Name: T-VOCE Winter Concert
Start: 2024-12-07T15:00:00
Location: Friends Center

Opera Philadelphia's 2024-2025 season promises an eclectic mix of performances that celebrate hope, love, and artistic innovation. From the harmonious T-VOCE Winter Concert to the dazzling spectacle of 'Mabeline: The Greenaissance Tour,' audiences are in for an unforgettable experience. Not to be missed are the captivating operas 'The Anonymous Lover' and 'Don Giovanni,' which bring to life historical narratives and timeless tales with modern ingenuity. This season is a testament to Opera Philadelphia's commitment to cultural vibrancy and artistic excellence in the city.

Opera Philadelphia: A Season of Musical Marvels and Cultural Celebrations

Opera Philadelphia

One librettist, one actor, four singers, and ten composers join forces to make opera in a brand-new way. In his first opera libretto, Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) traces the life of a woman named Sue whose personality is split in two. Sue’s life, from the mundane to the extraordinary, unfolds before us, with each decade scored by a different musical luminary. Opera Philadelphia favorites Missy Mazzoli (Breaking the Waves, The Listeners), Rene Orth (10 Days in a Madhouse), and Nico Muhly (Dark Sisters) return alongside a panoply of company debuts from notable composers, like GRAMMY® nominee Nathalie Joachim. The production stars MacArthur Genius and cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond, with Zack Winokur directing, and conductor Caren Levine making her Opera Philadelphia debut.

Complications in Sue

Academy of Music

In this opera, the chorus has the starring role. Composer Gregory Spears, whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser.

Sleepers Awake

Creator and opera revolutionary Davóne Tines brings Langston Hughes’ poem “The Black Clown” to musical life in a vaudevillian rendering of this masterpiece. Fusing gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals into a searing night of theatrical brilliance, The Black Clown embodies the evolving, divided soul of Black America and animates a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The Black Clown has been hailed as “pure poetry” by The Boston Globe, and The New York Times lauds “this rich, seamless production melds the past and present of African-American history into an electrifyingly ambivalent whole.” Tines makes his Opera Philadelphia debut alongside an ensemble of 12 performers in this genre-bending, visually arresting piece, juxtaposing dazzling cathartic performances with Hughes’ enduring work.

The Black Clown

Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

Join us for an afternoon of songs of hope, love, and light by Ysaye Barnwell, Isaac Cates, Kirk Franklin, Pink Martini, Vivaldi, Norma Jean Hughes, and more.

T-VOCE Winter Concert

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