Roger Pines
2006 Regional Judge

Roger Pines has judged annually for the District and Regional Auditions of the Metropolitan Opera National Council since 1991. He is currently editorial dramaturg at Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he edits the program, co-edits the magazine, and undertakes an extremely wide variety of writing, public speaking, and research. He has served as dramaturg for recent new Lyric productions of Thaïs, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Cunning Little Vixen. He is to undertake the same duties for the 2005-06 revival of Der Rosenkavalier.

During 1989-1995 Mr. Pines was Director of Education at San Diego Opera, where he greatly expanded the company’s education/outreach activities. He has also held positions at The Dallas Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. Mr. Pines has lectured for the American Institute of Musical Studies (Graz, Austria), the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Diego Symphony, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the University of Chicago concert series, and numerous opera-related professional conferences. His activities have also included extensive repertoire research and counseling for prominent artists nationwide.

Many of Mr. Pines’s more than 30 translations for projected English titles have been rented to major North American opera companies. He has written extensively for Opera News, The Opera Quarterly, and International Record Review, having also contributed articles to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Opera magazine, BBCMusic magazine, Playbill, and programs of major opera companies and orchestras nationwide, most recently the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. He has written liner notes for recordings by many renowned artists on five major labels, including performances by Renée Fleming, Plácido Domingo, Susanne Mentzer, and Ben Heppner. His most recent notes were for Deutsche Grammophon releases: the Heppner recital of Tosti songs and the re-release of Beverly Sills’s Manon.

Mr. Pines currently writes a column on audition repertoire for OPERA America’s bulletin for singers, and he has chaired panels for the OPERA America Singer Career Development Workshops in Chicago and Cincinnati. Twice Mr. Pines has taught his ten-week course on Verdi operas for OPERA America’s “Prompter’s Box,” an on-line learning project. He is former “Opera Wizard” of CultureFinder, an on-line cultural information service, for which he supplied answers to opera-related questions E-mailed daily by operagoers throughout the world.

Return to List of Judges