Long Beach Opera has always been an experimental company. Comfortable with site-specific production and out-there material, they scored a hit with the premiere of Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five (2019) and have recently released the recording from that performance. Their just-announced 2026-2027 season is as unique and risky as ever.
Chief Creative Officer and Artistic Director James Darrah Black has planned the season to take place almost entirely aboard The Queen Mary, a venue the company used for its production The Library of Maps, in April 2025. He’s conceived the season as an exploration of the breadth of human vocal expression. But this year, the company also explores fruitful collaborations with other organizations.
The season opens on Sept. 26 with a trio of music-theater works by composer George Aperghis. Greek by birth but embedded in Paris’ experimental scene since the 1960s, Aperghis founded ATEM ("Atelier Théâtre et Musique") in 1976. His aim was to create a new art form “inspired by everyday life and social issues transposed into an often absurd and poetic world, in which musicians, singers, actors, and multimedia artists meet on an equal footing,” as his biography has it.
In Le corps à corps (1978), for example, a lone percussionist describes in detail a demanding foot race, using vocalizations. Les Sept crimes de l'amour (1979) “merges music, physical movement, and staging into a unified performance,” LBO’s press release says. Finally, Récitations for solo voice (1977-1978) is about extended vocal techniques. LBO will pair coloratura soprano Habin Kim and synth-pop performance artist Geneva Jacuzzi in the show.
Venetian gambist Cristiano Contadin founded Opera Prima to create immediate and accessible performances of Renaissance and Baroque works. The group makes a stop on its West Coast tour with outstanding Grammy-winning soprano Amanda Forsythe for Tormento Seicento (Tormented 17th century), to be presented by LBO on Jan. 26. 2027 at the First Congregational Church of Long Beach. Developed by Contadin and Forsythe, the concert explores the passions of the soul through music by Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi, Tarquinio Merula, and Barbara Strozzi. Longtime LBO collaborator, soprano Anna Schubert and Black are also co-conceiving a recital scheduled for Jan. 30.
In the spring, Black directs Impressions of Pelléas, Peter Brook’s condensation of Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Melisande (April 3). Brook achieved signal success with his take on George Bizet’s Carmen so it will be fascinating to see what he did with this masterwork.
May 1 brings a performance of Handel’s Tolomeo with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Black’s production, which premiered in July in San Francisco, was a hit with critics and audiences and won SFCV’s Audience Choice Awards for both Favorite Opera Performance and Baroque/Early Music Performance.
Last November, LBO partnered with Opera UCLA to present Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. The company renews that collaboration on May 16 at UCLA’s Little Theater, bringing in the musicians of Wild Up for a workshop performance of composer Shelley Washington’s opera The Passion of Nell. The story of a model whose passion for soprano Birgit Nilsson ends in tragedy, this performance is free to the public. The date for the world premiere will be announced in 2027.
The season finishes on June 5 with Ana Sokolović’s fascinating and challenging Svadba (Wedding). Based on hundreds of Serbian wedding texts and songs, the work delves into the rituals and the bond between a bride-to-be and her five friends as they prepare for her wedding. Sung almost entirely a cappella, Svadba will make an intriguing close to a season about the powers of the human voice
