Houston Grand Opera Announces its 2024-25 Season
HGO’s new season to feature six operas; each an original HGO production or co-production
The new season includes two never-before-seen productions, Il trovatore and Tannhäuser; the Houston debut of Missy Mazzoli’s boundary-pushing Breaking the Waves; family-friendly classic Cinderella; Broadway masterpiece West Side Story; and the world’s most beloved opera, La bohème
Houston Grand Opera (HGO) announced its 2024-25 season featuring a spectacular, new, season-opening production of Il trovatore; the return of charming, family-friendly Cinderella, classic tragedy La bohème, and blockbuster musical West Side Story; Houstonians’ first-ever chance to see award-winning opera Breaking the Waves; and a lushly beautiful new production of Tannhäuser, the company’s first presentation of the opera in more than two decades.
“Our theme for the 2024-25 season is Truly. Madly. Deeply,” says HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor.“Whether Verdi or Wagner, a comedy or a tragedy, a centuries-old masterwork or a bold addition to the repertoire, each of the six ravishing operas HGO is planning for our audiences will explore what it means to fall in love—with every last iota of your being. Only opera, through its magical merging of text and musical score, can conjure the profound pleasure and searing pain that accompany pure romantic feeling. And that is what we will be reveling in, with abandon, over the extraordinary season ahead.”
“HGO’s new season is not only largely about young love, but the operas themselves were composed by youngsters—Rossini was 23 when he began his beloved Cinderella, and West Side Story’s lyricist Stephen Sondheim was only 24,” says HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers. “The boundless energy of youth runs through each of next year’s works: Tannhäuser, though not Wagner’s first opera, was his first grandly romantic work in the style for which he would change the world. Il trovatore was a breakthrough opera for the young Verdi, as was Breaking the Waves for the preternaturally gifted young Missy Mazzoli. And, of course, all of the innocence of youth, love, and the pain of loss is wrapped in the ultimate love opera, Puccini’s La bohème.”
The company will open the 2024-25 season with the debut of an original, new HGO-commissioned production, a fresh vision of Verdi’s Il trovatore from industry-leading director Stephen Wadsworth. His awe-inspiring, old-meets-new-world production sets the story in contemporary Europe, where castles sit amid skyscrapers and monuments stand alongside street art, a juxtaposition that accentuates the timelessness of the story.
Also part of HGO’s fall repertoire is Rossini’s frothy delight, Cinderella, presented in the production that has charmed the world. Directed by Joan Font, one of the geniuses behind Barcelona-based collective Els Comediants, the opera shares the story of renamed heroine Angelina, a sweet young beauty who finds love with a prince, in a bright and whimsical HGO co-production that includes a group of hilarious, scene-stealing rats.
The company’s winter repertoire will launch with Puccini’s heart-wrenching La bohème, in a revival co-production from HGO, Canadian Opera Company, and San Francisco Opera, created by Tony Award-winning director John Caird. The production’s intimate set, constructed from paintings and canvases, perfectly conjures belle époque Paris, where tragedy awaits the story’s irresistible band of bohemians.
Next, HGO presents a Broadway masterpiece, West Side Story, the creation of composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and playwright Arthur Laurents. Directed by the legendary Francesca Zambello and co-produced by HGO, Glimmerglass Festival, and Lyric Opera of Chicago, this production received raves in Houston in 2018, when the company was displaced from the Wortham Theater Center by Hurricane Harvey. Now audiences have the chance to experience Zambello’s full vision of the romantic tragedy, which transports Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a New York setting.
Spring will bring the highly anticipated Houston debut of Breaking the Waves, the critically acclaimed contemporary opera from sought-after composer-and-librettist team Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, which made its world premiere in 2016. Directed by Tom Morris, this powerful, highly praised HGO co-production brings to life the strict Calvinist community in 1970s Scotland, where the tragic story, adapted from the art film by Lars von Trier unfolds.
HGO will close the mainstage season with a highly anticipated new staging of Wagner’s Tannhäuser from internationally acclaimed director Francesca Zambello. Houston audiences will be the first to experience this strikingly beautiful co-production from HGO and Washington National Opera.
In 2024, HGO announced the launch of a new initiative to offer $20 student tickets for mainstage productions. Students with a valid student ID are invited to take advantage of this offer one month prior to the opening of every performance.
HGO’s mainstage season will comprise 34 mainstage, 1 family, and 2 student performances of six productions. Additional details of the upcoming HGO productions are provided below, and more information is available at the company’s website: HGO.org. All repertoire, dates, pricing, productions, and casting are subject to change without notice.
Photos courtesy of Houston Grand Opera