Opera Academy of San Francisco - Meet the Director

YEFIM MAIZEL

was born in Latvia, in the former Soviet Union. He began studying music at the age of six and graduated with a master's degree in violin from the Riga Conservatory in 1980, followed by another master's degree in opera stage direction from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1987.

He worked as an assistant stage director at the St. Petersburg Conservatory Opera (Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Le Nozze di Figaro, Eugene Onegin), at the Tallinn Opera (Khovanshchina), at the Moscow Chamber Opera (Don Giovanni; Imeneo, Handel; The Marriage, Mussorgsky). His own productions from this period include Tales of Hoffmann at the Alma-Ata Opera in 1988, Cosi fan tutte at the Tallinn Opera and The Nursery at the Kirov Opera in 1989.

After moving to New York at the end of 1989, Mr. Maizel directed Fidelio for New York Opera Forum, Lohengrin and Eugene Onegin for Opera on the Hudson, Haensel und Gretel for Opera Excelsior. He went to assist on two Santa Fe Opera productions (Don Giovanni, Der Rosenkavalier), as well as Portland Opera's Eugene Onegin, St. Petersburg National Opera's at the New York State Theatre (Boris Godunov, Le Coq D'Or, Pique Dame), Opera Pacific's Faust and Lucia di Lammermoor and Wexford Festival Opera's Cherevichki by Tchaikovsky.

In 1994 Mr. Maizel directed a production of Faust at the Michigan Opera Theatre and made his European directorial debut with a production of The Demon by Rubinstein at the Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland.

Since 1993 Yefim has worked as an assistant stage director for the San Francisco Opera (Pique Dame, Ruslan and Lyudmila, Madama Butterfly, Faust, Rusalka, Prince Igor, Eugene Onegin).

He started directing in the Bay Area in 1997 with a production of Manon Lescaut for the Berkeley Opera, followed by Il Trovatore for the San Francisco Lyric Opera and Don Pasquale for the West Bay Opera. In 1998 he will direct Luisa Miller, by Verdi and Madame Georgetown's Daughter (based on La Fille de Madame Angot, by LeCocq) at the Berkeley Opera, Rigoletto for the Bay Shore Lyric Opera, Das Rheingold for the San Francisco Lyric Opera and also assist at the San Francisco Opera on the production of Betrothal in a Monastery, by Prokofiev.