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Royal Ballet and Opera has now launched its 2025/26 Season, and is showcasing a programme that interrogates the future as well as delivering classic revivals and ambitious new productions.
One of the most intriguing prospects is RBO/Shift, a new festival exploring the ever-evolving intersection between opera and technology. And this sense of new beginnings is further present since this is the Royal Opera’s first season with new Music Director Jakub Hrůša who will be opening the season with a new production of Tosca with Oliver Mears, the Director of Opera.
Mears says this year is all about this, bringing the full weight of the theatre’s history to bear, but also pushing forward.
“One of the other things which is exciting to me is the way in which our season really spans the full 300 years of our existence, going right back to To Handel,” he says, “He wrote so many brilliant operas and oratorios for the first theater on this site. And when I started, I wanted to really bring these pieces back into the forefront of the repertoire and next season we'll be doing new productions of Ariodante and Giustino, which have not been staged at Covent Garden since the 1730s.
But then Netia Jones, our new Associate Director is curating this festival which is dedicated to exploring how AI can intersect with opera. We don't think this has been done by anyone else. It'll be a series of, performances and events towards the end of the season, to see how this technology can work creatively with an art form that is not always associated with innovation.
As well as presenting these older masterpieces, we always have to be thinking about how can we drive the art form forward, how can we bring opera up to date with the newest technology.”
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The old and the new. On the one hand you can see their production of Last Days, an opera based on the last days of Kurt Cobain (and a film of the same name by Gus Van Sant), and on the other you can see the next part in Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
“It’s an extraordinary odyssey for any opera house to take on a new ring cycle and a sign of our ambition,” he says, “This great masterpiece by Wagner is a sign of intent, with Siegfried the third installment of four. It's going to be great to welcome back our music director laureate, Antonio Pappano, to conduct it and Barrie Kosky, who has such an incredible way with theatre and performance.”
Mears provides further insight in just how difficult a task the Ring Cycle is:
“It’s just huge, gargantuan in scale. Obviously there are many challenges because the orchestra is very large, and because the music is so difficult, only a handful of singers in the world can sing these roles. It takes years and years to actually book them and get them to commit. And then you need a first-class creative team to realise that, and in Tony and Barrie we have that.
But it's also about the expectations that people have because new Ring Cycles only come around once every decade or once every two decades. So somehow it's about being able to do justice to Wagner's incredible vision for his music and his theatre, but also take it into the 21st century.”
Other highlights will be Hrůša leading The Royal Opera’s first-ever staging of Janáček’s haunting and enigmatic opera The Makropulos Case, in a contemporary new production by Katie Mitchell. He will also conduct the first revival of Deborah Warner’s acclaimed production of Peter Grimes and, in a nod to his musical heritage, he will lead the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and Royal Opera Chorus in a concert featuring music by Bartók and Dvořák
There will be Royal Ballet world premieres by Wayne McGregor, Cathy Marston, Akram Khan and choreographic duo Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, as well as the first Royal Ballet presentation of work by Justin Peck.
It’s not just something for everyone, it’s everything for everyone, and indeed Mears’ enthusiasm is about shattering expectations and bringing in plenty of new Londoners to Covent Garden.
“Those preconceptions that people have, you have to challenge them,” he says, “Our tickets start from five pounds, for example, and that's one preconception that's knocked on the head. I think it's still the cheapest starting price ticket that you can get in the West End, and it's also this unbelievable, stunningly beautiful theatre.
What we have to do is to communicate that when you get here, when you actually get into this magical space, the quality of the work that's on offer and the quality of the performers that are on offer in the opera and the ballet are so second to none that you're going to be drawn into this extraordinary world and intoxicated by it.
There’s nothing quite like it in theatre, it’s one of the great British artistic institutions, and it is on everyone's doorstep.”
Tickets for the season are available from £5 and on sale from 2 July 2025 https://www.rbo.org.uk/
