One of the most eagerly anticipated must be his “anything but sacred” oratorio Hercules which is this season’s annual offering by The English Concert. A short US tour will take it to Berkeley and Omaha before reaching Carnegie Hall on 15 March. Ann Hallenberg stars as Dejanira, one of her most acclaimed roles, with William Guanbo Su as Hercules.

Semele, Handel’s other secular oratorio masterpiece, was recently staged in both Paris and London staged by Oliver Mears.

Claus Guth’s production which premiered in Munich and is reportedly still bound for the Met, first stops in Amsterdam–again with Jakub Józef Orliński who will be joined by Louise Alder, Jasmin White, and David Portillo.

Rising American contralto White recently performed Hamor in a starry European tour of Jephtha. Given that its cast also featured Joyce DiDonato and Michael Spyres, both ERATO recording artists, I expect a commercial recording–also featuring lionine Cody Quattlebaum–will arrive sometime this season.

Juilliard, White’s alma mater, presents Jephtha twice in November conducted by Nicholas McGegan, first in New York followed by a repeat in New Haven as the chorus will be the Yale Schola Cantorum.  

Theodora has recently been performed with increasing frequency. Katie Mitchell’s controversial updating played in both London and Madrid and this fall an unusually interesting cast will tour a concert version to eight cities in Europe. Husband-and-wife team of Thomas Dunford and Lea Desandre will be joined by Véronique Gens, Hugh Cutting, Laurence Kilsby, and Alex Rosen.

In late March, a lesser-known oratorio Belshazzar arrives at Berlin’s Komische Oper in a new production by Herbert Fritsch conducted by George Petrou.

But the oratorio performance I’m most excited about is the towering music drama Saul which will be presented in concert by Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society in early October. New H&H music director Jonathan Cohen led Barrie Kosky’s much- traveled Saul production this summer at Glyndebourne and will bring with him to Boston several of its singers along with, as Michal, recent Met National Auditions winner Julie Roset, who debuts in November as Fiakermilli in the Met’s revival of Strauss’s Arabella which will also feature Amsterdam’s Semele as Zdenka.