24/25 Season: World Premieres, Album Releases, and Major Debuts
Eun Sun Kim conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker / Photo by Bettina Stös
Verismo Classical Music PR
24/25 Season Preview
WORLD PREMIERES
Seattle Opera • Music of Remembrance
ALBUM RELEASES
Seraph Brass • Samantha Ege
NEW WORKS
Jake Heggie • Lila Palmer
MAJOR DEBUTS
Eun Sun Kim • Lidiya Yankovskaya • Ryan McKinny
U.S. TOUR
Jamie Barton
25th ANNIVERSARY
From the Top
SEPTEMBER 2024
September 6-27 • San Francisco, USA
Music Director EUN SUN KIM, praised for her “assured technical command, subtlety and imagination” and named Classical Music’s Breakout Star by The New York Times, opens San Francisco Opera’s 24/25 season with Un ballo in maschera, the next chapter in her multi-year exploration of Verdi’s masterworks. Starring Michael Fabiano and Lianna Haroutounian, the opening night performance doubles as SFO’s Opera Ball.
September 9 – November 29 • Boston, USA
Hailed by NPR as “proof that classical music in America is alive and kicking…a potent antidote to any gloom-and-doom doubter,” FROM THE TOP launches Musicians and the Environment, a virtual ideas-to-action initiative for alumni artists who see music as a powerful tool for environmental advocacy. This program explores music’s potential to engage audiences and inspire action through candid talks with acclaimed eco-artists, producers, scientists, and policy experts, and culminates in participants’ self-designed projects.
September 28-29 • Nashville, USA
Conductor LIDIYA YANKOVSKAYA makes her Nashville Symphony debut with a program emblematic of her advocacy for both contemporary repertoire and Slavic masterpieces. Acclaimed as “a tour de force” by the Chicago Tribune, she leads Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7, and Prokofiev’s Violin Concert No. 1, with violinist Simone Porter.
Tazewell Thompson, creator and director of Jubilee / Photo by Jeffrey Henson Scales
OCTOBER 2024
October 1 • St. John’s, Canada
Fresh on the heels of the world premiere of American Apollo, which Classical Voice North America deemed “a major work that deserves future productions,” librettist LILA PALMER premieres Yours, Jill, a digital release with Opera on the Avalon. Written with composer Jonathon Monro, music director of Come from Away, this operatic miniature was created for the screen and filmed on location in Newfoundland. Inspired by letters written by the composer’s grandmother, the story follows a sheltered nurse as she struggles to explain a new love to her mother amid the wild freedom of her wartime assignment in Newfoundland.
October 8 • St. John’s, Canada
Librettist LILA PALMER and composer Mark Adamo release the film opera Flesh, marking the first time Adamo has composed music for a text he didn’t write himself. Commissioned by Opera on the Avalon, this five-minute opera follows a celebrity chef who has come home to open a restaurant and rebuild his peace of mind – but an old lover’s arrival is a confusing temptation.
October 12-26 • Seattle, USA
SEATTLE OPERA mounts the world premiere of Jubilee, a new opera by visionary writer-director Tazewell Thompson about a troupe of Black American singers, who forever changed the trajectory of music history. Featuring over 40 spirituals, the opera follows the Fisk Jubilee Singers as they embark on their first tours, raising money for the education and empowerment of newly freed Black Americans just after Emancipation and the American Civil War. The ensemble performed for audiences and dignitaries across the USA and Europe, including Queen Victoria, Mark Twain, and President Ulysses S. Grant, establishing a legacy that continues to the present day.
October 19 – November 5 • San Francisco, USA
Music Director EUN SUN KIM continues her San Francisco Opera investigation of Wagnerian repertoire with Tristan und Isolde, bringing the work back to the War Memorial stage for the first time in nearly two decades with a star-studded cast led by Simon O’Neill and Anja Kampe.
October 26 – November 7 • New York City, USA
Mezzo JAMIE BARTON returns to the Metropolitan Opera for her house role debut as Azucena in Verdi’s Il trovatore, opposite Michael Fabiano and Rachel Willis-Sørensen in Sir David McVicar’s Goya-inspired staging. When she sang the role at London’s Royal Opera House, The Times noted that “Barton provides the dramatic spark as the haunted, raddled Azucena – she chomps into text and music alike with wonderful vibrancy.”
Conductor Eun Sun Kim / Photo by Tae-hwan Kim
NOVEMBER 2024
November 26 – December 13 • London, United Kingdom
Conductor EUN SUN KIM makes her long-awaited Royal Opera House debut with Puccini’s Tosca, starring Sonya Yoncheva, SeokJong Baek, and Bryn Terfel. When she led the work in Chicago, Opera News called it “one of the most musically satisfying Lyric Toscas in memory. Eun Sun Kim’s marvelous reading of the score emphasized elegance over pyrotechnics. All manner of detail emerged from under Kim’s baton...”
November 30 – December 23 • Paris, France
Mezzo JAMIE BARTON brings her “blazing high notes and her booming chest voice” (The New York Times) to a dual house and role debut as Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress at Opéra national de Paris. Under the baton of Susanna Mälkki, she appears alongside Ben Bliss, Golda Schultz, and Iain Paterson at the Palais Garnier.
Urban Bush Women in Jake Heggie’s Intelligence at Houston Grand Opera / Photo by Michael Bishop
DECEMBER 2024
December 6-8 • Fort Worth, USA
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra presents the world premiere of Earth 2.0, a collaboration between composer JAKE HEGGIE, librettist Anita Amirrezvani, and dance troupe Urban Bush Women. Featuring countertenor Key’mon Murrah with Music Director Robert Spano on the podium. The recent premiere of Heggie’s Intelligence, also a collaboration with Urban Bush Women, earned praise from the Houston Chronicle as a “gorgeous, nuanced, layered and suspenseful masterpiece that deftly balances drama and wit.”
Joshua Hopkins sings Jake Heggie and Margaret Atwood’s Songs for Murdered Sisters / Photo by Curtis Perry
JANUARY 2025
January 6 • Boston, USA
FROM THE TOP, America’s largest national platform celebrating young classically trained musicians, kicks off its 25th Anniversary Celebration. What began as a radio experiment in 2000 has evolved into a learning and media laboratory for today’s young musicians, with a network of 3,000 alumni artists that incudes Kevin Olusola, Nadine Sierra, Randall Goosby, Conrad Tao, Tessa Lark, and Zlatomir Fung. Also on the docket: a new crop of Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Awards, which provide young artists with demonstrated need with $10,000 for instrument purchases, audition expenses, and private lessons.
January 9-11 • Philadelphia, USA
January 15 • New York City, USA
The Philadelphia Orchestra presents the American orchestral premiere of Songs for Murdered Sisters, a song cycle by composer JAKE HEGGIE and writer Margaret Atwood, written for baritone JOSHUA HOPKINS. After his sister was murdered by an ex-partner in a horrific killing spree, Hopkins set out to use his voice to wake people up to the global epidemic of gender-based violence – and their part in it. Opera News calls the work “a soul-baring performance that is gut-wrenching, cathartic, and a model of pinpoint focus,” while BBC Music Magazine says it is “at once powerful and tender…The cycle ultimately transcends the terrible circumstances of its conception to offer both a strident piece of social activism and an affecting work of art.” With Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium, The Philadelphia Orchestra performs at Marian Anderson Hall in Philadelphia and Carnegie Hall in New York City.
January 19 • Atlanta, USA
January 23 • New York City, USA
January 25 • Boston, USA
January 30 • Washington, DC, USA
Mezzo JAMIE BARTON joins violist Matthew Lipman and pianist Tamar Sanikidze on a four-city tour, performing repertoire by Clara Schumann and Brahms alongside a world premiere by Joel Thompson. Performances will be at Spivey Hall, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Celebrity Series of Boston, and the Kennedy Center Fortas Chamber Music Concerts.
January 24-26 • Los Angeles, USA
Conductor EUN SUN KIM leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in works by Rachmaninoff and a world premiere concerto grosso by Nico Muhly commissioned by the LA Phil’s Esa-Pekka Salonen Fund. Of her recent debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra, which paired Dvořák and Mason Bates, the Philadelphia Inquirer praised her as “an incisive conductor with a particularly strong point of view… Kim made this music her own.”
January 25 • London, United Kingdom
Following two smash successes at English National Opera, conductor LIDIYA YANKOVSKAYA returns to London for her London Philharmonic debut in an evening of Indian classical music with her longtime collaborators, Sarod Grand Master Amjad Ali Khan and his sons Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash. They will perform a new overture by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail and selections from film scores by AR Rahman, the “Mozart of Madras.”
January 27 • Seattle, USA
Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE joins forces with the Northwest Boychoir, Seattle Girls Choir, and members of the Seattle Symphony for Art from Ashes. The varied program includes cabaret songs created by prisoners in the Terezín concentration camp, selections played by a prisoners’ orchestra in Auschwitz, and a soulful contemporary arrangement of a Yiddish lullaby from the Vilna Ghetto.
Dr. Samantha Ege in recital at the Barbican Centre in London / Photo by Mark Allen
FEBRUARY 2025
February 7 • London, United Kingdom
Acclaimed for her scholarship and world premiere recordings of music by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, musicologist-pianist SAMANTHA EGE releases her newest recording: Maestra. The album features the first commercial recording of Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Two Uninterrupted Speeds by Julia Perry (1924-1979), who studied with Nadia Boulanger and Luigi Dallapiccola, earning admirers like Aaron Copland. The Perry concerto is paired with a Concerto for Piano and Strings by Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003), an English contemporary of Perry who was a pioneering film composer in the male-dominated movie industry.
February 13 • Liverpool, United Kingdom
Conductor LIDIYA YANKOVSKAYA returns to the United Kingdom, where The Guardian praised her reading of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as “visceral…refreshingly unsentimental,” to debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. She leads Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6 and Missy Mazzoli’s River Rouge Transfiguration.
February 13 • New York City, USA
February 20 • Washington, DC, USA
February 24 • Houston, USA
Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and pianist John Churchwell tour a new commission by composer JAKE HEGGIE, following the world premiere at Carnegie Hall with appearances at the Kennedy Center and with DaCamera Houston.
Seraph Brass releases Lunaire in celebration of International Women’s Day
MARCH 2025
March 3-29 • New York City
The Metropolitan Opera mounts the house premiere of JAKE HEGGIE and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick, following the haunting new production of Dead Man Walking that opened the Met’s 2023/24 season. Under the baton of Karen Kamensek, Brandon Jovanovich stars as the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, Stephen Costello as Greenhorn, the opera’s version of Ishmael, Peter Mattei as the even-keeled first mate Starbuck; and Ryan Speedo Green as the Polynesian harpooneer Queequeg.
March 6-8 • Boston, USA
Conductor EUN SUN KIM makes her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut with a trio of pieces exploring innovation within tradition: Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake, Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3, and Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with pianist Inon Barnatan. The Rachmaninoff also featured in Kim’s recent Berlin Philharmonic debut, with Berliner Morgenpost noting that “Kim only serves the orchestra. No Hollywood indulgences, no iconoclasm, no Russian melancholy. Instead: the pure musical text – Kim shows how this music works.”
March 8 • St. Louis, USA
Fresh off their 10th anniversary season and in celebration of International Women’s Day, SERAPH BRASS releases Lunaire, an album showcasing the excellence of women in brass. Featuring works by Reena Esmail, Jeff Scott, Kevin Day, and others, the album repertoire explores the full range of brass sonorities, moving beyond the bombastic into beauty, elegance, and emotional virtuosity. Performances in honor of St. Louis Brass Day on March 8-9 will be followed by tour dates to Jeju, Korea, Huntsville, Alabama, Guanajuato, Mexico, and Yale University.
March 16 • Seattle, USA
MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE spotlights works by important Black American composers in Identity. The evening includes a searing depiction of the slave trade by Rhiannon Giddens and a piece drawn from Requiem for the Enslaved by Carlos Simon. Jessie Montgomery’s Source Code, which builds on motifs from Black spirituals, takes on an added dimension with world premiere choreography commissioned from Spectrum Dance Theater’s Donald Byrd.
March 17 • Los Angeles, USA
FROM THE TOP collaborates with the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI), centering young musician-led explorations of the relationship between science and music. The Music and the Brain Initiative includes two broadcasts, student research projects, a youth symposium day, and the launch of a brain scan project. Together, BCI and FTT aim to bring visibility to the growing intersectional field of music, the brain, and wellness, and to ignite young musicians’ interest in expanding their understanding of the power of music.
Mezzo Jamie Barton / Photo by Stacey Bode
APRIL 2025
April 4-13 • Boston, USA
Mezzo JAMIE BARTON makes a dual role and house debut as Nettie Fowler in Boston Lyric Opera’s Carousel, directed by Anne Bogart in a landmark 80th anniversary production of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Barton has earned a reputation as a gifted singing actor, praised in The New York Times for work that is “as authoritatively acted as it was movingly sung, an embodiment of the role.”
April 19 – May 4 • Houston, USA
Acclaimed by the Washington Post for his “figurative and literal muscular force” and “richly human performance” in Dead Man Walking at the Metropolitan Opera, bass-baritone RYAN MCKINNY makes his role debut as Jan in Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s critically acclaimed Breaking the Waves at Houston Grand Opera, with Music Director Patrick Summers on the podium.
Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya / Photo by Karli Cadel
MAY 2025
May 2-10 • Washington, DC, USA
Conductor LIDIYA YANKOVSKAYA returns to Washington National Opera to lead the DC premiere of Mason Bates and Mark Campbell’s Grammy-winning opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, at the Kennedy Center for the Arts. Her first performances there, leading Sankaram and Dye’s Taking Up Serpents, were hailed by Washington Classical Review as “a strong WNO debut, skillfully bringing together the disparate sounds in the pit.”
May 18 • Seattle, USA
May 21 • San Francisco, USA
For one night only in each of two cities, MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE (MOR) presents Tom Cipullo’s award-winning opera After Life, which imagines a confrontation between the ghosts of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. The work, which was commissioned by MOR, celebrates its 10th anniversary with this production. Each performance begins with chamber music, performed by members of the Seattle Symphony and written by composers whom Stein and Alice B. Toklas might have hosted at one of their legendary gatherings on Paris’s Left Bank.
Ryan McKinny as Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman / Photo by Karli Cadel
JUNE 2025
June 27 – July 20 • Des Moines, USA
Bass-baritone RYAN MCKINNY makes his company debut as The Flying Dutchman in Des Moines Metro Opera’s first Wagnerian opera in nearly 40 years. The 2025 festival season opener will be conducted by David Neely and directed by Joshua Borths. McKinny’s first Dutchman, at the Glimmerglass Festival, was praised by the Wall Street Journal as “an excellent Dutchman whose rich bass-baritone and imposing presence brought unusually human, sexy and even pitiable depths to this cursed ship’s captain.”
Press Contact: Beth Stewart
Verismo Communications
Tel: 618.444.3183 | Email: beth@verismopr.com
Copyright © 2024 Verismo Communications, All rights reserved.