“Medea,” “Salome,” “Cav & Pag” on tap in Lyric Opera’s 2025-26 season
Lyric Opera’s 2025-26 season will open October 11 with Sondra Radvanovsky starring in Luigi Cherubini’s Medea, a role she has sung to wide acclaim, most recently at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Matthew Polenzani is Giasone with Elena Villalón as Glauce. Enrique Mazzola conducts in David McVicar’s Lyric-Met co-production. This will be the belated company premiere of Cherubini’s opera.
Opera’s most famous double bill returns after many years with Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci opening November 1. In Mascagni’s uber-Sicilian drama, Yulia Matochkina and SeokJong Baek will make Lyric debuts as Santuzza and Turiuddu, with Quinn Kelsey as Alfio and Lauren Decker as Mamma Lucia. In the blood-and lust theatricals of Leoncavallo’s classic, Gabriella Reyes is Nedda with Russell Thomas as Canio, and Kelsey as Tonio. Mazzola conducts.
Richard Strauss’s Salome return to the Lyric boards January 25, 2026, with Elena Stikhina as the relationship-challenged princess of Judea with Nicholas Brownlee making his Lyric debut as Jochanaan. In richly cast support, Brandon Jovanovich is Herod and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Herodias. Conductor Tomáš Netopil makes his Lyric debut with McVicar’s Covent Garden staging.
Mozart’s Così fan tutte follows February 1-15 with Jacquelyn Stucker as Fiordiligi, Cecilia Molinari as Dorabella, Anthony León as Ferrando, Ian Rucker as Guglielmo, Ana María Martínez as Despina and Rod Gilfry as Don Alfonso. Mazzola conducts.
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly returns March 14 with Karah Son as Cio-Cio San, Evan LeRoy Johnson as Pinkerton and Nozomi Kato as Suzuki all making house debuts. Zachary Nelson is Sharpless and Domingo Hindoyan conducts. The season release states that Matthew Ozawa’s staging “reckons with the opera’s outdated stereotypes and challenges audiences to reconsider their point of view,” with “an all-female and all-Japanese design team bringing new dimensions to the age-old story.”
Gabriela Lena Frank’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego) has its Chicago debut March 21. The operatic fantasy depicts the ghost of artist Kahlo visiting her still-extant lover Diego Rivera for 24 hours. Daniela Mack is Frida with Alfredo Daza as Diego and Ana María Martínez as Catrina. Roberto Kalb conducts.
The season closes with the world premiere of safronia by avery r. young April 17 & 18. A story about the Great Migration, Lyric bills it as a “musical work from Chicago’s first-ever poet laureate, the celebrated interdisciplinary artist avery r. young” that “will draw you in with its compelling storytelling.”
While the mainstage operas were previously scheduled under the Freud administration, the season has been fleshed out by new CEO John Mangum with various non-operatic events.
Most curious is “A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness” a fully staged production of The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1995 album of the same name (seven performances, November 21-30). In the words of Lyric’s season press release, “Iconic frontman Billy Corgan reimagines his magnum opus by marshaling all of Lyric’s technical and artistic forces — including the epic sound of the Lyric Opera Orchestra and Chorus and special guest artists — for an immersively original sonic and visual experience that blurs the boundaries of opera, rock, and performance art.”
Other events next season include a Lyric Opening Concert & Gala October 10, three performances of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (Nov. 14-18), Renée Fleming’s environmental recital program, “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” with pianist Inon Barnatan February 5, and two “Movie Nights at Lyric” with films TBA.
Subscriptions are now on sale. lyricopera.org
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One Response to ““Medea,” “Salome,” “Cav & Pag” on tap in Lyric Opera’s 2025-26 season ”
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Posted Mar 11, 2025 at 1:28 pm by John
I guess the good news is that the season isn’t as bad as one would have expected from Mr. Freud. The Medea production was very good when I saw it in NY, but I dread the absurd revision of Butterfly.
Anna Maria Martinez will be better cast as Despina than she was several years ago as Fiordiligi. And it’s great to have Cav/Pag back. Let’s just hope that Mazzola has more to offer than he showed this year.