2023-2024 Season Announcement

Explore Pagliacci

Austin Opera’s 2023-2024 season opens at the Long Center in November with Pagliacci, in which composer Ruggero Leoncavallo creates not the usual love triangle, but a love quadrangle, with three men all fighting for the love and attention of one woman. Using the classic ‘play within a play’ format, the composer sets up the real lives of his characters as a mirror to their parts in the play, with the two stories coming together in one final explosion of manipulation, jealousy, violence, and ultimately, of death.

Sad-faced and sad-hearted clown, Canio, is sung by tenor Jonathan Burton, returning to Austin Opera after his 2018 visit as Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos. Making her role debut as Nedda, the target of so much welcome and unwelcome attention, is soprano Hailey Clark, last seen at the Long Center in 2019 as Anna Sørensen in Silent Night. Troublemaker Tonio is sung by baritone Anthony Clark Evans, and Nedda’s lover Silvio is sung by baritone Ben Taylor, both making their Austin Opera debuts, as is character tenor Rodell Rosel, who also makes his role debut as Beppe. Austin Opera’s Sarah and Ernest Butler Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor, Timothy Myers, will conduct this powerful heartbreaker, collaborating with director Tara Faircloth who returns to Austin Opera after her last visit for Rigoletto in 2019. Scenic design is by Laura Fine Hawkes, with lighting design by Kathryn Eader.

Explore Cruzar

The season continues in February with the world’s first-ever Mariachi opera, José ‘Pepe’ Martínez and Leonard Foglia’s Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (Crossing the Face of the Moon), in a new co-production by Austin Opera and Minnesota Opera directed by David Radamés Toro with scenic and costume design by Tony Award nominee Arnulfo Maldonado. In a new orchestration by David Hanlon commissioned by Austin Opera, Minnesota Opera, and Houston Grand Opera, Cruzar marks the next phase of the significant, ongoing cultural collaboration between Austin Opera and Ópera de Bellas Artes, the national opera company of Mexico. This production of Cruzar is also the first opera at the Long Center supported by the new Butler Fund for Spanish Programming, created in 2022 with a donation of $3.3 million from Austin philanthropists Sarah and Ernest Butler to expand Spanish language programming at Austin Opera.

The cast for Cruzar will include vocalists from the Ópera de Bellas Artes Studio performing alongside U.S-based artists, the Austin Opera Orchestra, and the Mariachi musicians of Trío Chapultepec. The Trío comprises three much sought-after musicians from San Antonio—Vincent Pequeño, Israel Alcala, and William Carlton Galvez. Trío Chapultepec and the members of the Ópera de Bellas Artes Studio will also perform together in Austin Opera’s forthcoming Bella Noche de Música concert at Waterloo Park in April 2023.

Explore Carmen

The final Long Center opera of the season features arguably opera’s sexiest role in Georges Bizet’s lush and emotionally charged tragedy, Carmen.  Carmen is a beautiful, free-spirited woman and yet, she despises any man who falls for her, including soldier, Don José. She rejects José to take up with a famous bullfighter. José spurns his childhood sweetheart, Micaëla, and as his love degenerates into morbid obsession, it is only a matter of time before he will make Carmen face the consequences of her desire for freedom.

Featuring two of opera’s most iconic tunes, the Habanera and the Toreador’s March, this production sees the directorial debut of Denyce Graves, the most iconic Carmen of her generation, who sang the role at major international houses such as the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. The production is designed by Riccardo Hernández with costumes by Oana Botez. The tragedy is led by three singers making Austin Opera debuts. Sultry Carmen is sung by mezzo-soprano Virginie Verrez, a graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development who made her role debut as Carmen to great acclaim at the Welsh National Opera. Tenor Robert Watson co-stars as her all-too-brief love interest, Don José, a role he has sung in major houses across Europe and the United States. Flashy bullfighter, Escamillo, will be sung by bass-baritone Seth Carico, in a rare visit to the U.S. Conducting opera’s most popular title will be Timothy Myers, Austin Opera’s Sarah & Ernest Butler Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor.

Explore Concert

Austin Opera continues its practice of extending its programming beyond the Long Center by welcoming back internationally acclaimed bass-baritone, Ryan Speedo Green, for a concert at the new Austin PBS Media Center.  Presented in partnership with Austin PBS, the concert will build on the hugely successful 2021 An All-Star Concert—in which Ryan Speedo Green also performed—which has aired on more than fifty PBS stations around the US, with an audience reach of 113 million. The concert will be recorded live for national distribution on public television.

In high demand at the world’s leading opera houses, Ryan Speedo Green has received praise for his featured roles at the Metropolitan Opera in Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut up in my Bones and in Gerswhin’s Porgy and Bess, an opera for which he won a Grammy Award. He also served as the Texas Opera Alliance’s first-ever Artist in Residence in the 2021-22 season.

Ryan Speedo Green will be joined by pianist Adam Nielsen in this one-night-only concert underwritten by Jeff and Gail Kodosky.