Opera Philadelphia announces O23 Festival and a peek at its 50th anniversary season

A Verdi favorite, a new opera based on pioneering American journalist Nellie Bly and a long-neglected chamber opera by Black composer Joseph Bologne are among the high points on the horizon for Opera Philadelphia.

The company on Tuesday announced artists and repertoire for its 2023-24 season, as well as some details of 2024-25, as it seeks to build back momentum lost during the pandemic.

Opera Philadelphia’s centerpiece for the past several years has been the fall O Festival, and if the pandemic forced a scaled-back festival in 2022, Opera Philadelphia has outlined upcoming programming that restores the ambition a few degrees.

“We’re in a different place than we foresaw before the pandemic, but we’re still O-ing,” said Opera Philadelphia general director and president David B. Devan, referring to the ongoing O festival. “What we’ve done is we’ve scaled it to be more in sync with the supply and demand equation as we think it is emerging.”

At its height, the O festival presented seven main shows. Now, “three seems to be the right amount,” says Devan.

O23, which opens in September, brings the world premiere of 10 Days in a Madhouse by composer Rene Orth and librettist Hannah Moscovitch. The piece is inspired by the work of Bly, the journalist who in 1887 posed as a patient in an asylum so she could report on conditions there. Daniela Candillari conducts.

Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra arrives in a production from Belgium’s Opéra Royal de Wallonie. The cast includes baritone Quinn Kelsey as the Doge of Genoa and soprano Ana María Martínez in the role of Amelia, with conductor Corrado Rovaris.

Tenor Karim Sulayman uses the music of George Frideric Handel, Claudio Monteverdi, and contemporary composer Mary Kouyoumdjian to tell the story of the crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective in Unholy Wars. The piece utilizes live performers, choreography, video projections, and animation.

Apart from the fall festival, the company will present The Anonymous Lover by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, in February 2024 at the Academy of Music. The work is the only surviving opera by the composer, whose music has been revived in recent years. Bologne was born in 1745 in Guadeloupe, the son of a Black enslaved woman and her French enslaver.

The season closes in April/May of 2024 with Puccini’s Madame Butterfly in a production by Toronto-based director Aria Umezawa conducted by Rovaris that adds new elements in an effort to tell the story through a more authentic lens of Japanese culture.

The company also gave a peek at its 50th anniversary season, announcing that O24 will feature the U.S. premiere of psychological thriller The Listeners by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek; and the world premiere of Woman with Eyes Closed by composer Jennifer Higdon and librettist Jerre Dye.

The pandemic took a bite out of the opera company’s audience numbers. In 2019, the troupe sold just over 12,000 tickets to its O19 festival. This past fall’s O22 festival drew 6,970 ticket buyers. For O23, the company is planning for a few more performances and larger venues than those of O22.

“A lot of the industry is talking about how the return is slow, and we are pretty convinced the return is complete — that the people that wanted to come back came back,” says Devan.

Buying habits have become a moving target post-pandemic, he says. In looking at audiences last fall and last month, he can quantify who the audience was and what they were interested in hearing.

But: “Ask me next month, I’ll have a different answer.”

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