SFO News:
SANTA FE — Santa Fe Opera (SFO) General Director Robert K. Meya announced Wednesday, the repertory and casting for the company’s 2023 Season and revealed its 19th world premiere slated for 2024.
Opening the opera’s 66th Festival Season will be Puccini’s Tosca and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, followed by Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Dvořák’s Rusalka and Monteverdi’s Orfeo with a world premiere orchestration by American composer Nico Muhly.
In 2024, the company has commissioned a new opera by two of America’s most exciting talents, composer Gregory Spears and former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith titled The Righteous, which will explore the intersection between religious faith and political power. The piece marks the second operatic collaboration between Spears and Smith, whose Castor and Patience will receive its world premiere at Cincinnati Opera this July.
Speaking by video from Stieren Orchestra Hall, Meya expressed delight over the future season, stating, “We will bring five new productions to the stage, each carefully chosen. Monteverdi, Debussy and Dvořák are paired with audience favorites by Puccini and Wagner.” Meya noted that the 2023 Season marks the 50th anniversary of the company’s Pueblo Opera Program. Since 1973, children and families from New Mexico’s 19 Pueblos and three reservations have come to the Santa Fe Opera to take part in a music program founded on the shared value and respect for the power of storytelling. The Pueblo Opera Program is guided by an advisory council that includes many past participants and Tribal Elders from around the state. To commemorate its 50th anniversary, Meya confirmed that the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council has engaged filmmaker Beverly Singer of Santa Clara Pueblo to create a documentary about this unique program.
Scheduled in the 66th Festival Season are 38 performances including two special Sunday evenings featuring the opera’s singing and technical apprentices in staged Apprentice Scenes on August 13 and 20. The company holds to its mission and time-tested programming model: a balanced and varied repertory of new, lesser performed and standard works. Opening on June 30 and July 1, 2023 are two standard works, Tosca and The Flying Dutchman, followed by two lesser performed works, Pelléas et Mélisande and Rusalka, on July 15 and 22. Rounding out the season and presented for the first time on July 29 will be Monteverdi’s seminal Orfeo.
Leading performances of both Orfeo and Pelléas et Mélisande, Music Director Harry Bicket notes, “It’s a serendipitous moment that SFO plans Monteverdi’s Orfeo and Debussy’s Pelléas in the same season because Debussy was trying to find a musical language that matched the natural speech rhythms of French in the same way that Monteverdi was trying to do for the Italian language a few hundred years earlier. Both operas share dream-like atmospheres where there is no real time or place, but which are inhabited by real human beings suffering vividly real heartbreak.”
Tickets for the 2023 Season are on sale now at santafeopera.org.
Read more about the SFO 2023 Season and the 19th world premiere slated for 2024 here.
