Peter Kozma, founder and artistic director of San Diego’s musical gem Opera NEO, is the first to admit his enterprising company long ago outgrew the master plan he crafted for it back in 2012.
Born and raised an “opera nerd” in Hungary, Kozma moved to the U.S. to direct Ohio State’s opera program only to become frustrated with universities’ one-size-fits-all competition/audition-driven opera programs where theater and music departments stand apart. Kozma dreamed of starting a smaller, masterclass-based training program where artists could help each other take risks and grow into well-rounded artists. But when exactly and where?
“I had so many constipated ideas and needed a new place,” Kozma recalled recently over Zoom from his San Diego home. A honeymoon trip to San Diego with his wife, musician Kelley Hart, piqued their interest in the city, and with their San Jose-born daughter in tow they decided San Diego was the place for Kozma’s dream to either put up or shut up.
Opera NEO began as a five-week-long tuition-based summer program in Del Cerro featuring eighteen performers, discovered via national auditions, who sang eighteenth-century repertoire to piano accompaniment. NEO’s focus on Baroque programming was not only because Kozma loves the music.
“Early music has the unique ability to require young voices to gain, display and practice agility instead of pressuring [them] to produce the larger operatic sounds,” Kozma explained. “Because of the uniqueness of how the repertoire is written, it forces them to be singing actors. A lot of thought and creativity [is] required to actually bring these pieces alive.”
Peter KozmaWith NEO’s repertoire — encompassing Handel, Purcell, Monteverdi, Cavalli and more — settled by 2013-14, Kozma fixed on larger goals. “My hope was that eventually we would be in a situation where we could stop charging tuition,” he said. “Access to education should be based on willingness to want to do this crazy art form, potential and talent, rather than financial means.”
After eight years of steady growth, the COVID shutdown forced most arts organizations to circle the wagons. Kozma used it to bravely pivot. “That was a good time to rethink everything and go into a new model: we are [now] paying all of the young artists who work with us, rather than them paying tuition to us,” he said.
NEO’s growth since that risky decision has surprised even him. “When we started, we had a master plan, but we did not envision that Opera NEO would grow into what it is right now. Our growth from 2020 to 2026 has been unprecedented,” he said. “Our budget in 2020 was around $300,000 to $400,000. Now we are inching towards a million-dollar-a-year budget. It is amazing to see that happen. I can’t thank enough our wonderful board and everybody who saw value and need in what we are doing.”
Such success now empowers Opera NEO to double down in its 15th season, which is anchored as usual by three core productions. Though over three centuries old, Antonio Vivaldi’s Arsilda, regina di Ponto (Arsilda, Queen of Ponto) is only now receiving its U.S. premiere May 15 and 16. It was so daring in conception — Arsilda falls in love with another woman dressed as a man — that Venice initially censored it.
Kozma stumbled upon the 1716 opera while planning Vivaldi’s Motezuma (1733) for NEO’s 2025 summer season. “We enjoyed playing, acting and performing Vivaldi so much that I felt we needed to give him another try,” Kozma said.
He reviewed nine or ten different Vivaldi operas (the composer claimed to have composed 94, though only 20 survive fully). “I tried to find the show that has the best music, that I enjoyed the most, and a story that is the most compelling. The most compelling story had an off-and-on level of musical quality, and the operas that had the really, truly banger arias [were] not really interesting to put on stage,” Kozma said. “So, we resorted to what Vivaldi would have done: we took the story that we liked the most and inserted eight of the arias from other operas that we like the most” but including the best arias from Vivaldi’s original Arsilda.
Kozma is pleased with the result, saying the opera was “really fun to put on stage. We have a really, really incredible show.”
The summer’s second opera, Fausto (June 26, 27), is hardly less unique: only the second-ever opera of at least twenty based on the sixteenth-century German Faust legend, but composed by a nearly-forgotten 26-year-old Frenchwoman, Louise-Angélique Bertin. As NEO’s 2025 season closed last August, Kozma received emails alerting him to New Yorker magazine music critic Alex Ross’ article “There Is More to French Opera Than Carmen and Faust.” Ross profiled a French organization (Palazzetto Bru Zane) based in Venice that rediscovers and promotes neglected French repertoire.
Opera NEO’s planned 2020 production of Gounod’s Faust — the most performed version by far — had fallen victim to COVID, so Kozma was intrigued. “More than 30 years before Gounod, this woman writes an opera based on Faust. That was crazy. Luckily, I found the CD right away and my mind was completely blown,” Kozma said. “It was nothing I ever heard before, such a strange amalgamation of Mozart and Weber — like German “magic opera” sounds, Rossini, and sounds from the future, like Berlioz and a little bit Wagner. I just fell in love with it.”
The Bru Zane organization generously sent Kozma the opera’s complete performance materials for free, and NEO had the makings of yet another American premiere.
Opera NEO’s season finale (July 24, 25) will likely not feel anticlimactic. Building on its tradition of producing lesser-known operas by composers famous for other operas (think Mozart’s Mitridate and La finta giardiniera of past seasons), NEO’s summer closes with an under-performed opera by a composer, Rossini, much better known for Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola (Cinderella) — both of which NEO has previously staged.
Rossini’s El Turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) is, Kozma admits, a flawed work. “It suffers a little bit from awkwardness in the libretto. The storytelling is a little bit confusing, and while the basic story is sweet and lighthearted and fun, there are some twists and turns that require some tender loving care,” he said.
Not one to shy from a challenge, Kozma views the opera’s greatest flaw — a politically incorrect take on identity profiling — as an opportunity. “Some of the themes are a little dated: how we see gender roles and how we see different people from around the world,” he acknowledged. “But this is not any less exciting, interesting, exuberant or entertaining a piece of music than Barber or Cenerentola. I think it’s one of his most amazing operas.”
Kozma sees the “dramaturgical awkwardness” of Il Turco as a hidden strength worth exploiting. “It has this strange structure — the main character is a poet who is writing this piece of theater,” he said. ” We are witnessing the creation of his art [through] this piece of art before our eyes. The writing process interacts with the world he sees. It’s quite fascinating and quite modern in a way.”
Such cross-century anticipations and rhymes are part of the excitement that sends Kozma and NEO rifling through scores of centuries past. “Good pieces of art are about how human beings interact with each other,” he explained. “We are trained differently by our social structures to respond to stimuli and to certain situations. We say things differently or react to things differently, but we human beings are the same, we keep encountering the same situations.”
“It’s comforting to discover that I am just the new iteration of the same human beings that the composers were talking about 400 years ago,” Kozma points out. “It’s a message that should resonate very much with everybody today.”
Hence then, the article about peter kozma and san diego s opera neo build on success in 15th season was published today ( ) and is available on Times of San Diego ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Peter Kozma and San Diego’s Opera NEO build on success in 15th season )
Also on site :