We will have two Bellinis in new productions, with the best possible casts that can be assembled.
Messiah remains ubiquitous, but several of Handel’s other superb English oratorios will be given enticing performances during the 2025-26 season.
Next season I am looking forward to performances of Andrea Chénier at the Met.
Atlanta Opera’s Götterdämmerung (Stage Direction Tomer Zvulun with set design Erhard Rom).
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino presents John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer next May.
Palm Beach Opera has listed its 3 operas for next year — La bohème, The Pearl Fishers, and Rigoletto — but has not listed any casting yet!
Corinne Winters will take on a trio of roles in Puccini’s Trittico in Houston.
I am looking forward to seeing The Greatest Thing Ever as Gounod‘s Juliette, a role I have never seen her in, at the Berlin Staatsoper on 6 November.
I am pretty excited to add coverage of nearby performances while I am getting settled here in Southern California.
Thank you, Leon Botstein, for giving us a chance to hear the Berlioz adaptation of Der Freischütz (or Freyschütz).
My next production will be Aïda with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta.
Kaija Saariaho’s gifts for vocal and instrumental writing and the uncanniness of the themes she musicalized resonate with unforced power
De Materie (1989) by Louis Andriessen is unsuitable for home listening, so I’m really looking forward to hearing the great Asko|Schönberg ensemble perform it live in Rotterdam next season.
‘Expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.’
One of the most exciting things in prospect next season is Lise Davidsen‘s role debut as Isolde, to take place in Barcelona in January.
The announcement that the increasingly Trump-annexed Kennedy Center would be presenting Robert Ward‘s The Crucible seemed too on-the-nose to be true.
Barrie Kosky directs Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Sickos: “Yes… ha ha ha YES!”
In a world of guilty pleasures, Arabella is mine.
I’d love to have a better answer than ‘movie star directs opera’, but I’m curious to see what Ralph Fiennes does with Eugene Onegin in Paris.
This season, I’m looking forward to Washington Concert Opera’s (WCO) production of Georges Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles on 14 March 2026.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
