About Us

Pocket Opera, the Bay Area’s premiere chamber opera company, has offered accessible and audience-friendly performances for over 40 years. It presents the Bay Area’s finest singers and, with Pocket Philharmonic’s 5 to 12 players, perform lively, professional, entertaining productions. Performances are fully staged and performed in intelligible and singable English translations by Donald Pippin, the company’s Founder and Artistic Director Emeritus. The audience experiences full operatic works, including some welcome rarities, on an intimate scale unique to Pocket Opera.

The company has been an integral part of San Francisco’s cultural fabric well in advance of its formal founding in 1977. Pippin’s English translations of operatic works have delighted and entertained San Francisco audiences since the mid-60s, at venues ranging from the Hungry I and Opus One in North Beach, to the venerable Old Spaghetti Factory. Its current venues include the Hillside Club in Berkeley, and is the only company still presenting opera at the jewel-box Gunn Theater at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Pocket Opera was voted Best Discovery in the San Francisco Classical Voice Audience Choice Awards 2019-2020. We invite you to discover the deeply personal experience that is a Pocket Opera performance.

Our Mission Photo

Our Mission

Pocket Opera shares the beauty, artistry, and scope of the operatic repertoire sung in English, through performance, outreach, and education.

Our Vision Photo

Our Vision

Pocket Opera will promote the production of opera in English:

  • Develop new libretti translations
  • Collaborate with other cultural and educational organizations
  • Produce existing English-language operas
  • Revive lesser-known operatic works
  • Make available our 90 plus libretti repertoire to other companies
  • Leverage our chamber-opera size to produce works often neglected by larger companies
Our Values Photo

Our Values

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We foster an environment where everyone feels included

Community
We engage with performing arts organizations, educational institutions, and community groups to enrich the community as a whole

Artistic Integrity
We aim for the highest level of artistic integrity in everything we do

Fiscal Responsibility
Since 1976, Pocket Opera has weathered every imaginable fiscal headwind, and continues to be financially responsible and fiscally sound. Since 2018, we have created an endowment fund with an eye toward a healthy future