New Stages for Operas at Orchestras

Even the staunchest advocates for concert performances of operas acknowledge that stage action isn’t the format’s strong suit.  

“Concert opera has a reputation of being, dare I say, park and bark,” says Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. But the Baltimore Symphony recently challenged this premise when Heyward conducted two performances of Verdi’s Aida. An opera that’s synonymous with grandeur was seen without marching Egyptian armies or prancing horses and became, Heyward says, a “shared stage experience” between the singers and orchestra, that included some stylized costumes and lighting design.   

“The pro to this concert approach is, of course, the music is central,” says Heyward, who will conduct three more Verdi operas with the Baltimore Symphony, including a June 2026 Rigoletto. “The emotions of the music are amplified in a way. The intimacy becomes even rawer. It becomes almost more meaningful than seeing it on a huge stage.”  

Operas conceived for large orchestra might stand to benefit the most from a concert-based approach, as seen in the current spate of Wagner performances, including at the Dallas Symphony (the complete Ring Cycle), Philadelphia Orchestra (Tristan und Isolde), Houston Symphony (Act II of Tristan und Isolde), Pacific Symphony (Das Rheingold), and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (a fully staged Die Walküre). This is not to ignore the rewards of performing operas for Mozart-scaled orchestra, which can be considerable.

Some orchestras take a different route, partnering with local opera companies to co-produce new or offbeat works that might otherwise be too complex or expensive for a single organization to tackle. In April the Richmond Symphony teamed up with Virginia Opera for the fully staged premiere of Damien Geter’s Loving v. Virginia, about the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. Similar partnerships have sprung up between the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and New Orleans Opera and between the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Lyric Opera (Boston Symphony Orchestra also has a distinguished history of performing operas on its own). That’s separate from the ongoing work of conjoined organizations such as the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera or Utah Symphony ǀ Utah Opera, which function both together and singly, onstage and behind the scenes, as needed.   

Whatever the staging, orchestras have been filling gaps in opera-thin markets such as Cleveland (where the Cleveland Orchestra has stepped up for many years with concert productions of works by Strauss and others, often with innovative staging) and Baltimore (which saw two regional opera companies shut down in recent years). Though some audiences may miss the lavish sets and costumes of a fully staged opera, others welcome the more intimate halls and concentration on the music alone. Still, concert opera can be tricky to market, and audiences must be clearly told what to expect when it comes to the visual experience.  

Luring the Orchestra Audience  

“In most markets, there’s probably some, but not a significant amount of overlap between opera audiences and symphony audiences,” says Lacey Huszcza, president and CEO of the Richmond Symphony in Virginia. “You have to put significant marketing effort behind [opera]. It’s not necessarily in our wheelhouse to market and convince an orchestra audience to attend opera. It’s a different set of barriers that you have to break down when you’re doing it from the symphony’s side.”  

Geter’s Loving v. Virginia involved three years of coordinated planning and fundraising in which both organizations assumed production costs. This process might have been eased by the fact that the orchestra had separately named Geter its composer in residence, a post he holds through 2026. A “commissioning club” of several lead donors got to track the opera’s progress, from piano-and-vocal workshops to dress rehearsal. Marketing felt easier than for a concert version of Puccini’s Tosca, which the Richmond Symphony presented in January. “Because the cast is in rehearsals for so long, they can create a lot of [behind-the-scenes] content that you then have access to,” says Huszcza. “That’s a benefit that symphonies don’t often have.”  

Gil Rose, the artistic director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), says that especially for offbeat or neglected operas, concert performances are vastly more affordable than full stagings. “I think that’s really what drives this,” he says. “You used to be able to go out and say, ‘I want to do a production of Massenet’s Thaïs’ and you could have a reasonable conversation with three or four other opera companies about a co-production, which could make it possible. Now, other companies may pick Thaïs, too, but nobody else picks it at the same time.” 

In addition to BMOP’s orchestral concerts, over the years Rose has presented more than two dozen operas, often in conjunction with Odyssey Opera, a company he founded in 2013 to focus on overlooked repertoire. In June, his two companies presented a concert revival of Frederick Douglass, Ulysses Kay’s 1991 rarity about the 19th-century civil rights icon, which features a sprawling cast, multiple choruses, and an off-stage band. “It’s a real monster,” Rose says, noting that Frederick Douglass was the second installment in “As Told By,” BMOP’s planned five-part series devoted to operas by Black composers; the series launched in 2022 with Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X. 

Though Rose has led fully staged productions of works such as Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata (jointly presented by BMOP and Odyssey Opera), in general he believes that recordings are a superior artistic investment. “We are trying to preserve and document and revive these operas out of obscurity, and it’s much better to put the money into a recording. Then the world can know about it in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise,” he notes, an assertion that is supported by more than 100 albums on the BMOP/sound label. “Either you have a recording that’s going to last forever, or you have nice scenic [elements] in a storage facility or in the alley in a dumpster.” 

Sizing Operas to Concert Halls 

When the Houston Symphony presented two performances of Richard Strauss’s Salome in 2023, it was a complex production—a “blowout,” with custom-made costumes, projections, theatrical lighting, and suggestions of sets. Many of the staging elements were donated, says Rebecca Zabinski, the symphony’s senior director of artistic planning. Two extra rehearsals were needed. Performances coincided with the League of American Orchestra’s annual National Conference that June. “The vendors basically donated their services to have them recognized as sponsors of the special concerts we did for the League,” says Zabinski. “That production was a big reach for us. We couldn’t have paid sticker price for everything we did for that.”  

But next February, when soprano Tamara Wilson and tenor Stuart Skelton are slated to join the Houston Symphony in the title roles of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (Act II), the focus will be squarely on the music, led by Music Director Juraj Valčuha. “We won’t have costumes,” says Zabinski. “We’ll maybe have some creative lighting to set a mood. But we didn’t feel like it needed a whole lot in this case.” Zabinski continues, “It can be challenging. People think opera and they think a set or costumes. So, it’s up to us to make sure an audience knows what they’re going to get.”  

Some artists believe that orchestras shouldn’t have to choose between resource-heavy stagings and spare concert performances, as technology can fill certain gaps. “Lighting alone allows us many opportunities to create effects on stage,” says Matthew Kraemer, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic  Orchestra. “I have utilized video projection on the back of a scrim.” He recalls a production of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti in which singers moved down aisles through the orchestra to give the impression of changing locations. In May 2026 Kraemer and the Louisiana Philharmonic will partner with New Orleans Opera on Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 cantata Pilgrimage and a passage from Kaija Saariaho’s dreamlike 2000 opera L’Amour de Loin, in a semi-staged performance. 

For the Baltimore Symphony’s recent Aida, it turned to the stage director Marcus Shields, who previously worked with the Metropolitan Opera on its massive new production of the opera. “He was really clever in thinking about the dimensions of the work and how we compare that to the dimensions of our hall,” says Heyward. “You must be a little bit more creative in utilizing the space because there are things that you simply can’t move. For instance, I was always thinking about how we were going to do in the tomb scene. Marcus brilliantly illustrated it with Amneris [sung by Jamie Barton] in the far-off distance. Angel [Blue] and Limmie [Pullman] were right next to me, and the lighting that came with it.”  

Baltimore’s two Aida performances sold out and attracted 350 new households, who bought 689 tickets. But the extent to which opera and orchestral audiences naturally overlap is an open question. At the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, for example, opera buffs are seen as a subset of a larger audience.

“The core audience for opera is very different from the core audience for choral and vocal,” says Marie-Hélène Bernard, St. Louis Symphony’s president and CEO. “Those don’t necessarily mix with one another. But our orchestra audience is quite vast. When we’re doing opera in concert, we’re just showing a facet of the repertoire that’s accessible to us.” A concert version in February 2026 of Mozart’s The Magic Flute should allow audiences, she adds, to “get an experience of an opera maybe without the stigma or fear that’s affiliated with ‘I’m going to the opera.’ “ 

Indeed, orchestra concert halls bring more intimacy and fewer entrenched expectations than the legacy opera theaters. A 2024 Opera America survey of audiences at 36 opera companies (“Understanding Opera’s New Audiences“) found that some 87% of newcomers to opera since 2020 attended a fully staged production with sets and costumes; just nine percent were drawn to a concert version. But the study didn’t examine orchestras. 

“I think you’re going to see a lot more [concert operas],” said BMOP’s Rose. “There is a reality in which you can attract people to opera. It’s sexy. It’s flashy. It tells stories. There’s an effort to supply visual elements. No one can just listen to the Brahms Fourth Symphony anymore. It has to come with animation and explanation. Operas love that.”