Opera in Greater Boston
Sat Oct 17
Verdi's Macbeth, transmitted live in HD from the Met: soprano Lise Davidsen and baritone Quinn Kelsey as Shakespeare's scheming, murderous couple in Louisa Proske's powerful new production, with tenor Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff. Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts, screened from the Met stage into cinemas.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:30pm
Odyssey Opera programmes three composers of the Second New England School: Edward MacDowell's tone poem Lamia, drawn from Greek myth; Amy Beach's concert aria Jephthah's Daughter, drawn from the Book of Judges; and George W. Chadwick's opera The Padrone, a portrait of immigrant life in turn-of-the-century Boston. All three helped define the city's musical identity around 1900.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:00pm
The premiere of Martin Brody's The Carp, a forty-five-minute chamber operetta for four singers and five instrumentalists, built from a 2003 news story about a fish in a New York market that was reported to have spoken. Brody worked with art historian Dario Gamboni on the piece, which treats the episode as apocalyptic comedy.
Fri Oct 9 – Sun Oct 11
Fri Oct 9 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 10 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 11 · 2pm
Weill and Brecht’s 1933 sung ballet splits one woman in two: Anna I, the practical side, who sings, and Anna II, the artistic side, who dances. Sent by their family to earn the money for a little house on the Mississippi, they meet a different sin in each of seven American cities. Nathan Troup directs a spare Fringe staging, with Georgi Videnov conducting and Matthew Larson as music director.
Sat Oct 17 · 1:00pm
Verdi's Shakespeare, in a new Met staging by Louisa Proske, screened on Cape Ann as it is transmitted. Quinn Kelsey is the Scottish king and Lise Davidsen the Lady whose ambition damns them both, with Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff and Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts. Rockport Music's Live in HD series runs through June.
$30, $27
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Oct 25
Fri Oct 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 25 · 2pm
David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s opera is set at vinkensport, the Belgian folk contest that pits chaffinches and their owners against each other, each contestant tallying the calls of a rival’s bird. The competitors’ inner monologues and flashbacks reveal “deception, deep-seated rivalries, painful loneliness, and blossoming romance.” Lauren Lenz directs a spare Fringe staging, with student Ian Henscheid conducting and Allison Voth as music director.
Thu Oct 29 · 6:00pm
The Opera Department's twice-yearly scenes programme, drawing highlights from across the repertory — comedy and tragedy in short excerpts rather than a full staging. Joshua Major directs. An early start, at six. A scenes programme lets a department cast far more singers than a full staging would.
Sat Oct 31 · 10:00am
Seymour Barab's one-act Little Red Riding Hood is the other half of NEC's annual touring children's opera, a collaboration between the Conservatory's opera department and its Community Performances and Partnerships program. Barab, an American cellist, wrote dozens of short operas. The show runs about 50 minutes, is meant for children of all ages, and audiences are invited to come in Halloween costume.
Nov 5–6/8
Thu Nov 5 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 6 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 8 · 3pm
André Previn's operatic setting of Tennessee Williams's play: the self-deluding Blanche DuBois takes shelter with her sister Stella and the brutish Stanley, and unravels. Daniela Candillari conducts and Patricia Racette directs, with Brittany Renee, Angela Yam, Thomas Glass and Brenton Ryan in the cast.
Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 7
Singers from NEC's Undergraduate Opera Studio, an auditioned programme for voice majors who have passed their first-year promotional exam, perform staged scenes from the opera repertoire, mixing tragedy and comedy, across two nights. Steven Goldstein directs and Justin Williams is music director; the studio is led by its artistic director, Michael Meraw.
Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 8
Fri Nov 6 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 7 · 3:00pm & 7:30pm / Sun Nov 8 · 3:00pm
Opera Cambridge, formerly Cambridge Chamber Ensemble, stages Kurt Weill's Down in the Valley in an evening of Weill titled Coming to America. Inspired by Weill's love of American folk songs, the short opera, written in 1948 to a libretto by Arnold Sundgaard, tells the story of the doomed love between Brack and Jenny. The company's production of Handel's Samson won first place in The American Prize in Opera Performance.
$45 general; $35 seniors/students; $8 Card to Culture; children 6–12 free
Sat Nov 14 · 1:00pm
Richard Eyre's Met production of Bizet's opera, recorded in January 2010 and brought back to the Kendall Square screen as part of the Live in HD series' twentieth-anniversary season. Elīna Garanča is the cigarette girl who lives and dies on her own terms, Roberto Alagna the soldier who cannot let her go. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted, in his first Met season.
Thu Nov 19 – Sun Nov 22
Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, staged by the Opera Department over four nights. Written in 1893, it puts Wagner-scale orchestration behind a fairy tale, and is the one opera in the standard repertory aimed as squarely at families as at opera-goers.
Thu Nov 19 – Sun Nov 22
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm / Fri Nov 20 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 21 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 22 · 2pm
Puccini's 1896 opera about four young artists sharing a cold Paris garret, and the seamstress Mimì who comes to the door for a light and dies of consumption four acts later. It is among the most performed operas anywhere. The Conservatory stages it over four nights with its own singers and orchestra.
Fri Nov 20 · 7:00pm
A masque first staged in London in 1696, with a libretto by Peter Anthony Motteux, telling the story of the affair between Venus and Mars and the trap her husband Vulcan lays for them. Contemporaries praised its music as having 'excelled even itself'. The Purcell Society performs it in the Cathedral Church of St Paul.
Sat Nov 28 – Sun Nov 29 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Nov 28 · 8pm / Sun Nov 29 · 3pm
John Frederick Lampe's burlesque sets the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with material borrowed from Purcell's Fairy Queen. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs are the musical directors, Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière stages and choreographs it, and Robert Mealy leads the band.
Wed Dec 2 – Thu Dec 3 · 6pm
Wed Dec 2 / Thu Dec 3 · 6pm
NEC’s first-year opera students pair Handel arias with Shakespeare monologues in a single evening, moving between Baroque opera and spoken verse. Admission is free, and a live stream is open to members of the NEC community.
Thu Dec 3 · 8pm
Wolfi to Weill pairs opera, operetta and musical-theatre scenes by Mozart and Kurt Weill, sung by current Tufts students and invited alumni. Twenty years ago the Tufts Opera Ensemble staged a Kurt Weill revue, and this programme returns to Weill to mark the 20th anniversary of the Granoff Music Center. Carol Mastrodomenico and Thomas Stumpf direct the ensemble.
Sat Dec 5
Saint-Saëns's grand opera Samson et Dalila, screened live in HD from the Met: mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina and tenor Clay Hilley in the title roles of the biblical tale of seduction and vengeance, in Darko Tresnjak's epic staging. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts, transmitted from the Met stage.
Sat Dec 12 · 1:00pm
The abridged English-language Magic Flute that opened the Met's cinema series in December 2006, returned to theatres for the holidays. Julie Taymor's puppet-filled staging of Mozart's fairy tale features Matthew Polenzani as Tamino, Nathan Gunn as the bird-catcher Papageno and René Pape as Sarastro. A recorded performance of about two hours, suited to families and first-time opera-goers.
Fri Dec 18 – Sat Dec 19 · 7pm
Fri Dec 18 / Sat Dec 19 · 7pm
Longy's fall production is Cavalli's Il Giasone of 1649, a tragicomic opera loosely drawn from the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, and among the most performed operas of the seventeenth century. Cavalli was Monteverdi's pupil and later his successor at St Mark's in Venice.
Sat Dec 19 · 4:00pm
Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Christmas opera written for NBC television in 1951 and the first opera composed for the medium, paired with Bach's Epiphany cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen. Emmanuel programmes the two together under the heading Empathy.
Sat Dec 19 · 11:00am
Saint-Saëns's biblical spectacle in Darko Tresnjak's outsized production, shown at the Shalin Liu two weeks after the Met's December 5 transmission. Mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina is the Philistine seductress and tenor Clay Hilley the hero whose strength she undoes; Quinn Kelsey sings the High Priest of Dagon. Giacomo Sagripanti conducts the full Met orchestra and chorus.
$30, $27
Sat Jan 23
Puccini's Gold Rush opera, which had its premiere at the Met in 1910, follows Minnie, who runs a saloon in a California mining camp and stakes the life of the bandit she loves on a poker game with the sheriff. This live HD transmission shows Richard Jones's new staging, with Vida Miknevičiūtė making her Met debut as Minnie opposite SeokJong Baek and Christopher Maltman; Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts.
Sat Jan 23 · 1:00pm
Puccini's Gold Rush opera in the Met's first new production of it in over thirty years, staged by Richard Jones and transmitted live to the Shalin Liu. Vida Miknevičiūtė makes her company debut as Minnie, the saloon keeper who gambles for a bandit's life; SeokJong Baek is Dick Johnson and Christopher Maltman the sheriff Jack Rance. Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts.
$30, $27
Jan 29/31 · 7:30pm/2pm
Fri Jan 29 · 7:30pm / Sun Jan 31 · 2pm
Tchaikovsky wrote The Queen of Spades in six weeks in 1890, to a libretto his brother Modest drew from Pushkin's novella about a gambler who tries to extract a card secret from an old countess. Kristine Opolais sings Lisa and David Butt Philip the obsessive Hermann; Andris Nelsons conducts this semi-staged production, closing the orchestra's Tchaikovsky cycle. Presented with Boston Lyric Opera.
Feb 20–21/26–27
Sat Feb 20 · 1:30pm & 7:30pm / Sun Feb 21 · 1:30pm / Fri Feb 26 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 27 · 1:30pm & 7:30pm
The Sudbury Savoyards' annual Gilbert and Sullivan, this year The Pirates of Penzance, with its Pirate King, the Major-General's patter song and the leap-year birthday that traps Frederic in his apprenticeship. The volunteer company stages G&S on a grand scale, casts of sixty and an orchestra of thirty, as it has each winter since 1961.
Thu Feb 25 – Sun Feb 28
Thu Feb 25 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 26 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 27 · 2pm / Sun Feb 28 · 2pm
Mozart and Da Ponte’s 1786 comic opera, drawn from Beaumarchais’s play, follows the servants Figaro and Susanna through their wedding day as Count Almaviva pursues the bride and the Countess mourns his lost affection. William Lumpkin conducts. It is this season’s spring opera from the Opera Institute and the School of Theatre, an annual collaboration cast with students of the College of Fine Arts.
Mon Mar 1 – Wed Mar 31
A new opera by composer Joey Timmons and librettist Anna Jean Simmons, made with Voice of Iris and Horizon Ensemble. Little Songbook has announced March 2027 and an audition call for September 2026; no venue, cast or exact dates are posted yet.
Mar 12/14/19/21
Fri Mar 12 · 7:30pm / Sun Mar 14 · 3pm / Fri Mar 19 · 7:30pm / Sun Mar 21 · 3pm
Mozart and Da Ponte's comedy of one wedding day: Figaro and Susanna outmanoeuvring the philandering Count, the farce laid over a sharp critique of aristocratic privilege. David Angus conducts and Anne Bogart directs, with Michael Sumuel, Madison Leonard and Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, a highlight of BLO's fiftieth season.
Sat Mar 13 · 7:30pm
David T. Little and Royce Vavrek's opera imagines the last night John and Jacqueline Kennedy spent in Fort Worth before Dallas. Rather than staging the history, it moves through dream states — mythic Fates guide the couple into visions mixing memory and fantasy — and holds them at the edge of what is about to happen.
Sat Mar 20
Kevin Puts's Pulitzer-winning Silent Night, receiving its Met premiere and a live-HD cinema transmission: the true story of the 1914 Christmas truce, when First World War soldiers crossed the trenches to sing carols with the enemy. Dalia Stasevska conducts James Robinson's staging.
Sat Mar 20 · 1:00pm
Kevin Puts's Pulitzer-winning opera about the 1914 Christmas truce reaches the Met for the first time, in James Robinson's staging, transmitted live to Rockport. Mark Campbell's libretto moves between English, French and German as soldiers cross the trenches to sing together. Elza van den Heever, Ben Bliss and Rolando Villazón lead the cast; Dalia Stasevska conducts in her Met debut.
$30, $27
Sat Apr 3
Massenet's passionate drama Manon, screened live in HD from the Met: soprano Nadine Sierra in the title role opposite tenor Matthew Polenzani as her idealistic lover, the Chevalier des Grieux, in Laurent Pelly's breathtaking Belle Époque production. Yves Abel conducts, transmitted from the Met stage.
Sun Apr 11 · 12:00pm
Massenet's Belle Époque tragedy of a girl who chooses pleasure over love, in Laurent Pelly's staging, screened at the Shalin Liu a week after the Met's April 3 transmission. Nadine Sierra sings the title role opposite Matthew Polenzani as her devoted Chevalier des Grieux, with Andrzej Filończyk as her cousin Lescaut. Yves Abel conducts. Note the date change from Rockport's original listing.
$30, $27
Thu Apr 15 – Sun Apr 18
Stravinsky's 1951 opera follows Tom Rakewell from an inheritance through a London of brothels, an auction and a madhouse, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman that took its shape from Hogarth's series of paintings. The score is deliberately eighteenth-century in manner. David Gately directs and Andrew Bisantz conducts.
Fri Apr 16
Gilbert and Sullivan's 1878 comic opera, set aboard a Royal Navy ship where the captain's daughter is in love with a common sailor and the First Lord of the Admiralty has never been to sea. It made the pair's reputation and provoked the copyright fight that sent them to New York. The St Ignatius series presents it.
Thu Apr 22 – Sun Apr 25
Thu Apr 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Apr 24 · 2pm / Sun Apr 25 · 2pm
Britten’s chamber opera, first performed at Glyndebourne in 1946 to a libretto by Ronald Duncan, retells the Roman story of Lucretia, a general’s wife who is raped by the Etruscan prince Tarquinius and takes her own life. A Male and Female Chorus frame the action. William Lumpkin conducts and Clar Choquette directs, in a co-production of the School of Theatre and the Opera Institute.
Apr 23/25 · 7:30pm/3pm
Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sun Apr 25 · 3pm
Two landmark English operas of the 1680s on one bill: John Blow's Venus and Adonis, in which Venus loses her mortal lover Adonis to a boar hunt, and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which ends in Dido's celebrated lament. Blow's work is thought to have shaped Purcell's. Boston Baroque plays on period instruments under Lionel Meunier.
Sat Apr 24
Verdi's monumental Shakespearean drama Otello, transmitted live in HD from the Met: tenor Brian Jagde in the tour-de-force title role with soprano Ailyn Pérez as Desdemona, in Bartlett Sher's production. Michele Mariotti leads the full forces of the Met orchestra and chorus, screened in cinemas.
Sat Apr 24 · 1:00pm
Verdi's late Shakespearean tragedy in Bartlett Sher's production, transmitted live from the Met to the Shalin Liu. Brian Jagde takes on the punishing title role, Ailyn Pérez makes her role debut as Desdemona, and Artur Ruciński is the Iago who poisons the marriage. Michele Mariotti conducts the full Met orchestra and chorus in Boito's tightly wound adaptation.
$30, $27
Sat May 8 · 1:00pm
David McVicar's Met production of Puccini's thriller of painter, diva and police chief in Napoleonic Rome, recorded in November 2024 and screened again as an encore. Lise Davidsen sings Tosca, Freddie De Tommaso is Cavaradossi and Quinn Kelsey the predatory Scarpia. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts; the Kendall Square showing is the series' last encore of the season.
Sat Jun 5
Wagner's transcendent final opera Parsifal, screened live in HD from the Met in François Girard's acclaimed production. Tenor Piotr Beczała sings the title role, with mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča as Kundry and baritone Peter Mattei as Amfortas; music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the nearly six-hour work.
Sat Jun 5 · 12:00pm
Wagner's last opera, a five-hour meditation on compassion and the knights of the Grail, returns in François Girard's stark modern staging, transmitted live to Rockport. Piotr Beczała sings the innocent fool, Elīna Garanča the shape-shifting Kundry, Peter Mattei the wounded Amfortas and Jongmin Park the old knight Gurnemanz. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts; expect intermissions and a long afternoon.
$30, $27
Sun Jun 6 – Sun Jun 13
Telemann's Emma und Eginhard, first staged in Hamburg in 1728, is the centrepiece opera of the twenty-fourth biennial festival. It draws on the legend of Charlemagne's daughter Emma, who carried her lover Eginhard, the emperor's secretary, across the snow so that his footprints would not give him away. Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley returns as the festival's chamber opera.
Sat Jun 12 · 8:00pm
John Frederick Lampe's 1736 burlesque sends up Handelian opera: a dragon is eating Yorkshire and only the local squire can stop it, if he will put down his beer. It ran for forty-five years, the most performed opera in eighteenth-century England. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs conduct; Gilbert Blin directs this encore of BEMF's 2023 staging.
Thu Jun 17 – Sun Jun 20
Thu Jun 17 · 7:30pm / Fri Jun 18 · 7:30pm / Sat Jun 19 · 7:30pm / Sun Jun 20 · 5pm
Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre, a song cycle staged as opera and sung by Ailyn Pérez in Ladino, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Sardinian and English, reaching for the moment before Muslim, Jewish and Christian Spain came apart. A new BLO production with the company's orchestra.
