By DiDi Turley
With our return to Music Hall and SCPA, two world premieres, and incredible casts in store for our 2022 Summer Festival, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes! Check out this breakdown of things to know about Cincinnati Opera’s homecoming season:
2 world premieres will take the stage (at last)!
Castor and Patience, with music by Gregory Spears and libretto by Tracy K. Smith, and Fierce, with music by William Menefield and libretto by Sheila Williams, will both receive their world premieres this summer. Both were scheduled to premiere in 2020 but were postponed due to the pandemic. With both operas sharing relevant, relatable stories and featuring powerhouse casts, they’re sure to make a big impact.
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Castor and Patience
With 5 GRAMMY Award-winning artists and 2 GRAMMY nominees featured this season, we’ve got accolades galore!
Also joining us this summer are winners of an Emmy Award, Drama Desk Award, GLAAD Award, and Pulitzer Prize, as well as a former U.S. poet laureate!
Our GRAMMY Award-winning artists: (clockwise from top left) Zachary James, Morris Robinson, Tichina Vaughn, Christopher Allen, and Kevin Newbury
Out of our 5 productions and 1 featured concert this summer, 40 of our cast and creative team members are making their debuts with us.
25 of those debuting are singers, and the other 15 are members of the creative teams. Some artists are making their professional debut, like our Parpignol in La Bohème (Houston Tyrrell), and others are debuting with us after decades of professional work.
With 70 opera professionals flying into Cincinnati to join our casts and creative teams, we’ve been racking up the frequent-flyer miles.
We have artists joining us from across the globe—from Korea to Canada, and everywhere in between!
Our largest cast this summer will boast 128 people on stage at one time.
Verdi’s famously epic Aida, which closes out the 2022 Summer Festival, will be our largest show. Between principal singers, chorus, dancers, and supernumeraries, we’ll have a solid 128 people on stage at one time. On top of that, there will be 71 musicians in the pit!
Over the summer, we’ll spend ~690 hours in rehearsal.
Between staging, chorus rehearsals, orchestral read-throughs, sitzprobes, and tech rehearsals, we’ll be in rehearsal for nearly 700 hours by the time our season wraps. At the peak of our season, 4 out of 5 of our productions will be rehearsing, tech-ing, or performing all at the same time!
And lastly, by the end of the summer, we’ll have administered ~5600 COVID tests to our staff and singers.
We’re taking every possible precaution when it comes to our team’s health and safety this season. This includes masking in the rehearsal space and testing staff and singers twice a week! It’s going to be a lot of swabs, but it’ll be well worth it so that we can safely return home to Music Hall and SCPA for our 2022 Summer Festival.