Nantucket's own Nick Davies puts on a locally inspired opera for the ages.

Written by Andrea Timpano

For Davies—who first learned to play clarinet as an elementary school student in Australia, where he lived with his family before moving to Nantucket—this opportunity has been many years in the making. He credits his parents, islanders Beth and Wayne Davies, for introducing him and his sister to classical music at a young age.

“My parents played a wide range of music for us. I think ‘eclectic’ is barely covering it,” he recalls, adding that he remembers listening to his mom’s copy of the Igor Stravinsky opera “The Rake’s Progress” during his childhood. “As a kid, I just absolutely loved this stuff.”

Hooked on classical music and committed to mastering an instrument (or two) of his own, Davies trained on the clarinet and cello and eventually began to study musical composition—an interest that ultimately led the budding virtuoso to start the Rossini Club in 2012. Initially comprising a then-18-year-old Davies, his composition teacher and some local musician friends, the group—aptly named as a nod to renowned Italian composer and home chef Gioachino Rossini—began by entertaining their concertgoers with classical music performances and a multicourse meal, which club members would plate and serve themselves. In addition to their shared penchant for chamber music, “all of us really [liked] to cook,” Davies explains. But ultimately, music was their true passion.

The group’s upcoming Schubert production at Nantucket Dreamland, directed by Nantucket-based vocalist Greta Feeney, is an ambitious addition to their musical repertoire. After successfully joining forces with theater and dance companies in previous years, Davies felt the Rossini Club—currently made up of professional musicians from the island and beyond—was ready to tackle opera, which he reveres.



“I think opera is one of the pinnacles of Western civilization. That’s a very bold blanket statement, but I think it’s up there because it has and does everything,” says Davies, who has performed with the Santa Fe Opera, the Sarasota Opera, and the Des Moines Metro Opera throughout his career. “It’s art, costuming, set design. It’s literature.”

It’s music, too, of course—and, in particular, Davies thinks “Winter’s Journey” is a piece islanders will find relatable, even if they’re not familiar with the genre as a whole. The opera—which will feature tenor Benjamin Boskoff and Davies, among other musicians—is essentially a “70-minute breakup song,” he says. The opera’s setting, which for this production has been changed to 1950s Nantucket, should resonate with audience members too.

After all, catering to the local community is key to Davies’ mission for the club overall. While staging an opera in his adopted hometown allows him to cross a major item off the Rossini Club’s performance bucket list, the clarinetist also sees the show as an opportunity to bring something new to Nantucket—a community he feels could benefit from more exposure and access to “high art.”



Davies’ series will occur again at the end of August in 2025 and will center around the premise of humankind’s turning points in the last century through works like Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time”; a portrait concert of Boston-based composer Howard Frazin; and a new solo violin commission by Davies himself, based on the music of baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude.