Anthony Roth Costanzo has a fond story to tell from last year, which was his first as president and general director of Opera Philadelphia. As the company was preparing to stage The Listeners, a brilliantly searching contemporary opera by Missy Mazzoli, a musician in the orchestra made a left-field suggestion: why aren’t we buying ads on the Bigbelly trash bins all over the city?
Months later, as Costanzo recalls, “I met a young person who came up to me and said, ‘I want you to know that I went to my first opera because the ticket was only $11.’ And I said, ‘Well, how did you find out about it?’ He said, ‘Actually, I was walking up Broad Street, and I saw a trash can with an ad on it.’”
“And my favorite postlude is that he loved the opera he saw, which was The Listeners,” Costanzo adds. “He loved it so much that he wanted to go again soon — so he took the train to New York and bought a rush ticket to The Met. And I love this idea that Opera Philadelphia is providing an onramp to the genre. It's providing a place of discovery, a place of convening where, in a very rocky world that we live in, we can all come together and think about new stories and new voices. We can have some joy, some perspective, some meaning.”
As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, Opera Philadelphia is putting those ideas front and center, along with the Pick Your Price ticketing initiative that made headlines and packed every house last year. The coming 2025-26 season — the first that Costanzo, one of the world’s leading countertenors, was able to curate — will bring newly commissioned work, boldly reimagined repertoire, and a proliferation of daring choices. “Opera is a collision, and it was conceived as a real innovation,” Costanzo says. “So I’m constantly looking at this dialectic between innovation and tradition, and how we straddle that line, and how we push the art form forward.”
That mandate doesn’t strictly apply to new music. The first full production of the season will be Il viaggio a Reims, Gioachino Rossini’s last opera in Italian. A Dramma giocoso that premiered two centuries ago, in 1825, it will receive a fresh interpretation from the Italian director Damiano Michieletto, who sets its story in the present day, at an art museum preparing to open a major exhibition. This opera will be presented at the Academy of Music on Sept. 19, 21, 26 and 28.
Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons provided the springboard for a new opera titled The Seasons, co-conceived by Costanzo and the playwright Sarah Ruhl, who wrote its libretto in English, Italian and Latin. This opera will feature Costanzo in his first starring role at Opera Philadelphia since taking the helm. “What I love about it personally is that I get to make music with this orchestra, with Corrado Rovaris. And it helps keep me connected to the company in a different way — not feeling like I sit above people, but rather like I am a part of it and embedded within it. I think that's important for a leader.”
Directing The Seasons is Zach Winokur, a co-founder of AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), which partnered with SCENE, Opera Philadelphia and Boston Lyric Opera to present the work. The set design — by Mimi Lien, in collaboration with technologist Jack Forman of the MIT Media Lab — will underscore the opera’s focus on extreme weather and environmental forces by incorporating machine-generated soap bubbles in novel ways.
“So whether it’s suds filled with helium that float like upside-down snow,” says Costanzo, “or whether it’s bubbles filled with fog that float out onto the stage, pop, and leave a cloud — there are all these different ways of representing weather. The technology involved in making it reliable is quite fascinating, and it’s a great example of how collaboration can produce beauty.” The Seasons will be presented at the Perelman Theater on Dec. 19, 20 and 21.
For a centerpiece of the 50th anniversary season, Costanzo enlisted the playwright and director Michael R. Jackson, whose musical A Strange Loop won both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Together they approached the acclaimed cabaret performer Mx Justin Vivian Bond, one of Costanzo’s regular collaborators, who proposed a piece titled Complications in Sue. Intended to tell stories across each decade of a woman’s life, it will feature new music by 10 composers — Opera Philadelphia stalwarts like Mazzoli and Rene Orth as well as artists known outside of the field, like the acclaimed jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and flutist Nathalie Joachim. (The other six composers, all heavily garlanded, are Andy Akiho, Alistair Coleman, Nico Muhly, Kamala Sankaram, Dan Schlosberg, and Errollyn Wallen.)
“What we’ve done is like an exquisite corpse,” Costanzo explains. “We have not given each composer the entire libretto. Rather, we’ve only given them their scene and a summary of the other scenes — so it really is composing blind. And I was asked by the composers, ‘Well, are we supposed to find some continuity?’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, they can be as different as possible.’ The thread that unites it all is Justin Vivian Bond, the incredible MacArthur-winning cabaret performer playing Sue, acting through the whole piece, and four amazing opera singers around her singing, all the people in her life. So it is really a novel new way to make an opera, and I’m excited to unfurl the paper and see what Sue sounds like.” Complications in Sue will be presented at the Academy of Music on Feb. 2, 5, 6 and 8.
The familiar story of Sleeping Beauty sparked the inspiration for Sleepers Awake, a new opera by Gregory Spears, which puts the chorus at the center of the action. The production takes certain cues from a revisionist take on the fairytale by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. “This cycle that interrogates what it means to be awake felt really relevant for this moment we’re in, especially in the allegory of a classic fairytale,” Costanzo reflects. “I think it’s going to be a very special experience as created by Jenny Koons, who’s directing it in the Academy of Music, and to be surrounded by these choral voices is going to be truly spectacular.” Sleepers Awake will be presented in English on April 22, 24, and 26, 2026.
The Black Clown — adapted from the Langston Hughes poem by that title — was a breakthrough showpiece for baritone Davóne Tines, who developed it with Winokur and a close collaborator, Michael Schachter. (In The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross proclaimed the piece “astounding.”) Tines and his original creative team will present its Philadelphia premiere from May 14-17, 2026, at The Miller Theater.
“I was one of the lucky ones to see The Black Clown, and I thought it was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had in a theater,” Costanzo says. “It describes the Black experience in America in an incredible way, and it makes us have a kind of insight and understanding that’s really complex and at the same time elated and exalted. And so the idea that at the end of our season we’re transitioning from thinking about our 50th anniversary to America’s 250th — what would be better than this? Look at the Black experience in America over the past 250 years, and what could be a better show for Philadelphia, a city steeped in that experience, and deeply connected to it?”
As a kickoff and prelude to the 2025-26 season, Opera Philadelphia will present a gala concert on Sept. 13 at the Academy of Music. Vox Ex Machina will feature an array of operatic singers performing the arias of their choice. As they sing, sound waves from their performance will be processed by a machine, designed by artist and creative technologist Daniel Belquer, from Drexe’s ExCITe Center. This machine will paint a canvas in response to the music, in real time; the resulting art will be auctioned during a 50th Anniversary Gala at Reading Terminal Market.
Costanzo is coy about whether he’ll be among the performers in Vox Ex Machina. But he quickly grants that it would be an exciting prospect — “and a chance to return to the Academy stage, where it will have been almost 30 years since my debut.”
Subscription packages for Opera Philadelphia’s 2025-2026 season go on sale on April 3, at 10 a.m. at operaphila.org, or by calling 215-732-8400. A new subscription Opera Pass provides advanced access to Pick Your Price tickets, during a presale May 1-14. Single tickets and Pick Your Price go on sale to the general public on May 15.
