Independent Arts News Reporting Opera Philadelphia’s 50th Anniversary Season Delivers a Genre-Defying Ode to the Future of Opera
Reported Tuesday May 13, 2025.
Pictured Above: Anthony Roth Costanzo as The Poet in The Seasons. Photo Credit: Nile Scott Studio.
NEWSROOM POST: PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Subscriptions and Opera Passes are now on sale for the 2025-2026 Season before the May return of the wildly successful $11 Pick Your Price tickets
Philadelphia, PA – When Anthony Roth Costanzo was named General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia, he promised evolution—not just in repertoire but in the very essence of what opera could be. With the unveiling of the company’s 2025–2026 season, that promise is now a full-fledged reality.
That new path begins with six productions, including world premieres, Philadelphia premieres, and a 50th Anniversary Gala that fuses live painting with opera—literally.
“For 50 years, Opera Philadelphia has made art at the highest level, and as this visionary company continues to honor tradition and innovate, we are passionate about charting a new path for opera,” said Costanzo. “Our 2025-2026 Season embraces everything that opera is and helps us envision what it can become. It’s opera, but different. I invite both long-time opera lovers and first-time, opera-curious audiences to join us as we bring Pick Your Price back! We are excited to continue offering tickets for $11, or a higher price of your choosing, for every single performance of the season. An incredible 67% of single ticket buyers were first timers in the first year of this model, selling out every opera of this season. The audiences have spoken, and where there is demand, we want to provide supply.”
September 13, 2025: Vox Ex Machina at the Academy of Music
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.
Pictured Above: Viaggio a Reims by Clärchen & Matthias Baus Dutch National Opera
Il viaggio a Reims | Sept 19–28, 2025
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.
Pictured Above: Il viaggio a Reims by Clärchen & Matthias Baus Dutch National Opera. Photo Credit: Clärchen & Matthias Baus Dutch National Opera
The Seasons | Dec 19–21, 2025
ou could say Vivaldi had a kind of synesthesia when writing The Four Seasons. What does being cold feel and sound like? MacArthur Award-winning playwright and librettist Sarah Ruhl joins Anthony Roth Costanzo to co-conceive a tapestry of Vivaldi’s music, telling an original story about a world in which the seasons are completely out of order. Tony Award-winning set designer Mimi Lien collaborates with M.I.T. materials technologist Jack Forman to fuse art and science, bringing atmospheric events to the stage. Celebrated choreographer Pam Tanowitz creates a maelstrom of dance, director Zack Winokur helms the production, and Corrado Rovaris conducts the rapturous piece, which stars Costanzo.
Pictured Above: Composer Missy Mazzoli. Photo Credit: Marylene Mey
Complications in Sue | Feb 4–8, 2026
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.
Pictured Above: Director Jenny Koons. Photo Credit: Marylene Mey
Sleepers Awake | Apr 22–26, 2026
In this opera, the chorus has the starring role. Composer Gregory Spears, 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), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser. As the Opera Philadelphia Chorus sings itself in and out of slumber, the voices pull us into a liminal space where time is both fractured and cyclical. Conceived with and directed by the transformative Jenny Koons, this visually dazzling world premiere activates a collective voice to question the fragile line between waking and dreaming. Corrado Rovaris conducts.
The Black Clown | May 14–17, 2026
Creator and opera revolutionary Davóne Tines brings Langston Hughes’ poem “The Black Clown” to musical life in a vaudevillian rendering of this masterpiece. Fusing gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals into a searing night of theatrical brilliance, The Black Clown embodies the evolving, divided soul of Black America and animates a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The Black Clown has been hailed as “pure poetry” by The Boston Globe, and The New York Times lauds “this rich, seamless production melds the past and present of African-American history into an electrifyingly ambivalent whole.” Tines makes his Opera Philadelphia debut alongside an ensemble of 12 performers in this genre-bending, visually arresting piece, juxtaposing dazzling cathartic performances with Hughes’ enduring work.
Opera for All: $11 Tickets Return
Opera Philadelphia continues its wildly successful Pick Your Price program, making opera accessible for as low as $11 per ticket.
Art Beyond the Stage
A new partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art brings opera performances to the Rodin Museum gardens in summer 2025.
Visit operaphila.org for tickets, full cast lists, and subscriptions.
Opera Pass pre-sale begins May 1. General ticket sales open May 15.
Pictured Above: viaggio a Reims by Clärchen & Matthias Baus Dutch National Opera
