John Bowen
John Bowen is the founder and General Director of Opera Vivente. He narrates Lucia di Lammermoor at the October 16, 2010 Hopkins Symphony excerpts concert, and directs Opera Vivente’s October/November 2010 full production. His directing credits span all four centuries of opera, from Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland to the North American premiere of Jonathan Dove’s Tobias and the Angel. Other credits include Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Massenet’s Werther, Mozart’s Così fan tutte and La finta giardiniera, Hoiby’s The Scarf, Menotti’s The Medium and Amahl and the Night Visitors, Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Mollicone’s The Face on the Barroom Floor, Puccini’s Le villi, Copland’s The Tender Land, Rossini’s An Italian Girl in Algiers, Verdi’s Rigoletto, Stravinsky’s Mavra and Renard, and Handel’s Alcina, Agrippina, and Tamburlaine. Mr. Bowen has also written new singing translations for Così fan tutte, Agrippina, Le villi, Alcina, La finta giardiniera, Apollo and Dafne, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Orpheus in the Underworld. He has directed Così fan tutte and La traviata for Granite State Opera, and Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Lehár’s The Merry Widow, Menotti’s The Telephone, Barber’s A Hand of Bridge, and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti for Opera AACC (Anne Arundel Community College). He has directed La bohème for the Lancaster Opera Company and several world premieres for Peabody Opera Theatre.