The season will launch with a 50th Anniversary Gala, Vox Ex Machina, on Saturday, September 13 at the Academy of Music. In a concert of established and emerging stars, each singer’s aria will become a physical painting in real time before the audience’s eyes, harnessing bold new technology to marry music and visual art. In the winter of 2025, Opera Philadelphia partnered with Drexel University’s ExCITe Center and artist and creative technologist Daniel Belquer to launch a course with the goal of creating a machine that could take variables such as pitch and volume from a singer’s performance and paint a canvas in response to an aria as it unfolds. The audience will see these sonic visual representations materialize during this one-of-a-kind concert, and the resulting artworks will be auctioned off at the gala which follows at Philadelphia’s beloved Reading Terminal Market. Sponsorships are now on sale. Single tickets and performance-only tickets go on sale on Thursday, May 1 to Opera Pass holders and donors of $100 or more, and on Thursday, May 15 to the public.

Rossini’s final Italian theatrical work Il viaggio a Reims premiered 200 years ago to celebrate the coronation of Charles X. This ebullient satire of class, manners, and the timeless misery of long-distance travel makes its Opera Philadelphia premiere with four September performances at the Academy of Music. Damiano Michieletto’s inventive production shifts the time and place to a present-day art museum on the cusp of a major exhibition opening. The company returns to the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in December with three performances of The Seasons, an exploration of the connection between weather and emotion with a new story by playwright Sarah Ruhl that weaves together some of Antonio Vivaldi’s most stirring arias with excerpts from his masterpiece The Four Seasons. Ruhl co-conceived the work with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, in collaboration with celebrated choreographer Pam Tanowitz and visionary director Zack Winokur. Tony-winning set designer Mimi Lien brave the elements with a set formed largely from bubbles, created from dish soap in collaboration with MIT and Materials Technologist Jack Forman. The Seasons features Costanzo in his first Opera Philadelphia starring role since being named General Director & President.

February brings the World Premiere of Complications in Sue to the Academy of Music for four performances. This new opera unfolds in 10 vignettes by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) in his first opera libretto. Each scene will take place in a different decade in the life of the main character, named Sue, performed by MacArthur Genius and cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond. With four opera singers playing different characters in her life, the music for each scene up to eight minutes in length will be created by a different composer, including Opera Philadelphia veterans Missy Mazzoli (Breaking the Waves, The Listeners), Rene Orth (10 Days in a Madhouse), and Nico Muhly (Dark Sisters), alongside Andy Akiho, Alistair Coleman, Nathalie Joachim, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Kamala Sankaram, Dan Schlosberg, and Errollyn Wallen. Director Zack Winokur helms, in his second of three appearances with Opera Philadelphia in the 2025-2026 Season.

In his first commission for Opera Philadelphia, Gregory Spears, the New York-based composer who “possesses a singular compositional voice, unlike any that has been heard in opera before” (The New Yorker) works with director and event architect Jenny Koons to create a new work starring the Opera Philadelphia Chorus, based on the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty.” Inspired by the absurdist telling of Swiss wunderkind Robert Walser (1878–1956) in which Sleeping Beauty and her royal family are unhappy to be woken up, the opera questions what it means to be awake.

The season concludes in May 2026 with the Opera’s return to the Miller Theater for the Philadelphia Premiere of The Black Clown, based on the poetry of Langston Hughes. This music theater experience fuses vaudeville, gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage to embody the evolving, divided soul of Black America. The production, which the New York Times called, “an electrifyingly ambivalent whole” features co-creator Davóne Tines in the title role, alongside an ensemble of twelve performers and original music by co-creator Michael Schachter, and searing stewardship by co-creator and director Zack Winokur.

Subscription packages for the 2025-2026 Season go on sale on Thursday, April 3, at 10:00 a.m. at  operaphila.org, or by calling 215.732.8400 (Monday through Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.). Newly available this season is Opera Pass, which gains passholders advanced access to Opera Philadelphia’s pioneering Pick Your Price initiative, in which tickets for every performance are available for $11 or a higher price of your choice. Opera Passes are now on sale for $11 a month or $111 a year. Opera Passholders will receive an exclusive Pick Your Price presale from Thursday, May 1 through Wednesday, May 14.

Single tickets and Pick Your Price will then go on sale to the public on Thursday, May 15.

Il viaggio a Reims 
Philadelphia Premiere 
Music by Gioachino Rossini 
Libretto by Luigi Balocchi
September 19, 21, 26, and 28, 2025 
Academy of Music 
Performed in Italian with English supertitles 
Approximately 3 hours and 15 minutes including one intermission
Production from Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam, Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen,and Opera Australia

  
A group of aristocrats traveling from all over Europe to the coronation of Charles X of France are stranded in a luxury hotel near Reims due to a lack of horses. The situation soon descends into a morass of love affairs, chicanery, secret plans, and jealous passions. Rossini’s last opera in Italian, Il viaggio a Reims (“The Journey to Reims”) was composed for and set within the festivities surrounding the coronation of King Charles X of France in 1825. It was never originally meant to survive beyond its four original performances at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris, and Rossini later reused most of its music for the better-known Le Comte Ory (1829). The original score was reassembled in the 20^th century, receiving its first modern performance in 1984. 

Olivier Award-winning director Damiano Michieletto shifts the time and place to a present-day art museum on the cusp of a major exhibition opening in what OperaWire called “a clever, funny, and dynamic production.” Madama Cortese, the “Tyrolean hostess” in the original setting, becomes the museum’s curator; the scholar Don Profondo is an art auctioneer; and the Englishman Lord Sidney is an art restorer. The remaining characters are transformed into the subjects of paintings who progressively emerge from their frames or packing cases throughout the show. 

Praised by The Wall Street Journal for her “delicate” and “ideal” title role portrayal in La Calisto at the Glimmerglass Festival, Filipino American soprano Emilie Kealani makes her company debut as Corinna. Hailed by the Boston Globe as “balmy voiced” and for her “uniformly excellent” performances, mezzo-soprano Katherine Beck makes her company debut as Marchese Melibea. Having thrilled Opera Philadelphia audiences in the role of Ashley Devon in the U.S. premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners, soprano Lindsey Reynolds returns as Contessa di Folleville. Also returning to the Academy of Music stage as Madama Cortese is soprano Brenda Rae, who wowed Philadelphia audiences in 2018 in the title role of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Baritone Daniel Belcher, who created the role of Inspector Kildare in Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell's Elizabeth Cree (2017), returns as Il Barone di Trombonok, and bass Scott Conner, who appeared as The King in Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges (2019), returns as Lord Sidney. Also making their company debuts are bass-baritone Ben Brady (Don Profondo), tenor Minghao Liu (Cavalier Belfiore), baritone Alex DeSocio (Don Alvaro), and bass Anthony Reed (Don Prudenzio). Additional casting will be announced. 

Eleonora Gravagnola makes her Opera Philadelphia debut remounting the Michieletto production. Jack Mulroney Music Director Corrado Rovaris leads the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra, with Chorus Master Elizabeth Braden leading the voices of the Opera Philadelphia Chorus.

The Seasons 
Philadelphia Premiere
Music by Antonio Vivaldi
Libretto by Sarah Ruhl
Co-conceived with Anthony Roth Costanzo
Directed by Zack Winokur
December 19, 20, and 21, 2025
Perelman Theater
Performed in English, Italian, and Latin with English supertitles
Approximately 2 hours and 5 minutes with one intermission
A co-production with SCENE, AMOC*, and Boston Lyric Opera
 

This bold reimagining of Antonio Vivaldi’s string masterpiece The Four Seasons received its world premiere performances in March 2025 with Boston Lyric Opera. With additional arias and ensembles by the composer, woven into a new libretto by Tony-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl (Eurydice), The Seasons features Grammy-winning countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in his first Opera Philadelphia starring role since being named General Director & President. 

Co-conceived by Ruhl and Costanzo and directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Pam Tanowitz, The Seasons imagines a world whose weather is turned upside down. In this innovative production, a group of contemporary artists embark on a rural retreat to reconnect with nature and hone their crafts. But the harmony they seek is disrupted by extreme weather events that reshape their lives and their work. The narrative serves as a meditation on the interplay between current climate realities, Vivaldi’s celebration of the natural world through music and, as Ruhl says, “the emotional weather we experience inside ourselves.”

Costanzo says he was creatively inspired by the “incredible arias from rarely performed Vivaldi operas and thinking about how to weave the narrative and emotions they depict into a new story.” He and Ruhl hit upon the idea of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons as connective tissue for the piece. “Those concerti create a sort of synesthesia,” Costanzo says, “in which Vivaldi was thinking about what it sounds like to feel cold or hot – to see a bird or feel a breeze.” 

Ruhl’s libretto blends new English and existing Italian texts for those arias, creating a dynamic interplay of languages that enriches the storytelling. Her verbal embroidery of Vivaldi’s music with narrative text was a challenge made somewhat easier by her early writing. “I started as a poet, so meter is important to me,” Ruhl explains. “And I love creating bespoke text for the singers.”

Winokur directs operas around the world and is co-founder of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company). Tanowitz, who made her choreographic opera debut with The Seasons, has an award-winning career that includes her acclaimed company Pam Tanowitz Dance, as well as commissions from Martha Graham Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company and New York City Ballet.

Set design is by Mimi Lien, in collaboration with MIT Media Lab Design & Materials Technologist Jack Forman. Their set is formed largely from bubbles — creating ephemeral weather effects using a sustainable alternative to traditional wood and steel construction. Crafted from water and soap mixtures, and treated with a variety of processes, the materials take on various forms to evoke rain, smoke and snowy mountains. Forman has developed specialized soap formulas and built new machinery to animate and manipulate his unique substances. Costume Design is by Carlos Soto, with Lighting Design by John Torres.

Of the creative team bringing the work together, Winokur says he appreciates the non-traditional approach. “If you take Vivaldi too squarely or classically, it’s going to feel wrong,” he says. “Collaborations like this one brings you to places you wouldn’t get to alone. In the rehearsal room, we seek to get into each other’s business but also get out of each other’s way.”

Tanowitz, known for her abstract treatment of classical and contemporary movement ideas, reflects on the challenge of interpreting Vivaldi’s iconic music: “How can I honor this familiar music, but also downplay the familiarity so that dancers and audiences can hear it differently?”

The Seasons is co-produced with Boston Lyric Opera, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company) and SCENE.

SCENE gratefully acknowledges Carol Stein for her generous support as their Lead Sponsor of The Seasons.

A recent conversation by the artists about The Seasons, as well as music and dance excerpts, was part of the Guggenheim Works & Process series.

Complications in Sue 
World Premiere
Libretto by Michael R. Jackson
Music by Andy Akiho, Alistair Coleman, Nathalie Joachim, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Rene Orth, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Kamala Sankaram, Dan Schlosberg, and Errollyn Wallen
February 4, 5, 6, and 8, 2026 
Academy of Music
Performed in English with English supertitles
Approximately 100 minutes with no intermission 

One librettist, two actors, four singers, and ten composers join forces to make opera in a brand-new way. Complications in Sue traces the life of a woman whose personality is split in two, created on stage by MacArthur Genius and cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond. Sue’s life, from the mundane to the extraordinary, unfolds before us in ten scenes, with each decade scored by a different composer, to a libretto written by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) in his operatic debut. Zack Winokur directs, and conductor Caren Levine makes her Opera Philadelphia debut at the podium.

“I feel like I have been trying to innovate in musical theater for several years now, and with Complications in Sue I am challenging myself by stretching into this new form that I have long admired as an audience member,” Jackson said. “The scope and scale of opera really speaks to me, so when Anthony invited me to dip my toe in the waters of the form, I saw it as an exciting opportunity to leave my comfort zone. Examining a woman’s life from birth to death began as a very collaborative storytelling idea that I am now running with, and I look forward to embracing the next stage of collaboration with this group of amazing composers, who will bring a new scale of sound to the drama.”

Jackson’s musical, A Strange Loop, started as a personal monologue he wrote shortly after graduating from NYU, debuted in 2019, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and premiered on Broadway in 2022. The show won Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical at the 75th Tony Awards. 

Justin Vivian Bond (Viv) is an artist and performer working in the cabaret tradition weaving history, cultural critique, and an ethic of care into performances and artworks animated by wit, whimsy, and calls to action. Bond uses cabaret to explore the political and cultural ethos of the moment and tie it back to history to address contemporary challenges, particularly those facing queer communities. Bond’s decades-long journey across the landscape of gender has both informed their artistic practices and played a significant role in ongoing conversations around gender identity and LGBTQ+ rights. In Only an Octave Apart(2022), Bond collaborated with Anthony Roth Costanzo to create an evening-length performance combining elements of opera, avant-garde performance, and campy stage review.

The Philadelphia-born, Grammy-nominated Missy Mazzoli opened the company’s 2024-2025 Season with her newest opera The Listeners, and her 2016 world premiere, Breaking the Waves, was a phenomenon that won the inaugural Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America and has been performed all over the world since its Philadelphia debut. Like Mazzoli, Rene Orth is a former Opera Philadelphia Composer in Residence. The company presented the “triumphant world premiere” (Wall Street Journal) of Orth’s 10 Day in a Madhouse to open its 2023-2024 Season. Nico Muhly is a composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, chamber music and sacred music. He’s twice been commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011) and Marnie (2018). Praised as “one of the most exciting opera composers in the country” (The Washington Post), Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music and contemporary opera. She is known for her work pushing the boundaries of the operatic form.

Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated performer and composer. The Haitian American artist is hailed for being “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural voice” (The Nation). Her creative practice centers an authentic commitment to storytelling and human connectivity while advocating for social change and cultural awareness, gaining her the reputation of being “powerful and unpretentious” (The New York Times). She is Assistant Professor of Composition at Princeton University. Errollyn Wallen is a multi-award-winning Belize-born British composer and performer. Her prolific output includes 22 operas and a large catalogue of orchestral, chamber, and vocal works which are performed and broadcast throughout the world. She was the first Black woman to have a work featured in the BBC Proms and the first woman to receive an Ivor Novello award for Classical Music for her body of work.

Cécile McLorin Salvant is a composer, singer, and visual artist. The late Jessye Norman described Salvant as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings.” She received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for The Window, Dreams and Daggers, and For One to Love, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album WomanChild. Dan Schlosberg’s music has been performed by the Dover Quartet, Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Minnesota Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Albany Symphony, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and Lorelei Ensemble. In 2024, Schlosberg was arranger and music director of a radical take on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro all in one voice, in which Anthony Roth Costanzo sang every leading role. Andy Akiho is a “trailblazing” (Los Angeles Times) Pulitzer Prize finalist and seven-time Grammy-nominated composer whose bold works unravel intricate and unexpected patterns while surpassing preconceived boundaries of classical music. He is the only composer to be nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Alistair Coleman is a composer from Washington, D.C. currently based in Philadelphia, who has studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School. His recent composition activity has included a concerto for violinist Soovin Kim and cellist Zuill Bailey, a sonata for Joseph Alessi, chamber works by the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival and the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, and a vocal work commissioned by Young Concert Artists for Joseph Parrish that premiered at the Kennedy Center in February 2024.

New York City native Caren Levine, who serves as assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, has established a reputation as one of today’s most compelling young artists. She has won acclaim for her musicality, charm and sensitivity, and is known for her intense and impassioned performances. The San Francisco Chronicle described her as “a petite powerhouse, with technique to burn and unimpeachable musicianship.”

Sleepers Awake
World Premiere
An opera by Gregory Spears
Inspired by the writings of Robert Walser and others
April 22, 24, and 26, 2026
Academy of Music
Performed in English with English supertitles
Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission 

In this opera, the chorus has the starring role. Composer Gregory Spears creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale Sleeping Beauty, inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser (1878–1956). As the chorus sings itself in and out of slumber, the voices pull us into a liminal space where reality is fractured, cyclical, and shifting. Conceived with and directed by Jenny Koons, this visually dazzling world premiere activates a collective voice to question the fragile line between waking and dreaming.

Spears, in his first commission for Opera Philadelphia, is a New York-based composer whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe). Spears’ most recent opera The Righteous premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in summer 2024. His Fellow Travelers, written in collaboration with Greg Pierce, premiered at Cincinnati Opera in 2016 and has received numerous productions, hailed as “one of the most accomplished new operas I have seen in recent years” (Chicago Tribune) and an opera that “seems assured of lasting appeal” (The New York Times).

Sleepers Awake is conducted by Opera Philadelphia’s Jack Mulroney Music Director Corrado Rovaris and directed by Jenny Koons, with Chorus Master Elizabeth Braden leading the voices of the Opera Philadelphia Chorus.

Koons is a visionary creative director specializing in immersive events and innovative storytelling. With a track record of dynamic collaborations across industries—from global fashion brands and theatrical institutions to experiential pop-ups — she creates unforgettable moments that blend narrative, space, and human connection. Her expertise lies in bringing ambitious ideas to life across mediums, whether on stage, in branded environments, or at international festivals. Her productions have been showcased on renowned stages like The Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and Pasadena Playhouse. Her unique approach merges theater and spectacle, as seen in projects like Queen of the Night (Drama Desk Award-winning immersive show), Blue Man Group’s National SPEECHLESS tour, and her trilingual adaptation of Oedipus in ASL, English, and ProTactile with Deaf West Theatre and the Getty Villa.

The Swiss writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, “If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place,” Robert Walser is only now finding an audience among English-speaking readers commensurate with his merits-if not with his self-image. After a wandering, precarious life during which he produced poems, essays, stories, and novels, Walser entered a psychiatric hospital, saying, “I am not here to write, but to be mad.”

The Black Clown
Philadelphia Premiere
An adaptation of the Langston Hughes poem by the same name
Co-created by Davóne Tines, Michael Schachter, and Zack Winokur
Original music by Michael Schachter
Directed by Zack Winokur
May 14, 15, 16, and 17, 2026
The Miller Theater
Performed in English
Approximately 70 minutes with no intermission
Produced by ArKtype

“You laugh / Because I’m poor and black and funny…”, begins Langston Hughes’ poem, The Black Clown. This music theater experience fuses vaudeville, gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Hughes’ verse to life onstage to animate a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The production features co-creator and co-librettist Davóne Tines in the title role, alongside an ensemble of twelve singers and a score composed by Michael Schachter. The world premiere directed by Zack Winokur, with choreography by Chanel DaSilva and additional arrangements by Jaret London, was given by the American Repertory Theater in 2018, and The Black Clown was presented by Lincoln Center in summer 2019, where it was called “pure poetry” byThe Boston Globe and “magnificent” by The New York Times.  

Tines says, “Langston Hughes’ expansive and penetrating engagement with the life of the other has been a guiding salve since I was first introduced to his work in elementary school. This production provides the opportunity to harness Hughes’ words and my life experience as a Black man to claim humanity for myself, my race, and all people.” 

The Black Clown was a New York Times Critic’s Pick when it premiered, with Schachter’s music called “exquisitely layered.” Scenic & Costume Design is by Carlos Soto, with Lighting Design by John Torres, Sound Design by Kai Harada, and Wig and Hair Design by Rachel Padula-Shufelt.

With a career that spanned the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and the Black Arts movement of the sixties, Langston Hughes was the most prolific black poet of his era. Between 1926, when he published his pioneering The Weary Blues, to 1967, the year of his death, when he published The Panther and the Lash, Hughes would write 16 books of poems, two novels, seven collections of short stories, two autobiographies, five works of nonfiction, and nine children’s books; he would edit nine anthologies of poetry, folklore, short fiction, and humor. He also translated Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, Gabriela Mistral, and Federico García Lorca, and wrote at least thirty plays. It is not surprising, then, that Hughes was known, variously, as “Shakespeare in Harlem” and as the “poet laureate of the Negro.” 

This production contains racial slurs and stylized representations of violence, particularly related to slavery, as well as haze, simulated smoking, and bright flashing lights. Well-prepared teenagers will appreciate the stylized movement, dynamic music, and deep engagement with American history. 

Season Partnerships
We are excited to announce a new creative partnership between Opera Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, engaging audiences in the synergies between the visual arts and opera, and offering innovative ways to approach artistic traditions. The first incarnation of this new collaboration will be a series of concerts deconstructing opera in the garden of the Rodin Museum across four special evenings in summer 2025. Throughout the year, Opera Philadelphia will continue to enhance its artistic partnerships throughout the region.