A Year-Long Celebration Of WNO’s 70th Anniversary And
Inaugural Season Of Music Director Robert Spano’s Tenure
SEASON HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE: The Return of Five Main-Stage Productions, American Opera Initiative, Holiday Opera, Marian Anderson Vocal Award Recital, And Opera In The Outfield; Plus, Four New Productions for The First Half Of WNO’s Programming of The Promise Of US Festival—A Celebration of The 250th Anniversary of Our Country
Artistic Director Francesca Zambello says, “I passionately believe in opera’s ability to move people emotionally while exploring serious issues. The works we are presenting next season are testament to that ability. Whether they are created hundreds of years ago or in our time, they are all works of dramatic storytelling with compelling music. In 2026, as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country at the Kennedy Center, we will focus on American stories, looking back at who we have been and forward to who we might become. The operas we present will consider major historical events, as well as stories of fictionalized individuals at key moments in our collective history. I am also thrilled that my old friend and our new Music Director Robert Spano will conduct three productions. I look forward to those collaborations.”
WNO General Director Timothy O’Leary says, “Washington National Opera’s 70th anniversary coincides with our country’s 250th, giving us the opportunity to look back and look forward. Francesca Zambello has assembled a season that speaks across centuries to the most important values in the American and human experience. Our artists will give voice in our nation’s capital to our collective aspirations, in part by understanding where we’ve come from. I’m deeply grateful to the WNO community – artists, audiences, subscribers, donors, trustees, volunteers, and staff – for believing in this mission for 70 years, and for supporting us as we look to the future.”
Season opening: Aida
The season opens with one of the grandest operas—Aida—in WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello ‘s “robust and fresh” production (Chicago Tribune). Using hieroglyphs as the key visual element, famed contemporary visual artist RETNA, together with set designer Michael Yeargan and costume designer Anita Yavich, created a stage world that pays homage to Egyptian culture while also representing a country at war. Jessica Lang choreographs the vibrant dance. “The central theme of Aida is duty vs. desire,” says Zambello. “The characters are torn between their public duties and their private desires. The genius of Verdi is that he gives us these characters and puts them in situations where we can focus on the intimate but also have something spectacular. This contrast between the two arenas gives this work its immense power.” Aida will be conducted by Charlotte Symphony Orchestra Music Director Kwamé Ryan, who, fresh off from conducting WNO’s Porgy and Bess this season, will make his Met Opera debut next season. Aida will be sung by Jennifer Rowley, who was praised as having “the darkness and complexity of a real Verdi instrument” by Opera News, and Amber R. Monroe, a Cafritz Young Artist alumna, who sings the role for the first time. Adam Smith, whose appearance as Romeo with WNO in the 2023–2024 season was praised for his “heavy pour of passions” by the Washington Post, will make his American role debut as Radamès, alternating with Robert Watson. The “striking mezzo-soprano” (The New York Times) Raehann Bryce-Davis and Agnieszka Rehlis sing Amneris, Shenyang sings Amonasro, and Morris Robinson sings Ramfis.
Mozart’s masterpiece returns: The Marriage of Figaro
Mozart’s masterpiece is a work that both speaks to its time, in its representation of pre-French Revolution class conflict, and is timeless, with its message about human capacity for forgiveness. The intricate interpersonal drama is played out in the context of political change in Peter Kazaras’ period production, which returns for the first time since the 2016–2017 season. The production features Operalia 2024 winner Le Bu as Figaro. Rosa Feola, who dazzled the WNO audience with her “plush and limpid soprano across the dynamic range and from high to low” in WNO’s Romeo and Juliet in the 2023–2024 season, returns to sing the Countess. Yaritza Véliz is Susanna, 2020–2021 Marian Anderson Vocal Award winner Will Liverman is Count Almaviva, Elizabeth Bishop is Marcellina, Sir Willard White is Bartolo, and John Holiday is Cherubino. On November 15, a special performance of these roles will be sung by Cafritz Young Artists, including Anneliese Klenetsky as the Countess, Viviana Goodwin as Susanna, Veronica Siebert as Cherubino, Thandolwethu Mamba as Count Almaviva, Robert Frazier as Figaro, Michelle Mariposa as Marcellina, and Nicholas Huff as Don Basilio. Renowned conductor Robert Spano assumes his new capacity as the Music Director of WNO and will conduct three productions this season, including The Marriage of Figaro, American Opera Initiative, and The Crucible. “No doubt The Marriage of Figaro remains one of the world’s most beloved operas because of its encompassing humanity,” says Spano. “It embraces the spectrum of our experience: our foibles, pettiness, and even zaniness as well as our tenderness, our passions, and above all our capacity to forgive.”
World premiere of a new performance edition of Treemonisha
A pioneering work of American opera by Scott Joplin, for which he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976, Treemonisha portrays African American lives in the Postbellum and purports education as the way to advance. The work remains in incomplete form by Joplin, which has contributed to its infrequent performance. Composer Damien Sneed and playwright Kyle Bass created a new performing edition based on archives preserved in the Library of Congress that WNO will premiere in a production directed by opera legend Denyce Graves. The cast includes Cafritz Young Artist Viviana Goodwin as Treemonisha, 2023–2024 Marian Anderson Vocal Award winner Justin Austin as Remus, and Tichina Vaughn as Monisha. Kedrick Armstrong, Music Director of the Oakland Symphony conducts.
New production of The Crucible
American composer Robert Ward and librettist Bernard Stambler’s opera won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize and is based on Arthur Miller’s much lauded and Tony Award®-winning play. Miller wrote his highly dramatized portrayal of a community in fear during the Salem witch trials as an allegory of the 1950s Red Scare, and it has since become one of the classics of American theater. This opera comes to WNO in a new production by Francesca Zambello, which The New York Times called “a revelation…Expansive but never slack, The Crucible reminds you of the taut, unrelenting forward motion of Tosca.” Zambello says, “I first staged The Crucible at The Glimmerglass Festival in 2016 and I loved it. This is a great American opera based on a great American play. It is both humane and political. It works dramatically and musically. It has a message that is timely and timeless. I can’t wait to bring it to the Kennedy Center.” The production will be headlined by opera stars and Grammy Award®-winners mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny as the central characters Elizabeth and John Proctor. It is conducted by WNO Music Director Robert Spano.
New production of West Side Story
The landmark musical makes its WNO premiere in Artistic Director Francesca Zambello’s production that is “a masterful combination of high-budget production values and gritty social awareness” (The Saturday Paper, Sydney). A truly integrated music theater work, as conceived and created by four giants in their respective fields—Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents, three of whom received the Kennedy Center Honors—West Side Story reimagines Romeo and Juliet as mid-century New York City residents in the rapidly changing Upper West Side who navigate between their love and neighborhood’s ethnic rivalries. The work was created in 1956, the year WNO was established. The production will get the big orchestra treatment that only an opera company can deliver, with Robbins’ original choreography, and will be conducted by Bernstein protégé Marin Alsop and James Lowe. “West Side Story is, for me, one of the greatest scores ever composed,” says Alsop, “It epitomizes Leonard Bernstein’s eclectic and all consuming grasp of pop culture, Shakespeare, current events and musical expression. Bernstein takes the interval of the tritone, often referred to historically as ‘the devil’s interval’ and uses it to convey the extreme conflict of the narrative, building the entire score to West Side Story on it! Working on this score with this wonderful cast and amazing director will be a privilege.”
Holiday presentation: The Little Prince
Composer Rachel Portman and librettist Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of this literary classic is a classic of its own. Praised as “full of warmth, wisdom and generous lyric beauty” in a “thoroughly enchanting” (Boston Herald) original production, this family affair returns to cast its spell on the holiday season with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s bewitching characters and heartwarming message intact. “As an opera director, nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing kids and families on stage and in the audience,” says Zambello. “The Little Prince is a perfect example of this family-friendly genre. Throughout the years, thousands of kids and families have enjoyed it and have gone on to other operas. Some even became opera practitioners! I am very happy to bring it back to the WNO stage.”