Union Avenue Opera Theatre’s season continues with the playful cavorting of Zerbinetta and her troupe and the soaring power of Ariadne and Bacchus in Richard Strauss’ brilliant and beautiful tale of Viennese contradictions, Ariadne auf Naxos on July at 8 p.m., 23, 29 and 30 at Union Avenue Christian Church, 733 North Union Blvd. (one block north of Delmar). Tickets are $35 Center Front, $28 Adult General Admission, $22 Student/Senior (60 plus) General Admission and may be purchased by calling 314-361-2881 or emailing uaottickets@juno.com. Stage direction by UAOT veteran Jolly Stewart and UAOT Founder and Artistic Director Scott Schoonover conducting.
The opera features gifted, accomplished principal Soprano Katherine Jolly as Zerbinetta. Her immense talent has won her several roles and awards of recognition. Most recently Jolly received the MacAllister Career Grant Award 2005 and will receive the William B. McMillan Memorial Award from Opera Theatre of St. Louis where she will return next season as Dew Ferry in “Hansel and Gretel.” She will also perform a recital in 2006 at SIU-E Edwardsville where she recently won the Southern Illinois Young Artist Competition. She has appeared in Pensecola Opera, the Cincinnati Opera Education Ensemble, the Lyric Opera Cleveland. She made her European debut with Opera Theatre Lucca in 2000 and performed throughout Tuscany singing recitals of Italian music. She performed as the soprano soloist in Carmina Burana with the Florida Northwest Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s C Minor Mass and Exultate Jubilee and has been raved as a “voice that was destined to sing Mozart. A 1999 summa cum laude graduate of Boston University College of Fine Art, Jolly received the Ellalou Dimmock Vocal Excellence Award. She completed her Master’s of Music from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, where she was an Albert Yates Scholar. Jolly currently resides in St. Louis and is engaged to News Channel 11 Sports Anchor/reporter Donald Bell.
