Peter Kazaras is the new Director of Opera at UCLA.  He has been Artistic Director of the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program since 2006, a position he will retain in conjunction with his duties at UCLA.  As an operatic tenor, he has performed worldwide, appearing at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, Seattle Opera, New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Dallas Opera, San Francisco Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Opera Omaha, Vienna State Opera, L’Opéra National de Paris, L’Opéra de Nice, Grand Théåtre de Genève, New Israeli Opera, Wellington International Festival of the Arts (New Zealand), Canadian Opera Company and others.  He has premiered several new works, including Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (Metropolitan Opera), Bernstein’s A Quiet Place and Tippett’s New Year (Houston Grand Opera) and Picker’s Thérèse Raquin (Dallas Opera,  L’Opéra de Montréal, San Diego Opera.) Conductors he has worked with include Leonard Bernstein, James Levine, Daniel Barenboim, James Conlon, John Nelson, Armin Jordan, Asher Fisch and Robert Spano.  

Over the past decade, he also worked with great success as a stage director, with productions including Norma for Seattle Opera;  Le nozze di Figaro, The Turn of the Screw, Falstaff (in the reduced Jonathan Dove orchestration), and black-box touring productions of The Tragedy of Carmen and La Serva Padrona for the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program;  Trouble in Tahiti for the Caramoor Festival;  Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi for Opera UCLA and for Hartt College of Music;  Iolanta for the Academy of Vocal Arts;  The Medium and Angélique for San Francisco Opera Center’s Merola Program;  Der Vampyr for Florida State University;  Little Women at the Cabrillo Festival;  Die Fledermaus for Madison Opera; and Acis and Galatea with the Santa Fe Pro Musica.   Last summer he made his Wolf Trap debut directing a revival of Musto’s Volpone prior to reprising Falstaff for the Intermezzo program in Tampa. 

In the fall of 2007, he directed black box versions of Trouble in Tahiti and Donizetti’s Rita for the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, for whom he will also direct fully-produced productions of L’enfant et les sortilèges and Gianni Schicchi in the spring at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue. Upcoming engagements also include a new production of Albert Herring for the San Francisco Opera Center’s Merola Program in the summer of 2008, and Le nozze di Figaro for Opera Cleveland next fall and for Seattle Opera in spring 2009.  The year after that, his production of Falstaff will also move to the Seattle Opera mainstage.   Next summer, he returns to the stage as a performer in the role of Abe Kaplan in Weill’s Street Scene at the Chautauqua Opera.  This year at UCLA he will direct Falstaff and Threepenny Opera, as well as run Opera Workshop and teach Master Class in Opera, and do individual coachings. 

A native New Yorker, Peter Kazaras is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and is a new resident of Los Angeles.