Independent Arts News Reporting 
Pictured Above: Maestro Rossen Milanov. Photo Credit: Stephen Pariser.
Star Power & Spectacle: Inside The Princeton Festival 2026
By: Lori Goldstein
Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s 2026 Princeton Festival promises an extraordinary summer celebration of music, opera, dance, and performance under the stars. In this feature, Lori Goldstein goes behind the scenes with Maestro Rossen Milanov and internationally acclaimed artists including Sondra Radvanovsky, Victor Starsky, and Toni Marie Palmertree to explore the artistry, innovation, and star power shaping this year’s highly anticipated festival.
The Princeton Festival 2026 aptly belongs in what music director and conductor Rossen Milanov deems “the power portfolio”—the top-tier summer music festivals around the country. What distinguishes The Princeton Festival is its eclectic array of musical genres. It brings the best of opera and Broadway, Baroque and ballet, classical, jazz, and rock music together under one expansive performance pavilion adjacent to Morven Museum and Gardens June 5-21.
Opening weekend features the return of actress and singing star Sierra Boggess, best known for originating the role of Ariel in The Little Mermaid on Broadway and for multiple performances as Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera. Having sung with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO) in 2022, on June 5, Boggess will delight audiences in a cabaret setting. Accompanied by piano, she will sing thrilling renditions of Broadway classics and favorite melodies.
Pictured Above: Sierra Boggess. Photo Credit: Contributed.
The next evening, June 6, American and Canadian bel canto soprano Sondra Radvanovsky will perform a program of arias and duets with the PSO. Radvanovsky is globally renowned for her interpretation of Verdi and Puccini roles. Tenor Victor Starsky, who sang as Cavaradossi in last summer’s Tosca and as Pinkerton in this summer’s Madama Butterfly will join Radvanovsky in the duets.
Radvanovsky is “one of the big divas for the past twenty years,” says Milanov. “And she still is one of the most outstanding artists in the world.” He recalls that when he was working in Spain, Radvanovsky won the Best Female Singer (Mejor Cantante Femenina) award at the 2nd Ópera XXI Awards in 2019 and in 2023, the Liceu Golden Medal by the Gran Teatre del Liceu. “Her interpretations, particularly in the Verdi and verismo repertoire [including composers such as Leoncavollo, Giordano, and Puccini] are quite stunning,” says Milanov. “Just the scope of her voice in combination with acting ability, an understanding of each persona that she’s portraying on stage, is something phenomenal that she possesses.”
Pictured Above: Sondra Radvanovsky. Photo Credit: Michael Cooper.
While Milanov believes Radvanovsky is best known for her role as Tosca, he says that she also offered to sing a gem of an aria from Turandot. “I think if we get lucky, we might hear ‘In questa reggia’ with her, so that would be absolutely amazing.”
The pairing of Sondra Radvanovsky with Victor Starsky was a matter of neither of coincidence nor convenience. In the fall of 2025, for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Starsky covered [understudied] the roles of Giasone in Cherubini’s Medea and Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Radvanovsky was singing the title role of Medea. “Maestra Radvanovsky is a tour de force Medea,” says Starsky. She hadn’t heard Starsky sing very much in person; however, before she arrived for the first night of rehearsal, he stepped in for Matthew Polenzani, who hadn’t arrived yet either.
The director, David McVicar, heard him sing, and “he was gracious and generous enough to be interested in me,” recalls 34-year-old Starsky. “He asked, ‘Can I hear you sing privately? I would like to hear you sing some of the repertoire that you do.’ I sang an audition for him maybe two or three weeks later. And I sang ‘Che gelida manina’ from La Boheme. He was taken aback that I actually sang it in key—a lot of tenors take it down a half-step for whatever reason I don’t understand. It’s written in the key [of D-flat major] and I believe you should sing it in the key. He was so blown out of the water by that interpretation of the aria that he said, ‘Can you sing it again and can I film it?’” Starsky recounts how McVicar became his champion ever since and began sending the video to his opera world colleagues, including Radvanovsky.
“She was very complimentary, saying you seem to be an old-school tenor, and you have this ability which I think we’re all yearning for in the modern tenor,” says Starsky. “A month or so later, The Princeton Festival reached out to me and said Sondra Radvanovsky is going to do a recital here, and she’s recommended you. Talk about a jaw on the floor moment. I still can’t believe it’s happening because in my opinion, she is the top soprano in the world at this time. This is the maximum honor of my career.”
Pictured Above: Victor Starsky. Photo Credit: Visual Victory Studios.
While preparing his duets with Radvanovsky, Starsky will also be rehearsing as Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. This will be a reunion, as Toni Marie Palmertree, who sang Tosca so passionately to his Cavaradossi last summer, will take on the starring role of Ciao-Ciao-San June 12 and 14.
“We even talked about Butterfly last year, before we knew that we were going to be doing it this year, because Toni related to it a lot in her experience of doing the Tosca. I’m very excited to hear her bring that experience and excellence to the role. Because Pinkerton is not the hero, I’m eager to support her in being the most important facet of the opera.”
When Palmertree and Starsky sang Tosca together, “she was giving, thoughtful, consistent—just a magnificent soprano,” says Starsky. “I think [Butterfly] is a defining role for her.” In March 2026 she made her principal debut as Cio-Cio-San with the Metropolitan Opera.
Pictured Above: Toni Marie Palmertree. Photo Credit: Contributed.
Starsky acknowledges that “Pinkerton is rather awful. I don’t like him very much. You really shouldn’t, right? However, you have to find a reason to do it. There’s a redeeming opportunity in demonstrating what not to be, how not to act. Pinkerton shows remorse at the end, too little, too late.”
“Toni literally carries the entire show on her shoulders because she’s almost in every scene,” says Maestro Milanov. “The opera is all about empowering her as a person that has to make very difficult choices and is completely in control of her fate. We know that Puccini loves writing operas about powerful women. The way that we will stage it is making Cio-Cio-San not necessarily just a victim, but a character that really understands internally what is happening and trying to save the people that are around her from admitting that she knows the truth.”
Milanov hints that in this production “we are going to not necessarily portray the story in the time when it happened, the end of the imperial period of when Puccini intended the opera to be. We will try to put it just a little bit later, closer to our time, in the world of fashion and the world of being in touch with something exotic and different from the understanding of the world in which we personally live at the moment.” Eve Summer will direct Madama Butterfly, as she did last summer’s Tosca.
Another innovation is the placement of the orchestra. Rather than on the ground adjacent to the stage, it will be situated at the back of the stage, “and from there, building up a stage and sets that are going to be a lot more vertical and three-dimensional compared to what we had in the past,” says Milanov. “We’re trying to bring the singing closer to the audience, and that will allow us to have a more interesting visual and vocal presence.”
Other performances during the first half of the Festival include “An Evening of Dance,” by the American Repertory Ballet and the PSO on June 7. Baroque enthusiasts will enjoy the return of New York’s premier ensemble, The Sebastians, on June 9. They will present a program of Bach cantatas at Princeton’s Trinity Church. In the same venue on June 11, Handel’s cantata Aminta e Fillide, a trendsetter for casting two female sopranos (a practice forbidden by papal Rome) will be performed by the historical performance specialists, Twelfth Night. Devotees of the British rock band Queen will be regaled with a tribute concert by Queen Nation on June 13 in the Festival pavilion.
On June 2, at 6:30pm, Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s (PSO’s) Princeton Festival Guild presents its annual Artists’ Roundtable in the Princeton Public Library’s Community Room. The Guild invites anyone curious about what goes into putting on an opera to this round table discussion centered on Giacomo Puccini’s tragic opera Madama Butterfly. Panelists led by Maestro Rossen Milanoc will discuss the upcoming Princeton Festival production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Stage Director Eve Summer and members of the cast will provide delightful insights into artists’ roles, and the joys and challenges of being in the opera business.
To learn about performances scheduled for the second half of The Princeton Festival 2026, read our next installment.
Tickets for all Princeton Festival 2026 concerts are available at Princetonsymphony.org
