Khori Dastoor, the operatic soprano turned administrator who became general director of Opera San José in 2019, had big plans for her first season with the company. Instead, she watched as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the Bay Area’s performing arts world.

Now it will fall to someone else to oversee nearly everything she planned, because Dastoor has been tapped as the next general director of the Houston Grand Opera. She’ll assume the new post in January, filling a leadership spot left vacant by the departure of Managing Director Perryn Leech at the end of 2020.

The move, announced Tuesday, June 29, represents an abrupt career leap from the leadership of a respected but small regional organization, with an annual operating budget of around $5 million and a schedule of four productions a year, to one of the top U.S. opera companies. HGO, founded in 1955, presents six to eight productions on an annual budget of $27 million, with casts drawn from the top echelons of international singers.

“When we began our search, we knew we were searching for a candidate who would bring groundbreaking ideas to Houston and expand on the wonderful work already underway at HGO,” HGO board chair Allyn Risley said in a statement. “We found that and so much more in Khori Dastoor.”

Dastoor, the 40-year-old daughter of an Indian father and a Dutch mother, will become the only person of color and one of the only women to direct a top-tier opera company in the U.S.

“To me, Houston embodies the work I’m most interested in,” Dastoor told The Chronicle. “That’s the question of how American opera can welcome in a new generation of listeners in a city where audiences look more like a diverse America.

“Given its place in American opera, especially its history of world premieres, this is the only call I would have taken.”

Most of the history of HGO — including more than 40 world and U.S. premieres — took place during the 33-year tenure of former general director David Gockley, who left the company in 2006 to take over the San Francisco Opera.

Astley Blair, co-chair of the HGO General Director Transition Committee, said that Dastoor had made an immediate impression on the committee members.

“The first time we had a brief one-hour interview with her, we found her spellbinding,” he said. “She has so many innovative thoughts and ideas about the future of opera — we were all captivated by this relatively young and fearless individual. At the end of one hour we just wanted to hear more.”

Blair conceded that at 40 and with comparatively little administrative experience, Dastoor represented a gamble for a major company. But he pointed out that Gockley was just 29 when he took the reins of the company.

“Talent is talent,” he said, “and in Khori you have talent. She has all the attributes to be the leader of a company of any scale. I believe she will prove any doubters wrong.”

Patrick Summers, who began his career at the San Francisco Opera before becoming artistic and music director of HGO, “could not be more excited to welcome Khori Dastoor to Houston,” he said in a statement. “It has been incredible to witness her rapid rise in the opera world.”

Dastoor said that her first task when she begins with the HGO is to acclimate herself to her new surroundings.

“For most of my career, I’ve joined organizations that I already had some kind of relationship with, where I’ve been able to watch from the sidelines and know the players. So this is a different experience for me,” she acknowledged. “My first job will be to embed and find out what’s working and what’s not.”

Before moving to Houston, Dastoor said she plans to oversee the first two productions of Opera San José’s 2021-22 season: a streamed presentation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera “Mozart and Salieri” in September, followed in November by a live production of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” in the company’s home at the California Theatre in San Jose.

The company plans to begin a search for Dastoor’s successor, with a candidate to be named within the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

Dastoor, a native of Pasadena, began her professional career at Opera San José in 2007, when she was hired by the company’s founding director Irene Dalis as a member of the resident company. She immediately drew attention with a lavishly acclaimed company debut in the title role of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and went on to sing in operas of Mozart, Verdi and Massenet.

She returned to the company in 2013, after a stint at the Packard Humanities Institute, and served as artistic advisor to Dalis and director of artistic planning under Dalis’ successor, Larry Hancock.

Her term as general director, though brief, has included a number of innovative organizational and artistic initiatives in response to the pandemic. In July, Dastoor used an unrestricted gift from board member Peggy Heiman to create the Fred Heiman Digital Media Studio, an onsite recording facility that the company used to present virtual recitals and opera productions.

Those included fully staged presentations of Jake Heggie’s “Three Decembers” and a triple bill headed by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s “The Secret of Susanna” — all of which provided work for the company’s resident artists and musical offerings for patrons.

“We take great pride in Opera San José’s 37-year history as one of the world’s leading operatic incubators,” Board Chair Gillian Moran said in a statement, “and no one has embodied this mission more than Khori Dastoor. We are so thankful for all that she has done in service of our artists, our art form and our community.”

Dastoor admitted that the timing of her move was less than optimal.

“I’m not going to lie, I wish this could be happening a couple of years from now. But I know that Opera San José will find a leader worthy of the team, one who can carry the work forward,” she said.

“I’ve been with the company for 14 years one way or another — all through my performing and administrative careers. Other gigs have been just that, but I’ve always come back to OSJ. So this is a real turning point for me. But my position in Houston is an extension of the work I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a dream come true.”