The hardy cultural force that is Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) just announced its next season, bolstered by the classic standard rep stuff of Pagliacci, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Daughter of the Regiment. But for this weekend’s 2023-24 season closer, the company turns its attention to more freshly baked operatic goods, in the contemporary but accessible form of Zorro, the 2022 opera by composer Héctor Armienta.
Zorro arrives as a thematic bookend to a season sprinkled with Spanish flavors, befitting the aspects of Spanish-heritage influences on Santa Barbara. Carmen opened the season in grand style at the Granada, followed by Spanish composer Xavier Montsalvatge’s chamber opera charmer El Gato con Botas, a compact dose of Christmas-timed family fare.
“Family fare” can also describe Zorro’s blend of swashbuckling action/dance, romance, injections of flamenco, and sociopolitical activism at sword point. Armienta is a respected Mexican-American composer based in Los Angeles, also the site of his Zorro — circa the early 19th-century period, when the region was a colony of New Spain.