Berkshire Opera Festival 2026 Expands with Tragedy, Comedy, and Residency

July 31–August 28 | Great Barrington and Chatham, MA/NY | Tickets from $20

Berkshire Opera Festival's 2026 season pairs its flagship mainstage production with a new initiative that says something about how far the festival has come. The mainstage attraction is Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor", running August 22, 25, and 28 at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. Ahead of that, on July 31 and August 2, the company launches its Resident Artist Program at PS21's open-air pavilion in Chatham with a fully staged production of André Grétry's "Zémire et Azor"—an 18th-century French comic opera based on the Beauty and the Beast story, written roughly two centuries before Disney got to it.

BOF Conductor Brian Garman and director Jonathon Loy met in the late 1990s, when Garman was a principal conductor at Pittsburgh Opera and Loy was an intern there while attending the University of Pittsburgh. They stayed friends for two decades, kicking around the idea of starting an opera company together, before deciding the Berkshires made sense on every level—Loy had spent childhood summers in the region and knew it as one of the most culturally rich places in the country, but one that had been without a real opera company since the original Berkshire Opera Company closed in 2008.

BOF incorporated in 2014. A decade later, It's early scrappiness has given way to regional institutional excellence. The company now operates with its own orchestra (half local musicians, half drawn from the tri-state area) and chorus assembled from scratch each season, rehearsal and office space at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, and a board and donor base substantial enough to support this year's new training initiative. BOF recently named Natalie Johnsonius Neubert as its first President and CEO, formalizing the leadership structure beyond Garman and Loy's original division of labor—Garman handles casting and all musical aspects as Artistic Director, Loy runs production and stage direction, a split both men credit for the partnership's durability.

The Resident Artist Program has been a long-standing ambition for Garman, whose passion for training young singers runs alongside his conducting work. In his words, the goal is to train the next generation of artists "the right way"—building a performance-oriented experience where participants work with real opera professionals on real roles before bringing it all together onstage, rather than the conservatory model of paying tuition for instruction with limited stage time.

BOF's resident artists are paid and housed, and each gets a lead role in the fully produced Grétry opera; they'll also learn principal roles from "Lucia" so they're prepared to step in as understudies if needed. Director Mo Zhou, a Chinese-born stage director whose work has appeared at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Elbphilharmonie, and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in China, has reimagined Grétry's fairy tale in the shimmering, morally fragile world of Gilded Age America—Zémire, daughter of the nouveau riche, longs for authenticity, while Azor, an old-money recluse disfigured by an industrial accident, hides in a decaying mansion outside New York. Soprano Ethel Trujillo, mezzo-soprano Christina Grohowski, tenor Scott Rubén La Marca, and baritone June Young Kim star.

The mainstage "Lucia" is the more traditional draw, and BOF has assembled a strong cast for it. Christine Lyons, winner of the 2025 Princess Grace Award, sings the title role, returning to BOF after performing in the company's 2025 gala and the role of Echo in its 2017 "Ariadne." Terrence Chin-Loy, who has recently sung with the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and Arizona Opera, plays Edgardo. Dean Murphy, a leading baritone at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, sings Enrico; Stefan Egerstrom, a regular at Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Met, plays Raimondo. Garman conducts; Loy, who has directed Met revivals of "La Traviata, Tosca, Carmen, Le Nozze di Figaro," and "Faust" across 16 seasons on the Met's staging staff, directs—and has called Lucia his personal favorite in the entire bel canto repertoire, citing its fully realized characters and its brooding evocation of Scottish gothic atmosphere. This production, he's said, will lean into the opera's supernatural elements.

A free pre-performance talk with dramaturg Cori Ellison precedes the August 22 matinee at 12pm. Lucia runs approximately two hours and 45 minutes with one intermission, sung in Italian with projected English translations.

Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, 14 Castle St., Great Barrington, MA. PS21, 2980 NY-66, Chatham, NY. Tickets and full schedule at berkshireoperafestival.org.