Sofronia rules the house, Pasquale starts to regret getting married. He learns that Sofronia is to meet a lover that night in the garden.  Pasquale and Malatesta form a plot to catch her in the act.

Later in the garden, Ernesto and Norina meet and express their love for one another. Pasquale erupts from hiding believing he has caught his wife cheating. Malastesta gets Pasquale to promise to let Ernesto marry Norina so long as ‘Sofronia’ leaves. Malastesta exposes the truth that Sofronia is actually Norina in disguise, the Notary was actually his cousin, and Pasquale is not really married. Relieved, Pasquale blesses the union of Ernesto and Norina, happy to remain an old bachelor.

NEC Philharmonia

First Violin                   
Bo-Wen Chen
Dorson Chang
Hannah Goldstick
Thompson Wang
Seunghee Lee
Justus Ross
Jimmy Wang
Haeun Honney Kim
Natalie Boberg
Xiaoqing Yu

Second Violin                  
Nikki Naghavi
Dongyoung Shim
Yebin Yoo
Bree Fotheringham
Ruoran Yu
Bella Hyeonseo Jeong
Evelyn Song
Caroline Jesalva

Viola                       
Sachin Shukla
Ayano Nakamura
Joy Hsieh
Aadam Ibrahim
Hyelim Kong
Yeh Chun Lin
Sophia Tseng

Cello                       
Claire Park
Macintyre Taback
Jeremy Tai
Ivan Sendetskiy
Daniel Kim

Bass                        
Chiyang Chen
Gregory Miguel Padilla
Yihan Wu

Flute                      
Elizabeth Kleiber
Zoe Cagan

Piccolo                   
Zoe Cagan

Oboe                       
Samuel Rockwood
Izumi Amemiya

Clarinet                  
Ching-Wen Chen
Erica Smith

Bassoon                  
Zoe Beck
Delano Bell

French horn           
Paolo Rosselli
Tasha Schapiro
Drew Hayes
Hannah Messenger

Trumpet                 
Wentao Xiao
Alex Prokop

Trombone               
Jianlin Sha
Zach Johnson

Bass Trombone      
Ki Yoon Park

Timpani  
Stephanie Nozomi Krichena

Percussion             
Yiming Yao
Doyeong Kim

Artistic team

STEVEN GOLDSTEIN – Stage Director

Steven Goldstein,a member of theNEC Opera Department faculty, is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. Performance highlights include Our Town on Broadway with Spalding Gray; the premiers of Boys’ Life, Oh Hell, The LIghts (Lincoln Center Theatre); Romance, The Vosey Inheiritance, The Water Engine, Shaker Heights (Atlantic Theater Company); Intimate Apparel (Center Stage Baltimore); Big Fish (SpeakEasy Theatre Co.); I Was Most Alive With You (Huntington Theater). He has made appearances in the TV shows quarterlife, Law & Order and The Guiding Light, and in films including The Untouchables, Signs and Wonders, The Spanish Prisoner, The Night We Never Met, Homicide, House of Games and Things Change. As a professional singer, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2011 and has sung in many performances with the New York City Opera, Seattle Opera, LA Opera, Vancouver Opera, Cleveland Opera, Israeli Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, Odyssey Opera, and Gotham Chamber Opera. His most recent directing credits at NEC include: Die Zauberflöte, La Finta Giardiniera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Der Kaiser von Atlantis.  Other directing credits include: Street Scene, Spring Awakening, A Little Night Music, La Tragédie de Carmen, La Traviata, and Die Fledermaus

ROBERT TWETEN – Conductor

Described by Opera News as conducting “brilliantly” with an “unerring sense of balance, blend, and drama,” Conductor Robert Tweten has worked extensively throughout North America and is currently the Head of Music Staff with The Santa Fe Opera, and the Music Director of Graduate Opera Studies for New England Conservatory. Recent performances have included Turandot with Lyric Opera of Chicago,  Rigoletto with Calgary Opera, Faust with San Antonio Opera, and Silent Night with Utah Opera.  
        An active operatic conductor, Tweten has enjoyed a long relationship with UtahOpera/Symphony where he returned in January 2021 to conduct Light on the Horizon, a concert filmed for the USUO On Demand streaming series. Robert has conducted extensively in his native Canada, with companies including: Vancouver Opera, Edmonton Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and Calgary Opera. Top  American collaborations include Kentucky Opera, Dayton Opera, Austin Lyric Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Birmingham, Madison Opera, El Paso Opera, Sarasota Opera, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he served as an Assistant Conductor.  
        Equally at home as a recitalist and chamber musician, Tweten has performed with many of this generation's most prominent singers throughout many of the world's most prestigious concert halls and festivals, including Wigmore Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Chicago's Orchestra Hall, Carnegie Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and the Salzburg Festival.  
        This year marked Tweten's thirty-first season with the Santa Fe Opera where he serves as Head of Music Staff. Operas conducted during his tenure with SFO include Ermione, Katya Kabanova, Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, The Pirates of Penzance, and performances of the Grammy winning The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.  
        Robert is currently in his fifth season on the NEC opera faculty as Music Director where he has conducted productions of Later the Same Evening, Le nozze di Figaro and Postcard From Morocco. 

TIMOTHY STEELE – Musical Preparation

Timothy Steele is an active vocal coach, collaborative pianist, and conductor, and has taught for twenty-nine years on the opera faculty at New England Conservatory.  He has conducted for outreach tours with the Boston Lyric Opera and is a former music director for Opera Providence.  He has served as assistant conductor/pianist for over 190 productions with twenty-five opera companies, including Opera Theatre of
Saint Louis, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, Wolf Trap Opera, Central City Opera, and Opera Maine.  He assisted with the Pulitzer Prize winning opera Madame White Snake for productions in Boston and Taiwan and the Ouroboros Trilogy in 2016, and for three years collaborated with WaterFire-Providence on a unique and popular series of opera evenings.  In Boston he has performed with Emmanuel Music, the Handel and Haydn Society, and the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, among others. 

Cast Biographies

YEONJAE CHO – Norina
YeonJae Cho is a Korean coloratura soprano who has performed in numerous operas, including the role of Aminta in Il Re Pastore, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, First Dame in Die Zauberflöte, and Giorgetta in Il Tabarro. She has won first prize in several competitions, including the Korean Voice Competition, the German Lieder Competition, the Korea Mozart Orchestra Music Competition, the Yun-Art National Music Competition. She has also received awards from many competitions such as the Sungjung Music Competition, the Suri Music Concours, Chun-Chu Music Competition as well as the Berlin International Music Competition. Cho was the recipient of the Lee Dae Woong Music Scholarship Association and selected as a Young Artist of the Kumho Asiana Cultural Foundation. Cho graduated from Seoul Arts High School and received her bachelor’s and master’s degree from Seoul National University with honors. She is pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Opera Studies at New England Conservatory where she studies with Bradley Williams.

JAWOON KOO – Notary
Baritone Jawoon Koo was born in Korea and first studied clarinet and then turned to voice.  He attended Hanyang University where he sang the title role in their production of Don Giovanni and was a soloist on several opera recitals.  In the summers of 2009 and 2010 he participated in the Italy International Music Festival in Ferrara.  He is a first-year master’s student at NEC where he studies with MaryAnn McCormick.

PHILIPPE L’ESPERANCE – Ernesto
Praised for his “agility, range, and pleasant timbre” (Opera News), tenor Philippe L’Esperance is an Artist Diploma candidate in Opera at New England Conservatory where he studies with Bradley Williams and is a recent graduate of the Manhattan School of Music. At MSM, he was featured as Mathew in Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, Prince Ramiro in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Sandor Barinkay in J. Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron and Tito in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. This past summer Philippe appeared as a Gaddes Festival Artist, performing the role of Lucano in The Coronation of Poppea by Monterverdi, with The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.   Philippe was a Gerdine Young Artist with the Opera Theater of St. Louis, where he appeared as Giuseppe in Verdi’s La Traviata and as Jake in Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath, and covered the role of Danny Chen in the premiere of An American Soldier by Huang Ruo. With the Chautauqua Institution’s Voice Program, he has appeared asNemorino in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, Prince Karl Franz in Romberg’s The Student Prince, and PeterQuint in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Philippe made his New York Festival of Song debut this pastsummer as an Emerging Artist with NYFOS@North Fork. Later that year he returned to the New YorkFestival of Song as a Caramoor Rising Star where he performed a concert at Merkin Hall. Earlier thisyear, Philippe also made his Carnegie Hall debut as a soloist in Vaughan Williams’ A Serenade to Music at The Manhattan School of Music’s Centennial Gala.

LUIS ANTHONY LEÓN – Ernesto
American born, Cuban and Colombian tenor, Anthony León holds a Bachelor of Music degree concentrating in vocal performance from La Sierra University in Riverside, California, studying under Javier Gonzalez and a Master of Music degree in vocal performance from New England Conservatory where he studies with Bradley Williams.  He is currently pursuing the Artist Diploma at NEC.  Most recently, Anthony was an Apprentice Artist at Santa Fe Opera covering the role of Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His other recent leading roles include Le Chevalier in Dialogue des Carmélites, Agenore in Il re pastore, Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore, Tamino in The Magic Flute, the Witch in Hansel and Gretel, and Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance.  Most recent honors include winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in the Los Angeles District, being named “Best up-and-comer” in the Inland Empire Magazine’s “Best of the Best 2019” list, and being awarded NEC’s Wendy Shattuck ’75 Presidential Scholarship for Vocal Studies.

WANCHUN LIANG – Don Pasquale
A native of China, baritone Liang Wanchun attended the Xi’an Conservatory of Music where he sang the roles of the Earl in Le nozze di Figaro and Papageno in The Magic Flute and graduated first in his class.  He has participated in several international vocal competitions and in 2019 won first prize in the Fifth Asian International Music Festival International Opera Competition in Hong Kong.  Also in 2019, he was selected for the National Grand Theater-Solti China Master Class, and in 2020 he received a full scholarship to travel to Italy for three weeks of professional training and study.  Liang is a first year master’s student at NEC and studies with Michael Meraw.

JAEEUN SHIN – Norina
Soprano Jaeeun Shin has received attention for her beautiful voice and delicate expression. She graduated from Korea National University of Arts and has won numerous prizes, including ‘Rising Stars Competition’, ‘The Korea Voice Competition’, Music Education News Competition’. Also, she has appeared in various operas, including Don Pasquale, Die Zauberflöte, Giulio Cesare, and Xerxes. She is actively playing in the United States, Europe and Korea. She is currently studying with Lorraine Nubar at New England Conservatory.

ANDREW STACK – Dr. Malatesta
Originally from Manhasset, NY, baritone Andrew Stack recently earned his master’s degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied with Patricia Havranek. He received his bachelor’s degree from Westminster Choir College as a student of Lindsey Christiansen. Most recently, Stack was seen as the Marquis de la Force and Dr. Javelinot in New England Conservatory’s digital film production of Dialogues of the Carmelites. Stack made his professional debut in 2017 in the Spoleto Festival USA production of Eugene Onegin as Zaretsky. While at Indiana University, Stack was seen in performances of Stephen Paulus’ The Three Hermits as the Bishop, as well as in IU Opera Theater’s production of La Traviata as Barone Douphol. 
        Stack is currently a second-year Graduate Diploma student at New England Conservatory, studying under the tutelage of Michael Meraw. He is also on the artist’s roster of the New England-based art song performance group Calliope’s Call.

LIBANG WANG – Notary

YIHE WANG – Dr. Malatesta
Baritone Yihe Wang is a second year graduate student at New England Conservatory, studying Vocal Performance with internationally acclaimed mezzo-soprano MaryAnn McCormick. Yihe is from China and holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Vocal Performance from Xi’an Conservatory of Music. Yihe is full of respect and love for opera, and he hopes everyone could gain happiness from this beautiful work.