Opera Australia (OA) has announced its eagerly awaited 2025 season, comprising a line-up of spectacular productions that demonstrate the Company’s ongoing commitment to broadening its repertoire and audience base and showcasing exceptional Australian talent both on and off the stage.
OA continues forward with its mission to ensure a sustainable future for the Company by extending opportunities for Australian artists and creating new pathways for the next generation of opera singers, musicians and creatives, including the introduction of a renewed Young Artist Program.
OA’s CEO Fiona Allan thanked OA’s former Artistic Director Jo Davies for her dedication and hard work in delivering the 2025 program. “We’re very excited about the 2025 season, it’s a great representation of the breadth and depth of the operatic canon and includes some of the finest operas ever written, to be brought to life by the finest Australian talent,” said Ms Allan.
Sydney 2025 Season:
Opera Australia’s Head of Music Tahu Matheson worked closely with Ms Davies to create the 2025 Sydney season. “The Sydney seasons are a marvellous mixture of the esoteric and the obvious, the known and unknown. There will be renowned and well-deserved encore productions, while others will inhabit and thrill our stage for the first time,” he said.
“We will see productions brimming with coruscating wit and riotous slapstick, productions replete with the extravagantly fantastical and the unworldly mystery and of course, what opera does best, productions sustained by the abjectly flawed human journey: the passage into the acutely, deeply moving.”
“The season has certainly filled the brief to engage and delight, to encapsulate the entire gamut of dramatic expression. There is definitely something for everyone,” said Mr Matheson.
Featuring five Sydney Opera House premieres, the 2025 Sydney Season begins with a joyous and vibrant opera production of Cinderella (Cendrillon) presented in association with Sydney Festival. Sung in English, this is the first time OA has performed this opera and Laurent Pelly’s production is a feast for the senses.
The brilliant cast includes four of Australia’s finest singers, Emily Edmonds, Emma Matthews, Sian Sharp and Margaret Plummer, who is returning to debut with OA after achieving international success.
Melbourne Theatre Company’s Anne-Louise Sarks will be making her fully staged opera directorial debut with a new production of Bizet’s Carmen, that will play in both Sydney and Melbourne and star celebrated soprano Danielle de Niese along with an exceptional cast of local and international singers.
“Creating a new production of Carmen is a thrilling prospect for me. Carmen was ground-breaking when it premiered and I am excited to capture that revolutionary spirit in our bold new production. This story is a classic for good reason,” said Ms Sarks.
“The need for love and connection is timeless. And its examination of desire and division – via class and sexuality and power – is all too relevant today. Opera is an incredibly powerful way to tell stories, and I am so excited to get started.”
Australian opera sensation Nicole Car will star in a new production of Dvorák’s Rusalka, directed by the award-winning Sarah Giles, whose critically acclaimed La Traviata will also make a celebrated return to the Opera House in 2025.
“Creating these operas has been deeply fulfilling for me – not only because they offer profound insights into our identities, politics and world but also because they afforded me the opportunity to reimagine these fearless, complex central characters from a fresh perspective,” said Ms Giles.
“Making my production of Rusalka – a contemporary fairy-tale about the courageous search for belonging – with West Australian Opera this year has been equally rewarding – the audience’s response left me truly inspired.”
“I’m immensely excited to begin rehearsals with the brilliant Nicole Car as she brings our complex and fearless Rusalka to life,” said Ms Giles.
The Opera Conference production of Rusalka is one of the many, meaningful collaborations OA has undertaken with other Australian performing arts companies that also includes Victorian Opera’s production of Candide, and Opera Queensland’s production of Dido & Aeneas in association with Circa.
The season will also see the return of three OA hall-of-fame productions to the Joan Sutherland Theatre: Sir David McVicar’s The Marriage of Figaro, Elijah Moshinky’s The Barber of Seville and Gale Edwards’ perennial production of La Bohème. All three productions continue to enthrall audiences and some superb Australian voices will return home to join the casts, including Samuel Dale Johnson, Kiandra Howarth and Rachelle Durkin.
Musical fans will be spoilt for choice in Sydney with the Broadway and West End smash hit Hadestown opening at the Theatre Royal in February, a brand-new production of Guys & Dolls on Sydney Harbour in March/April, and Shaun Rennie’s production of RENT debuting in the Joan Sutherland Theatre in September.
OA’s outdoor stage on Sydney Harbour will come alive when the winner of five Tony Awards, the much loved musical comedy Guys & Dolls transports audiences to 1950’s Manhattan – a colourful and glamorous world filled with showgirls and gangsters. With music by Frank Loesser and book by Joe Swerling and Abe Burrows, Guys & Dolls is regarded as one of the finest musicals ever written.
From its premiere on Broadway in 1950, the adaptation to a Hollywood film in 1955 starring Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, to its most recent smash-hit revival on the West End, this musical is filled to the brim with toe-tapping tunes, high-energy, vibrant dance numbers and plenty of laughs.
Melbourne 2025 Season:
Opera Australia’s Head of Music Tahu Matheson worked closely with Ms Davies to create the 2025 Melbourne season. “The Melbourne season brims with appeal. From one of the most brilliantly witty productions of The Barber of Seville, to a Carmen – fresh new and rethought – to Gluck’s Orpheus & Eurydice in an incarnation spectacular and unequivocally unique, the season will be fascinating,” he said.
“We’ll be running the operas in Stagione this season, which means performing on consecutive nights, so all the major roles will be double cast and the line-up is really exceptional,” said Mr Matheson.
The 2025 season will include three Melbourne premieres and mark the Company’s operatic debut in the Regent Theatre. The highlight of the season will be the premiere of a new production of Bizet’s Carmen by MTC Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks and starring internationally acclaimed soprano Danielle de Niese, returning to her hometown to perform for the first time in seven years.
OA continues its commitment to meaningful collaborations with other Australian performing arts companies, which includes presenting Opera Queensland’s production Orpheus & Eurydice in association with Circa, where awe-inspiring acrobatics meet Gluck’s exquisite music, and starring Australian soprano Samantha Clark and British countertenor Iestyn Davies.
Featuring an all-Australian cast, Elijah Moshinsky’s sparkling production of The Barber of Seville will makes its debut on the Regent Theatre stage. Rossini’s laugh-out-loud comedy will overflow with as many famous tunes as you can fit into two-and-a-half hours.
Those who attended the sell-out Puccini Gala at Hamer Hall this year will attest to the brilliance of Nicole Car and OA is proud to announce her return to Melbourne along with her husband, French-Canadian baritone Étienne Dupuis to star in next year’s Verdi Gala.
Celebrating one of the most influential and beloved composers, Giuseppe Verdi has given the world three of the most popular and glorious operas in the canon, Aida, La Traviata and Rigoletto. It will be a show not to be missed.
For musical lovers, the Tony and Grammy Award-winning smash hit Hadestown will have its Melbourne premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre in May. Taking Broadway and the West End by storm, winning eight Tony Awards including Best Musical, Hadestown has now been seen by three million people and streamed by more than 350 million.
OA is pleased to announce its free, outdoor concert BMW Opera for All will return for a third year to Fed Square providing opera lovers, and those curious to experience opera, an opportunity to attend a live performance.
Images: Candide – photo by Charlie Kinross | Cinderella (Cendrillon) at Royal Opera House, 2011 – photo by Bill Cooper | Carmen – courtesy of Opera Australia | West Australian Opera’s 2024 production of Rusalka – photo by West Beach Studio | Orpheus and Eurydice – photo by Keith Saunders | Opera Australia’s 2016 production of The Barber of Seville – photo by Keith Saunders