Breanna Sinclairé fled from a conservative, religious, sometimes-abusive family in Baltimore, moving west in her late teens to study vocal performance at California Institute of Arts and later at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She made history as the first trans woman to sing with the San Francisco Symphony in 2018 and to sing the national anthem at a professional sporting event a baseball game between the Oakland Athletics and the San Diego Padres in 2015.
At 29, Sinclairé was prepped and eager to make her professional operatic stage debut in Toronto last year when COVID derailed those plans. As California eases its pandemic restrictions, her June 20 solo recital in San Francisco s esteemed Old First Concerts series will be among the first wave of public, indoor, live-audience performances in the city since March 2020. At Old First, Sinclairé will sing opera arias, art song, and musical theater works in a hybrid performance limited to 100 in-person audience members a
Honors & Awards
Sheri Greenawald
Sheri Greenawald has been awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal in recognition of years of service. She made her debut with S.F. Opera in 1978 and went on to play a number of leading roles in the company. Since 2002, Greenawald, who is retiring this month, has been the S.F. Opera Center director and the S.F.-based Merola Opera program artistic director. “On Sunday, Nov. 11, 1978, a house debut was made by a young Marzelline in ‘Fidelio,’” Matthew Shilvock, the opera’s general director, said in a press release. “On that day a journey began that would encompass many roles on the War Memorial stage and a 20-year tenure leading two of the greatest opera training programs in the world. I wonder what that young Marzelline, Sheri Greenawald, would have said at that time if you had told her that 42 years later she would have made one of the most indelible impacts in the history of this Company.” The San Francisco Opera Medal is awarded “in r