Photograph by Raftermen Pictures
Unveiled February 4, the Atlanta Opera’s upcoming 2025/2026 season is “all about twilight,” says inventive director Tomer Zvulun. And never simply because the corporate is presenting the eagerly awaited manufacturing of Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), the spectacular conclusion to the composer’s Ring cycle, a large 15-year enterprise for the Atlanta Opera.
Photograph by the Sintoses
The whole season will give attention to, as Zvulun describes it, “change, transformation, renewal, and a brand new daybreak.” Verdi’s La Traviata is about for Nov. 8, 11, 14, and 16, 2025; Philip Glass’s rating for La Belle Et La Bete will happen Nov. 15, 2025; Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro might be carried out March 14, 17, 20, and 22, 2026; Turandot by Puccini takes middle stage April 25, 28, Might 1, and three, 2026; and at last, Twilight of the Gods might be carried out Might 30, June 2, 5, and seven, 2026.
Two centuries of masterworks are included within the season’s lineup, from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, initially offered in 1786, to Turandot, which might be carried out on the precise centennial of its 1926 premiere: April 25, 2026. And Philip Glass wrote his 1994 unique rating to be synchronized with a screening of La Belle Et La Bete, director Jean Cocteau’s traditional 1946 movie. “I’m excited for audiences to see the historic development we have now deliberate for the brand new season,” Zvulun says.
However in fact, it’s the completion of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle that Atlanta Opera followers are most enthusiastic about—an pleasure Zvulun shares. The 15-year odyssey to current the four-part German-language epic in Atlanta was considered one of his unique targets when he arrived on the Atlanta Opera in 2013. “It’s so hardly ever achieved as a result of it’s such an elaborate and complicated effort,” Zvulun says. “When an opera firm does it, it transforms the corporate. Doing the Ring cycle is a bit like climbing the Mount Olympus of opera. It’s arguably opera’s best masterpiece, essentially the most difficult and the longest written. It took Wagner 26 years simply to write down it.”
Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta Opera
As Twilight’s villain Hagen, the Atlanta Opera is bringing again Atlanta native Morris Robinson, who has turn into one of many world’s most interesting bass singers. (Robinson may also be seen in March on this season’s Atlanta Opera manufacturing of Macbeth.)
Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta Opera
And whereas some opera corporations have quietly tiptoed away from staging Puccini’s Turandot, initially set in a fictionalized China (a rustic the composer by no means truly set foot in), the Atlanta Opera is inventively reimagining it as a timeless fairy story. “Plenty of corporations have struggled with the problem of approaching Turandot in a method that highlights this concept of exoticism, which was the way it was carried out 100 years in the past,” explains Zvulun. “However the story may be very a lot a fairy story based mostly in mythology. That’s what we’re leaning into, and the attractive and romantic music Puccini wrote helps this story past time and place.” Angela Meade, who has carried out the title position on the Metropolitan Opera in New York and on the Los Angeles Opera will once more sing the position for Atlanta’s Spring 2026 manufacturing.
The Atlanta Opera’s inventive director additionally teased one ultimate 2025/26 manufacturing—a co-production with the Alliance Theatre to be directed by Zvulun himself. (The Alliance will unveil the title as a part of its upcoming season announcement.)
Whereas it’s thrilling for Zvulun so as to add the completion of the Wagner Ring cycle to his resume, he additionally acknowledges the workforce effort it represents. “Folks fly in from New York Metropolis, Australia, and Vienna for opening evening,” he says. “This has been an effort that’s profoundly shifting to observe. Our orchestra has grown a lot by doing this masterwork. Our advertising workforce has risen to the event. The units are inbuilt Wales, so our workforce travels throughout an ocean. The costumes are made in Minnesota, so we’re flying there to verify each element is appropriate. It’s very shifting to see a imaginative and prescient begun 15 years in the past come to life and now attain its conclusion. And we have now the viewers to thank for that.”
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