From School Visits to a Musical Home: How OperaDelaware's Young(est) Artists Are Changing the Game – by Emily Margevich

/

Emily margevich as tosca | Operadelaware 2025 | moonloop photography

Thank you all so much for taking the time to read about an exciting new project for OperaDelaware! For those of you who don’t know me, I became the first Company Artist with OperaDelaware in September of 2024. When I am not singing on stage for the company, I am spearheading our Educational Outreach Program! From day one of working here, I knew I wanted to focus on bringing young people into our opera community! With the platform from being an OD Company Artist, I’ve been able to visit almost a dozen different schools and youth organizations sharing various forms of operatic curriculum that’s centered in improvisation. I have a lesson plan, but I want to meet the students with friendliness at their level of interest for that day. I want to introduce opera starting from a familiar place. When I was growing up, I didn’t know anything about opera even though I grew up in a musical family. Opera can be as accessible and as enjoyable as any entertainment choice, and that’s when my wheels started turning!

It was no surprise to me that young people were curious about opera; enthusiastic, thoughtful, creative, and eager to explore theatre and music with me. They asked smart questions and engaged with me immediately. They reminded me how I fell in love with this art form in the first place—my Grandma as my voice teacher and my mom as my theatre and dance teacher and model of what it means to be a citizen dedicated to their community.

My past and my present clicked, and I realized that OperaDelaware had the opportunity to provide something important that I had the privilege of living first hand my entire childhood—an artistic home for young people. OperaDelaware did not have any youth programs available when I became a Company Artist. So when I decided to spend this summer leading Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with young Delawareans, it was more than exciting—it was a chance to build something new for OperaDelaware, drawing on my own experience with performing arts education and my position as a Company Artist.

My goal isn't only to teach music, prepare a performance, or force a love for opera. I wanted students to feel confident using their minds, bodies, voices, and emotions in a space all together through experiencing me as an opera singer and getting comfortable with OperaDelaware—as audience members and as performers, too. I wanted to remind students that using our imaginations isn’t kid stuff—it’s what professional performers get paid to do all day long. I want to encourage the students to know that muscle for self expression and play isn’t something you grow out of; it’s a beautiful gift we all can exercise. Our free spirits should be cultivated, encouraged, shared, and seriously valued.

Students who first discovered us through outreach programs now run through our doors excited to rehearse, create, sing, dance, and spend time together. Families who may never have attended an opera before are becoming audience members and advocates for the arts. Most importantly, young people know they are welcomed at OperaDelaware. Whether they're aspiring musicians, theater-loving kids, curious first-timers, students still figuring out where they fit, or young people who had fun during my visits and wanted to continue using their imagination with me are all now on stage together thriving! They’re all finding community inside our opera studio.

A student I randomly met in the hallway of a school I was visiting is now my Production Assistant, creating props and set pieces for our show. I’ve no doubt they will have a career in theatre! The students and I are having so much fun preparing this important production together. We’re storytellers, and we understand each other. Yes, I'm their teacher and leader, but some of my favorite moments happen when we're collaborating together as partners in the process.

Our rehearsals are built on respect, humor, fun, inclusivity, support, kindness, focus, celebration, play, and hard work. We listen to one another's ideas positively. We learn from one another. We laugh a lot, we help out, and we applaud each other’s work loudly and proudly! Young people thrive when they're treated with respect and given a genuine voice. The rehearsal room becomes a place where everyone contributes, everyone grows, and everyone matters. Those are lessons that extend well beyond music.

The big age range of our participants is awesome. Ages 5 to 16—well, ages 5 to 30 if we count me—have become one family. In fact, this show is all about family. For example, the 12 people who play the siblings in this show are caring for each other like real family members on and off stage. Watching the older students instinctively take on leadership roles to help the younger kids is the best, heartwarming, and rewarding satisfaction. Perhaps the most treasured part of this program has been watching our students become their own community.

The story and the music makes the age difference disappear. The kind conversations and the fun friendships that are already solidified after just a few days of rehearsals is proof that our world can connect genuinely and instantly; and music is the best magic to bring people together. The students help each other remember entrances, set props, solve problems, and celebrate successes. We’re learning about life, responsibility, relationships, awareness, accountability, and communication—all through music and theatre. Experience doesn't matter. Background doesn't matter. What matters is learning how to coexist, collaborate, share ideas, share space, and care for one another. That’s why I worked hard to allow this program to exist. Young people are the best, and I want them to know about opera. We now have the next generation of opera goers walking through our studio doors every day. Who is going to go see operas in 10, 15 years? These students will. They’ll know what opera IS! They’ll have a relationship with an opera singer, now and forever. That’s cool!

The greatest validation has come from the students and families themselves. Their trust, support, and commitment have shown me that this work matters and is possible for OperaDelaware. A huge thank you to Company Artist Gerard Moon for his support setting up the stage and his fabulous wife, Yuri, who is our orchestra for the performance!

What started as a feeling that I needed to stay connected with students I met at school visits has become something much larger. We are creating a new OperaDelaware fan base- students and their families. We have such an amazing facility in the OperaDelaware Studios, and I am so grateful we are allowing that space to be where young people feel seen, valued, and inspired.

OperaDelaware strives to be a company with state-wide impact, and in our cast of Joseph we have students from Bellefonte, Middletown, Bear, Pike Creek, and Wilmington. Some schools represented in our cast are Richey Elementary, Cab Calloway School of the Arts, Padua Academy, Alfred G. Waters Middle School, Ursuline Academy, Springer Middle School, Odyssey Charter, and the organization Four Youth, to name a few!

With the gift of being a Company Artist, I've been allowed to create the kind of experience that shaped my own childhood—the skills I learned musically, socially, and morally growing up around music made me an adult that OperaDelaware wanted to hire two short years ago. I am so proud of the work the students and I are doing, and I am excited to share our efforts with OperaDelaware staff, fans, and patrons to reimagine how we can share opera, why we share opera, and with whom we share opera.

A few quotes from students and parents:

“I love the acting games! Practices are a lot of fun. I like the breaks for snacks, I also like Ms Emily, and when we get to talk with each other when we are early and meeting new people.” - Franklin

“OperaDelaware recently offered a workshop to introduce the art form to young people. My son and I attended, and Emily did an excellent job engaging the kids into the world of opera through discussion, song, demonstration, and fun games. Before this experience, I had never really considered how easily opera could become a lost art form if it is appreciated primarily by older generations who actively seek it out - it is not a mainstream art that is widely available or on the radar for most people living in this country. Inviting young people to participate in opera is a wonderful way to build a lifelong connection to it. I’m grateful that OperaDelaware is giving young performers the chance to stretch themselves artistically while helping ensure that opera continues to be discovered and appreciated by future generations.” - Kelly W.

“I LOVE Ms. Emily and all of my new friends!!”- Olivia

“We are thrilled to see OperaDelaware branch out to offer a youth production opportunity. This is in line with what other arts organizations are doing throughout the state, such as Wilmington Drama League and Delaware Symphony Orchestra. We are proud to help support Ms Emily, who is not only an amazing artist, but also an innovative educator who is bringing her love, energy, and commitment to every aspect of this production. We love that opera can be fun, accessible, and engaging in this way!” Grace and David

Limited tickets remain for the youth production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat! Head to operade.org/tickets to secure yours today!

OperaDelaware Announces the 2026/27 Season

/

OperaDelaware has announced the 2026/27 season under the new artistic vision of incoming General Director Eric Einhorn. The season offers audiences an ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of the operatic art form with two main stage masterworks at The Grand Opera House, a site-specific community production at the Sunday Breakfast Mission, and a series of intimate chamber performances at OperaDelaware Studios featuring Spanish zarzuela, a rare Puccini gem, and electrifying monodramas.

Of the announcement, incoming General Director Eric Einhorn says, “I am incredibly excited to start my tenure by sharing this dynamic season with OperaDelaware audiences, which sets out to explore the different forms opera can take and the places it can go. Partnerships with pillars of the nonprofit arts and social services community in Wilmington and beyond also feature prominently throughout the season to enhance the impact of our productions.” He adds, “I look forward to working alongside the OperaDelaware staff and board to launch this new vision, which is built on the strong foundation created by my predecessor, Brendan Cooke.”

OperaDelaware Main Stage Series

OperaDelaware opens its season with Mozart's Don Giovanni, a co-production with Opera Baltimore. Director Haley Stamats returns to OperaDelaware after directing Puccini’s La bohème in 2024 and Tosca in 2025 while conductor Joshua Horsch will make his OperaDelaware debut from the podium. This production stars Jonathan Bryan as the titular Don Giovanni, soprano Katerina Burton as Donna Anna, tenor Hayden Smith as Don Ottavio, mezzo-soprano Sarah Coit as Donna Elvira, bass baritone Dylan Gregg as Leporello, baritone Gerard Moon as Masetto, and soprano Robin Steitz as Zerlina. Written in 1787 with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni is a moral thriller, a ghost story, and a comedy rolled into one. The opera follows the legendary libertine Don Giovanni as he evades the consequences of a lifetime of conquest and cruelty, until a final, supernatural reckoning forces him to choose between repentance and damnation. Performances with full orchestra at The Grand Opera House on October 16 at 7:30PM and October 18 at 2:00PM.

The season's spring main stage production is Christoph Willibald Glück's Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice), produced in partnership with First State Ballet Theatre.  Director Keturah Stickann makes her OperaDelaware debut, OD Music Director Anthony Barrese will conduct, and First State Ballet Theatre choreographer and dancer Zachary Kapeluck will choreograph. The production will star OD Company Artist soprano Emily Margevich (Eurydice) alongside Delaware-native soprano Jennifer Zetlan (Amore), and feature dancers from First State Ballet Theatre. Set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi, the opera integrates stirring vocalism and dynamic dance to tell the story of Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld to reclaim his late wife, Eurydice, and the devastating cost of a single broken promise. Orpheus and Eurydice changed the course of operatic history, and remains one of the most emotionally potent works in the repertoire. Performances with full orchestra at The Grand Opera House on May 21 at 7:30PM and May 23 at 2:00PM.

OperaDelaware Chamber Series

Ahead of its main stage production at The Grand Opera House, OperaDelaware will present Don Giovanni Portraits at The OperaDelaware Studios on October 8 and 10, an intimate preview built around a new chamber orchestra reduction of Mozart's score by Husan Chun-Novak. The program offers audiences a rare, up-close encounter with the opera's most pivotal characters and confrontations performed in the intimate setting of OperaDelaware Studios. Don Giovanni Portraits invites audiences to step inside Mozart's music before experiencing it in full scale this October at The Grand.

For the first time in its history, OperaDelaware will present zarzuela, a popular operatic form developed in Spain and made popular throughout the Spanish-speaking world. OperaDelaware Studios will present a chamber reduction of Federico Moreno Torroba's Luisa Fernanda, widely regarded as the last great romantic zarzuela. Premiered in Madrid in 1932, the work follows its heroine through a love triangle set against the political upheaval of 1868 Spain, pairing Torroba's vivid Spanish nationalism with sweeping, unforgettable melody. Fernanda will be directed by Malena Dayen, last seen at OperaDelaware with her production Derrick Wang’s Fearless and starring Company Artists Dane Suarez, Gerard Moon, and Emily Margevich. Performances at the OperaDelaware Studios on November 13 and 15, 2026, sung in Spanish with English translations. Produced in partnership with Opera Hispanica.

In a milestone new community partnership, OperaDelaware will present a site-specific production of Gian Carlo Menotti's beloved holiday opera Amahl and the Night Visitors at the Sunday Breakfast Mission, a Wilmington nonprofit located on the same city block as OperaDelaware, providing emergency shelter, rehabilitative programs, and community outreach to our most vulnerable citizens. OperaDelaware will present a modern re-telling of this beloved opera about generosity, hope, and faith in direct conversation with the community it serves. Directed by OperaDelaware’s General Director, Eric Einhorn. Performances at The Sunday Breakfast Mission on December 5 and 6, 2026.

OperaDelaware will present Written in Secret, an intimate pairing of tenor monodramas, on January 22 and 24, 2027. The program opens with Janáček's The Diary of One Who Vanished, based on a 1916 newspaper diary of a village boy's forbidden love for a Roma girl named Zefka. It closes with Daron Hagen's Songs of Madness and Sorrow, a mutli-character work voiced by a single performer channeling the collapsing psyche of a small town at the close of the nineteenth century, where market panic and epidemic disease gave rise to two kinds of madness: obsessive ritual and paranoia. Stage director Katherine M. Carter makes her OD debut and Dane Suarez stars in this rare and limited studio engagement.

Audiences will have a rare opportunity to hear where it all began: Giacomo Puccini's first opera, Le Villi (1884), a gothic tale of love and vengeance rooted in the same Central European folklore that inspired the ballet Giselle. Composed when Puccini was just twenty-five, Le Villi reveals the dramatic instinct and melodic gift that would define the career of one of opera's greatest voices.

Orpheus Retold brings together three one-act operas that reimagine the world's oldest love story from radically different perspectives. Featuring OperaDelaware Company Artists and the music of three living composers, the program opens with Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's To Hell and Back, a devastating chamber drama recasting the abduction of Persephone as a modern story of spousal abuse. It continues with Eurydice by Jodi Goble — receiving its world premiere in a new version created specifically for Company Artist Emily Margevich — a through-composed setting of Hilda Doolittle's Imagist poem that gives voice to the silent Eurydice. The evening closes with Jonathan Dove's L'altra Euridice, from his trilogy Tales of Hope and Desire, which inverts the myth entirely by telling the story from the perspective of Pluto, recasting the god of the underworld not as villain but as a devoted partner undone by loss.

The thread through all of it:

Every story in this season turns on a single moment of choice. Don Giovanni chooses damnation over repentance. A man chooses to leave the woman who loves him. A mother chooses to steal, is caught, and grace arrives anyway. Orpheus, at the other end of the season, chooses doubt over trust at the last possible second.

Opera has always known that the most interesting thing about a person is what they do when everything is at stake. This season is built around that question.

Season tickets are on sale July 16. We hope you'll be here for all of it.

If you like... then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier!

/

Unless you're an opera buff, you probably haven't heard of Andrea Chénier. But most people have already felt exactly what Chénier feels like.

Giordano's opera (OperaDelaware's company premiere this May at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington) is one of the most emotionally devastating works in the repertoire. A historical drama/love story set against the French Revolution. A poet falls for a noblewoman. A revolutionary tears them apart. The guillotine is never far away.

If any of the following stories have brought you to tears, Andrea Chénier will too.

If you like Les Misérables… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier

Les Misérables gives you the French Revolution as a canvas for the eternal struggle between justice and power, love and loss, the individual and the state. Andrea Chénier lives in the same world... but instead of Valjean, you get a poet (Andrea Chénier). Instead of Javert, you get a revolutionary (Carlo Gérard) who starts out righteous and loses his way. And instead of "One Day More," you get a final duet ("Vicino a te") that will absolutely destroy you.

Both stories ask the same question: what does it cost a person to stay true to what they believe? Andrea Chénier answers it in four acts and goes straight for the throat.

If you like Philadelphia… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier

You already know the scene. Tom Hanks. Maria Callas. "La mamma morta."

That aria, the one that made an entire generation feel opera for the first time without realizing it, is Maddalena di Coigny's aria. It is the moment she describes losing everything and finding, in the wreckage, the will to survive because of love.

This May, Toni Marie Palmertree sings it live at The Grand Opera House. Fresh off her principal role debut at The Metropolitan Opera, she brings Maddalena to OperaDelaware's company premiere of the opera that gave Philadelphia its most unforgettable scene.

You already know how it feels to hear it. Come feel it in the room.

If you like Hamilton… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier

Hamilton gives you a writer in the middle of a revolution, a man who cannot stop putting words on the page even when it costs him everything. Andrea Chénier gives you the same thing — but set in France, two years before Hamilton was even born.

Chénier is a poet who shocks an aristocratic party with an improvised poem about the suffering of the poor. He is imprisoned not for what he did, but for what he wrote. His final aria before the guillotine is drawn directly from the real André Chénier's last poem, written in his prison cell the night before his execution.

Hamilton asked what it means to be "in the room where it happens." Andrea Chénier asks what it costs to tell the truth when the room wants you silent.

If you like A Tale of Two Cities… then you'll LOVE Andrea Chénier

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Dickens could have been writing the libretto. Andrea Chénier is set in exactly the world of A Tale of Two Cities—the French Revolution at its most violent and idealistic, a society consuming itself in the name of liberty, and at the center of it all, a man of conviction facing the guillotine for a woman he loves.

If Sydney Carton's final sacrifice has ever moved you, Andrea Chénier will feel like coming home. It is the same story, set to music that makes it hit harder than any novel ever could.

Come hear it for yourself.

OperaDelaware's company premiere of Andrea Chénier runs May 10, 13, and 15 at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware.

Tickets at operade.org/tickets

Viva la morte insiem! — Andrea Chénier

/

There's a moment at the end of Andrea Chénier that stops time.

The poet Andrea Chénier has been condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal. He's going to the guillotine in the morning. And Maddalena di Coigny (the woman he loves, the woman whose world the Revolution destroyed) walks into the prison and buys her way onto the death list so she can die beside him.

The jailer reads the name of a woman who has already been condemned. Maddalena steps forward and says: that's me. I am her.

And then, together, Chénier and Maddalena face what's coming saying "La nosta morte é il trionfo dell'amor!" or "Our death is the triumph of love!" culminating in either the most romantic thing ever written or the most devastating, depending on the moment you're in:

Viva la morte insiem!

Long live death together!

We've imprinted this on the guillotine on our artwork for a reason. Not because opera is morbid (though sometimes it is) but because that line contains the entire argument of the opera. That love, at its most absolute, is not about survival. That there are things worth more than living carefully. That choosing to go into the dark beside someone you love is, in Giordano's hands, an act of fierce, irrational, completely human beauty.

OperaDelaware performs this opera for the first time this May. Our company premiere of Andrea Chénier opens May 10 at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, presented as part of the OPERA America National Conference.

The cast is extraordinary. Let us tell you who's in it.

Dane Suarez as Andrea Chénier

The title role requires a very specific kind of tenor. Chénier is a poet, an idealist, a man who speaks in fire and dies unbroken (and the voice has to match.) It has to be large enough to carry the full weight of Giordano's orchestration, supple enough to honor the text, and present enough that when Chénier delivers "Un dì all'azzurro spazio" in Act I, the audience understands immediately why people stop and listen when he speaks.

Dane Suarez is an inaugural Company Artist at OperaDelaware, and a dramatic tenor whose "big, heroic voice" and "powerful emotions" (LA Weekly), have earned him recognition for commanding performances in the Italian repertoire and beyond. Critics have called his voice "a proper can-belto Italianate tenor" (The Spectator) and praised his "resonant, secure voice" and gift for combining vocal power with committed dramatic presence.

He made his acclaimed international debut with Wexford Festival Opera in 2024, where his Don Ferolo Whiskerandos (Stanford's The Critic) was celebrated across European press, with The Irish Times, The Stage, Bachtrack, and Seen and Heard International all singling him out. He also appeared in solo recital on the mainstage of the National Opera House. That same season, he earned strong notices as Lord Percy in Anna Bolena with Resonance Works, with OnStage Pittsburgh calling it "some of the most impressive singing of the evening," and returned to Lensky with Opera Columbus to reviews praising his "beautiful, rounded tenor tone" and "surging bluster." Recent engagements also include The Phoenix Symphony (Handel's Messiah en Español), Erie Philharmonic (Verdi's Requiem), and a return to his signature Don José with Opera Memphis.

His 2025/26 season marks major role debuts as Radamès (Aïda) with Opera Southwest, Giovanni (La hija de Rappaccini) with Opera Columbus, where Columbus Underground praised his "spectacular" singing throughout, and the title role in Andrea Chénier with OperaDelaware, a role built for exactly his voice. This summer he debuts with Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre, returning to his acclaimed Scalia in his fifth production of Scalia/Ginsburg and singing Richard Henry Lee in 1776. He is a grant recipient of The Olga Forrai Foundation supporting exceptionally large, dramatic voices in opera, he made his Off-Broadway debut at Soho Rep. in the world premiere of Kate Tarker's Montag, and is a former Resident Artist of Opera San José.

Learn more about Dane here: danesuarez.com

Toni Marie Palmertree as Maddalena di Coigny

The role of Maddalena asks a soprano to make a journey across the full width of human experience in roughly two hours. She begins the opera as an aristocrat's daughter, sheltered and a little skeptical. She ends it choosing death. The music has to carry both ends of that arc, and everything in between.

Toni Marie Palmertree is one of the most compelling soprano voices in American opera right now. A graduate of the Adler Fellowship Program at San Francisco Opera and alumna of the Merola Opera Program, she has performed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and Festival Opera New Zealand, among others. She is a recipient of the Richard F. Gold Career Grant from the Shoshana Foundation and The Olga Forrai Foundation, and is a district winner of The Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition.

She has been associated with the role of Cio-Cio San in Puccini's Madama Butterfly for years, performing it at San Francisco Opera, Florida Grand Opera, West Bay Opera, and Palm Beach Opera, among others. Critics have described her soprano as capable of producing what one reviewer called "voluminous, spine-chilling swells of sound." In March of this year, she made her principal role debut at the Metropolitan Opera in that very same role. She reprises her signature portrayal in her return to The Princeton Festival this summer.

That's the kind of cast we've built.

Toni Marie has been part of this company's identity for years now and continues to make an impact as a Company Artist. Audiences will remember her "radiant" Mimì in La bohème from last season and her steadfast Contessa in Le nozze di Figaro (2022).

Toni Marie's recent principal role debut at The Met has garnered much press attention; read her recent OperaWire feature here: https://operawire.com/how-motherhood-career-gaps-stage-iv-cancer-led-toni-marie-palmertree-to-her-met-opera-debut/

Gerard Moon as Carlo Gérard

Gérard is the most complicated character in the opera. A servant turned revolutionary turned judge, he ends the opera having signed the death warrant of the man whose poetry once moved him... and having done it for reasons that are not illogical. The baritone singing this role has to make you understand those motivations.

Gerard Moon is also an inaugural Company Artist at OperaDelaware and a South Korean-born baritone praised by OperaWire for the authority, command, and stage presence he brings from the moment he walks on stage. His repertoire spans the full breadth of the dramatic baritone canon: Figaro, Germont, Rigoletto, the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro, Ford in Falstaff, Don Giovanni and Leporello, Dr. Miracle in Tales of Hoffmann. He has studied and performed across the United States, Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, and throughout Asia.

Gérard's signature aria ("Nemico della patria") is one of the great baritone moments in the verismo repertoire: a monologue in which a man argues himself into betraying everything he once believed... and has to make you feel the logic of it. Moon has had this aria in his concert repertoire, which means he knows this music from the inside. But May will mark his role debut as Gérard in full production.

Fun fact: Moon chose the name Gerard when he came to the United States due to his love of this opera and this role in particular. Do you have your tickets yet?!

The Full Company

Andrea Chénier is an ensemble opera -- it requires a full company firing on all cylinders, from the featured roles to the comprimario singers who populate the world of Revolutionary Paris. OperaDelaware's production features: Taylor-Alexis DuPont as Bersi, Max Zander as L'Incredibile, Brian James Myer as Mathieu, Dylan Gregg as Roucher, Daryl Freedman as Madelon, Lauren Cook as Contessa di Coigny, Marcus DeLoach doing double duty as Fléville and Fouquier-Tinville, Douglas Rowland as L'abate, Dante Doganiero as Schmidt, and Dominic Walker as Il maestro di casa and Dumas.

Anthony Barrese, Conductor

Anthony Barrese has been OperaDelaware's Music Director since 2017. South Florida Classical Review has praised him for conducting "with passion and idiomatic fluency," and those of you who have heard him lead the OperaDelaware Orchestra know what that means in practice.

A recipient of The Solti Foundation U.S. Award for young conductors, Maestro Barrese is simultaneously a composer, conductor, and musicologist of serious standing. He made his operatic conducting debut in Milan and has since led productions at Sarasota Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Boston Lyric Opera, Opera North, and The Dallas Opera, among many others. He is Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of Opera Southwest, where his tenure has included landmark productions: the world premiere of Franco Faccio's Amleto (a score Mo. Barrese himself rediscovered, edited, and prepared in conjunction with Casa Ricordi, not heard anywhere since 1871), the American staged premiere of Rossini's Otello with the finale lieto, a company premiere of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, and a world premiere of Bottesini's Alì Babà.

Andrea Chénier is one of the great late-Romantic scores: rich, demanding, built on long melodic lines and enormous climaxes. It needs a conductor who understands how to let singers breathe inside that orchestral weight without ever losing momentum. That's Maestro Barrese.

Check out an excerpt of Faccio's Amleto here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUqRiJqjI2i/

Octavio Cardenas, Stage Director

Octavio Cardenas was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and brings to his work a visual imagination and physical sensibility that Opera News has described as creating an "immersive theater experience." The Dallas Morning News praised him for bringing "every character and situation to life." Opera Today noted that he brings "an abundance of imaginative stage business" while skillfully honoring the performance traditions of signature moments. This is exactly the balance a production like Chénier requires.

His credits include La bohème for Minnesota Opera (the Star Tribune credited the production's success directly to his staging), Silent Night for Fort Worth Opera Association and Lyric Opera of Kansas City (described as "a breathtaking realization" and "one of its finest performances in recent memory"), Cruzar la cara de la Luna for Opera Santa Barbara, and the world premiere of Zorro by Hector Armienta for Opera Southwest. He previously worked with OperaDelaware on the Papermoon production of Il barbiere di Siviglia.

He holds an MFA in Theatre from UCLA and a Master of Music from the University of South Carolina. He is currently a professor of opera at the Eastman School of Music.

A director who understands both the theatrical and the operatic, who has worked with Mo. Barrese before, directing our company premiere of one of the most glorious verismo operas in the repertoire. We couldn't ask for better.

Come See It

OperaDelaware's company premiere of Andrea Chénier opens May 10 at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, with additional performances May 13 and 15. The production is presented as part of the OPERA America National Conference (which is the world's largest gathering of opera administrators, artists, trustees, and advocates) to Wilmington that week.

This is a production we are proud of. A cast built for this music. A creative team that will breathe life into this incredible opera which has fallen out of the canon.

Viva la morte insiem!

Tickets at operade.org/2526-andrea-chenier

"I don't think I can bring my niece anymore."

/

A few years ago, one of our board members came to see La traviata — one of Verdi’s most ravishing, heartbreaking operas. She loved it. She was moved. And then, on her way out, she pulled aside a staff member and said something that has stuck with us ever since.

“I’m not going to be able to bring my niece anymore if the woman is always going to die.”

We laughed. A little. And then we thought about it.

Because she wasn’t wrong.

Here’s the sequence, since OperaDelaware mounted La traviata in the spring of 2023:

La traviata (spring 2023): Violetta dies of consumption. Rigoletto (fall 2023): Gilda sacrifices herself to save a man who doesn’t deserve it. Turandot (spring 2024): Liù takes her own life rather than betray the man she loves. La bohème (fall 2024): Mimì dies of consumption. Fearless (spring 2025): A world premiere about the life (and death) of WWII Women Airforce Service Pilot Hazel Ying Lee. Tosca (fall 2025): Tosca jumps off a building. Andrea Chénier (spring 2026, coming this May): The tenor goes to the guillotine. Maddalena (choosing love over survival) goes with him.

Six-and-a-half years. Eight productions. And with the exception of Fearless, which grapples with real historical loss, every single leading woman either dies, sacrifices herself, or chooses death as her most dramatic available option.

We love these operas. We will keep programming them. The music is extraordinary and the drama is real and that is not changing.

But our board member wasn’t making a critical argument. She was making a personal one. She wanted to share something she loved with someone she loved. And she wasn’t sure the thing she loved would be welcoming to a new audience member who might reasonably look at the pattern and feel like opera wasn’t built for her.

That is the reason this concert exists.

Stayin’ Alive: A Night at the Opera Where Nobody Dies started as a bit of a joke. And then we started pulling the repertoire and realized: there is so much music. So much gorgeous, alive, joyful, complicated, aching music that exists in opera and musical theatre where the characters make it to the final bar.

We organized it into four sets, because we think survival itself has a kind of arc.

Survival by Wit — the Beaumarchais characters: Figaro, Rosina, Cherubino, Susanna. They’ve been outsmarting everyone around them across centuries. They outlive kings. They outlive revolutions. Wit, it turns out, is a remarkably durable survival strategy.

Survival by Pleasure — operetta, party pieces, and the songs that exist purely to celebrate being alive. The good wine. The good company. The decision to stay at the party.

Survival by Song — the American songbook tradition and its heirs. Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Adam Guettel (who is, not incidentally, Oscar Hammerstein’s grandson). Music that believes a song can carry you somewhere your own feet can’t reach. There is also, for reasons that felt right, a tap number.

Survival by Purpose — Sondheim. Who was more interested in what happens after you believe that love or courage will carry you through. When the dream gets complicated. When staying alive means deciding again, and again what you’re actually living for.

The evening closes with “Make Our Garden Grow,” from Bernstein’s Candide. Which is, in our view, one of the most quietly devastating arguments for community ever set to music. Nobody in it is fine. Everything has gone wrong. And the answer they arrive at is: tend the garden. Stay. Do the work. Together.

Company Artists Emily Margevich, Dane Suarez, and Gerard Moon are joined by mezzo-soprano Gina Perregrino and pianist Husan Chun-Novak. The program is an evening of survival stories — not because nobody suffers, but because everyone chooses to keep going.

If you’ve been looking for a way in, this is it. If you’ve been a believer for years, this is a reminder of why.

And if you have a niece — or a nephew, or a friend, or a skeptical partner, or a neighbor who’s always said they want to try opera but never quite gotten there — bring them Thursday night or Sunday afternoon. We built this one with them in mind.

Stayin’ Alive: A Night at the Opera Where Nobody Dies March 27 at 7:30 PM · March 29 at 2:00 PM OperaDelaware Studios in Wilmington!

Tickets are on sale now for Stayin' Alive, part of the OperaDelaware Studio Series programmed by our company artists: sopranos Emily Margevich and Toni Marie Palmertree, tenor Dane Suarez, and baritone Gerard Moon. And coming this May, we bring you the company premiere of Giordano's French Revolution masterpiece Andrea Chénier presented at the OPERA America Conference hosted by OperaDelaware in Wilmington.

Want to learn more? Sign up for our mailing list so you don't miss a beat at OperaDelaware.