Conductor Daniela Candillari Reveals 2024-2025 Season

Conductor Daniela Candillari is coming to opera houses and concert stages throughout North America and internationally in the upcoming 2024-2025 season. She continues to bring enthusiastic, energetic, and sensitive direction to performances across the globe.

In 2024-2025, Candillari embarks on her fourth season as Principal Conductor with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and celebrates the company's 50th anniversary season by shepherding the company's 44th world premiere, This House (May 31-June 29) by composer Ricky Ian Gordon, with a libretto by Lynn Nottage and Ruby Aiyo Gerber. She'll also appear earlier in the year with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, leading the world premiere of Nina Shekhar's Accordion Concerto, a SLSO commission, featuring accordionist Hanzhi Wang, on a program with Samuel Barber's teenaged School for Scandal overture and Antonín Dvořák's beloved "New World" symphony (Jan. 10-11).

"The upcoming 2024-2025 season is one of great variety and beauty, as I have the immense honor of conducting and working with some of the world's most talented musicians through beloved compositions by Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, Puccini, and Dvorak, in programs that combine contemporary and traditional works," Candillari said. "I am thrilled to be making several appearances in New York City and New Orleans across the year, starting my season in Europe, and making my debut with Kansas City Symphony, as well as working with the St. Louis Symphony orchestra. I'm particularly excited to bring the works of some of the important composers of our time to the audiences, Anna Clyne, Gabriel Kahane, Ricky Ian Gordon, Ellen Reid, Carlos Simon, Missy Mazzoli, and Nina Shekhar. This season's musical journey, which combines music by Slavic and American, both past and living composers, will end with another world premiere in St. Louis in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and I'm very much looking forward to it."

Candillari's 2024-2025 season opens in Belgium with 15 performances of Madama Butterfly with Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (September 8-October 16, 2024). The production marks the centenary of Giacomo Puccini's death in Brussels, as well as the 120th anniversary of Madama Butterfly's world premiere. The direction and design are in the hands of the Argentinian duo Mariano Pensotti and Mariana Tirantte. Over 15 performances, sopranos Elena Guseva and Ana NaQe star as Cio-Cio San, with mezzo Lotte Verstaen as Suzuki and tenors Ovidiu Purcel and Łukasz Załęski as Pinkerton.

Candillari returns to her adopted home city to lead Trinity Church's resident orchestra NOVUS in the East Coast Premiere of Gabriel Kahane's emergency shelter intake form (October 24, 2024). The extraordinary oratorio was called "a cogent and emotionally potent response to the issue of housing insecurity" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Kahane, who composed the piece as he lived and volunteered at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, performs the work alongside mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and vocalists Holland Andrews and Holcombe Waller. Candillari will immediately follow that premiere with a return to the Juilliard School (October 28, 2024) for a program featuring Shostakovich, Barber and Bacewicz. A third New York concert comes at the Manhattan School of Music (January 22, 2025) in a program featuring Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2, Anna Clyne's This Midnight Hour, and Bedřich Smetana's Die Moldau.

In the first of two New Orleans performances this season, Candillari returns to New Orleans Opera to conduct Camille Saint-Saëns' rarely performed French masterpiece, Samson and Delilah (Nov. 8 & 10), based on the biblical story found in the Book of Judges in the Bible's Old Testament. Exploring themes of love, betrayal, faith, and redemption, the concert opera stars dramatic tenor Limmie Pulliam, praised for his "stentorian, yet beautiful" sound, in his company and role debut as Samson, with the "striking mezzo soprano" (San Fransisco Chronicle) Raehann Bryce-Davis in her company and role debut as Delilah. She later returns to the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra for a January 29 concert of Rachmaninoff's triumphant and emotional second symphony alongside composer Carlos Simon's exploration of the orchestration of cultural folk dances in Four Black American Dances, and the LPO's own Alex Mayon as the featured soloist on Hadyn's Trumpet Concerto, a favorite from the instrument's repertoire.

A highlight of the winter is Candillari's debut with the Kansas City Symphony, February 7-9, 2025, in a program that she has carefully crafted to explore dichotomies. Opening the program, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Reid's Floodplain explores the dualities inherent to its namesake: rich fertility and possible danger. Resplendent with trills that suggest cascading water, Floodplain has a broad sweep - expansive, with wide vistas.

With its contrast of lithe melodies and aggressive athleticism, Sergei Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto is a piece filled with scrumptious angularities. Violinist Karen Gomyo plays with fiery intensity and gorgeous tone, perfectly suited for this knockout concerto, one of the best ever written for the instrument. It's a perfect match. Like so much of Dmitri Shostakovich's music, his Tenth Symphony is filled with ambiguity - or is it? By some accounts, it included a portrait of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin while others have found no such connection. It's up to you to decide what you hear in this profoundly compelling and massive symphony. Moments of delicate intimacy contrast with frenzied explosions of sound. Of course, you'll hear Shostakovich's musical monogram - and so much else - in one of the 20th century's great symphonic works.

A return to Arizona in March finds Candillari leading a Tucson Symphony Orchestra program at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, beginning with Chopin's mellifluous Piano Concerto No. 2 in the hands of Venezuelan superstar pianist Gabriela Martinez, who made her orchestral debut at the age of 6. The concert also explores imagined worlds, and deeply buried worlds. Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet ballet music brings to life Shakespeare's beloved play of star-crossed lovers, and Missy Mazzoli's poignant These Worlds in Us delves into the worlds of intense memory that each person holds in themselves.

Candillari caps her season at Opera Theatre of St. Louis (OTSL) in celebration of the company's 50th anniversary season, conducting the company's 44th world premiere, This House, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon and libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and her daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber (May 31-June 29).

The opera centers on the Walker family, who have lived in the same Harlem Brownstone since the 1920s and have fought hard to keep what they have. When Zoe (mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter) returns home after many years away, she asks her mother Ida (soprano Adrienne Danrich) and her brother Lindon (baritone Justin Austin) to let her renovate the dilapidated building. But Ida and Lindon cannot let go of the past. The house is their whole world, and every room is full of ghostly voices and painful memories. As hidden truths about the family's legacy come to light, Zoe begins to realize that the secrets harbored within these walls are deeper and more profound than she ever dared to imagine.

Candillari will also conduct OTSL's annual Center Stage young artist showcase (June 24), featuring rising opera singers accompanied by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Daniela Candillari 2024-2025 Season Calendar

September 8-October 16, 2024

Puccini's Madama Butterfly
Opera Ballet Vlaanderen | Flanders, Belgium

October 24, 2024

East Coast Premiere of Gabriel Kahane's emergency shelter intake form
Trinity Church | New York, NY

October 28, 2024

Shostakovich Symphony No. 10, Barber Violin Concerto, Bacewicz Overture
The Juilliard School | New York, NY

November 8 & 10, 2024

Samson and Delilah in Concert
New Orleans Opera | New Orleans, LA

January 10 and 11, 2025

Dvořák's New World | American Sounds
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra | St. Louis, MO

January 22, 2025

Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2, Anna Clyne's This Midnight Hour, and Bedřich Smetana's Die Moldau
Manhattan School of Music | New York, NY

January 29, 2025

Rachmaninoff Symphony #2
Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra | New Orleans, LA

February 7-9, 2025

Classical Series Concert featuring Ellen Reid's Floodplain, Prokofiev and Shostakovich
Kansas City Symphony | Kansas City, MO

March 14 & 16, 2025

Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet
Tucson Symphony Orchestra |Tucson, AZ

May 31-June 29, 2025

World Premiere of This House
Music by Ricky Ian Gordon, libretto by Lynn Nottage and Ruby Aiyo Gerber
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis | St. Louis, MO

June 24, 2025
 

Center Stage: A Young Artist Showcase
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis | St. Louis, MO

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