| DONALD PIPPIN, TRANSLATOR |
|
|
| POCKET OPERA, PRESENT |
|
|
| POCKET OPERA, PAST |
 About Us Past Seasons: 1978-present |
| SUPPORT |
|
Contribute Planned Giving Sponsorship Volunteer Audition Contact |
|
|
|
|
"and when the pie was opened the birds began to sing" An oral history of Donald Pippin and Pocket Opera Transcribed oral history interviews November 1996 through May 1998 by Caroline Crawford. Sponsored by the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library, University of California The Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, announces the completion of the oral history of Donald Pippin, impresario, opera translator and founder and director of Pocket Opera. The oral history, entitled A Pocketful of Wry, documents Mr. Pippin's early life in North Carolina and Richmond, Virginia, his years at Harvard and in New York, his concerts at the hungry i, Opus One, and the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco's North Beach in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and his founding and directing of Pocket Opera, now in its twenty-fourth year. The volume contains Mr. Pippin's English version of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, production photographs, and the Pocket Opera repertoire, 1977-2001. This history is available as a bound volume to readers at The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, and the Department of Special Collections at UCLA. Hardcover bound, indexed copies are available at cost ($66 plus $4 shipping) from the Bancroft Library. Make checks payable to Friends of the Bancroft Library; mail to: Regional Oral History office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720. (510) 642-7395. Spiral-bound soft cover copies without the photographs are available for $20 at Pocket Opera performances, or for $25 via mail. Contact Pocket Opera: phone: (415) 972-8930 fax: (415) 348-0931 e-mail: info@pocketopera.org The Bancroft Library may produce and updated volume that includes color photographs. Inquiries should be directed to the Regional Oral History office, address and telephone above. |
|
"These interviews with Donald Pippin are full of bright talk and wonderful stories. No surprise they are so entertaining, when Pippin's witty narratives and translations for his Pocket Opera have delighted audiences for two and a half decades. His oral history reads like a novel -- an eighteenth-century fiction, with a huge cast, tales of hardship and accomplishment, and unexpected reversals of fortune. It's Pippin picaresque." -- from the introduction, by Gwen Sullivan |
|