Composer Gregory Spears Reveals 2025-2026 Season Highlights and World Premieres

Composer Gregory Spears has announced a milestone 2025-2026 season, including the debut of his newest opera, Sleepers Awake, at Opera Philadelphia, and the launch of a national, multi-year tour celebrating the tenth anniversary of his critically acclaimed opera Fellow Travelers. The season includes three additional premieres, beginning with a presentation by The Frick Collection of Spears’ Secrets, a work for early and modern instruments based on a painting from the museum’s permanent collection. MasterVoices will premiere a short new work as part of a collaborative cycle on the Seven Deadly Sins at Alice Tully Hall, and the Tucson Desert Song Festival will present the world premiere of Bartleby, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano and pianist Christopher Cano. 
 

Spears’ newest opera, Sleepers Awake, receives its world premiere with Opera Philadelphia at the Academy of Music from April 22 to 26, 2026. Inspired by the writings of modernist Swiss author Robert Walser and other literary sources, this reimagining of Sleeping Beauty creates a singular, dream-like meditation on the classic fairy tale. Praised for writing “exquisitely for vocal ensembles” (The Wall Street Journal), Spears fashions a hypnotic, labyrinthine soundscape in which the Opera Philadelphia Chorus sings itself in and out of slumber. Conceived with and directed by Jenny Koons, this visually dazzling production transforms the stage into a liminal space, blurring the fragile boundary between waking and dreaming.
 

The story follows The Stranger (Jonghyun Park), who wakes Thorn Rose (Susanne Burgess) and her companions from a century-long sleep. But instead of gratitude, they express annoyance. Thorn Rose and The Court Poet (Brian Major) recount the tale of the curse that doomed them to slumber, yet they remain unable to cross fully into wakefulness, repeatedly slipping back into sleep. Voices and music weave the audience into a fractured, cyclical world where time folds in on itself. Prior to its world premiere in April 2026, Sleepers Awake will be explored in a 10-day workshop through Opera Fusion: New Works, a new works development partnership between Cincinnati Opera and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, concluding with a public presentation on November 8, 2025.

Gregory Spears’ operas have been staged by leading companies in the U.S. and abroad, with his best-known work, Fellow Travelers, featuring a libretto by Greg Pierce, hailed as a modern classic. Based on Thomas Mallon's 2007 novel, Fellow Travelers speaks to the experiences of LGBTQ+ Americans who were banned from government employment and subject to humiliating investigations in the mid-20th century. The world premiere at Cincinnati Opera in 2016 was praised as "one of the most accomplished new operas I have seen in recent years" (Chicago Tribune) and an opera that "seems assured of lasting appeal" (The New York Times). Since then, Fellow Travelers has been staged by more than a dozen companies. To mark the opera’s tenth anniversary in 2026, Fellow Travelers will be performed in a multi-year national tour with 2026 dates including Seattle Opera (February 21–March 1, 2026), Portland Opera (March 7-15, 2026), San Diego Opera (July 10-12, 2026), and The Glimmerglass Festival (July 18–August 16, 2026). Headed by director Kevin Newbury and producer Jecca Barry, and produced by New York-based artistic collective Up Until Now, the tour will also come to Austin Opera in 2027. The touring production will partner with the American LGBTQ+ Museum on the Lavender Names Project, a "nationwide grassroots archival research and community outreach initiative," to engage libraries, universities, and LGBTQ+ organizations in each city. A curated lobby installation for each performance will feature exhibits detailing the history of the Lavender Scare documented in Fellow Travelers. The tour kicks off with a Guggenheim Works & Process event on Sunday, October 19, 2025 in New York City. Opera Parallèle’s production of Fellow Travelers will also be staged this season at Pittsburgh Opera (November 14-16, 2025). 

On February 1, 2026, The Frick Collection in New York City presents the world premiere of Secrets, inspired by Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Portrait of a Woman (1575) from the museum’s permanent collection. The work will be performed by New York-based viol consort Sonnambula – The Frick’s ensemble-in-residence – and vocal trio ModernMedieval Voices, utilizing a blend of modern instruments and period instruments, including Renaissance viols. Fusing the past and the present into a singular look is a specialty of the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Battista Moroni (ca. 1520-78). In his work, particularly in his portraits, the sitter’s cryptic gaze confronts our own and draws us into a relationship that transcends the frame and extends across time. Secrets will do the same by fusing musical styles from the Renaissance to the 21st century in a new composition performed live. By presenting this work in art museums, performers will bring the “now” of live performance to a place where viewers routinely confront the past through the medium of visual art, aiming to bring sound to the gallery space in a way that amplifies the quiet communion between modern viewers and the historical figures who gaze back at them. 

The Tucson Desert Song Festival unveils Bartleby, a song cycle based on Herman Melville’s enigmatic short story, on Tuesday, April 7, 2026 at the University of Arizona. Written for mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano and pianist Christopher Cano, the work will be performed by the duo in its world premiere. Part monodrama, part song cycle, this major new work tells the story of Melville’s famous “scrivener” (scribe) who has intrigued philosophers and literature fans alike with his inscrutable refrain: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby is being composed as a companion work to Spears’ earlier song cycle Walden (based on Thoreau). Both monodramas explore the minds of isolated figures who, in their iconoclastic manner, embody the paradoxes of 19th-century American Romanticism. 

On March 23 and 24, 2026 in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, MasterVoices will premiere a short new work by Spears as part of a larger song cycle on the Seven Deadly Sins. Spears is featured as one of seven powerhouse composers spanning the worlds of Broadway and classical music assembled by Artistic Director Ted Sperling to create SEVEN: A Cycle of Sins. Filled with fire, drama, and humor, SEVEN will be presented alongside Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor, showcasing soprano and baritone soloists along with the MasterVoices Chorus and a chamber orchestra incorporating Alice Tully Hall’s majestic pipe organ.

A New Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei, Spears’ completion of the Mozart Requiem, will be performed by the Columbus Symphony and Chorus at the Ohio Theatre on January 23 and 24, 2026, as well as by the New York Choral Society at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on May 9, 2026. In his reimagining of the Requiem, Spears combines his interest in musicology with a lifelong respect for liturgical traditions. His three movements replace the commonly performed versions of the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei written by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who completed the unfinished Requiem shortly after Mozart’s death. In his alternate completion of these movements, Spears pays homage to the juxtaposition of old and new styles apparent in Mozart’s late work and much of the liturgical music of the period. The piece was commissioned and premiered by Seraphic Fire and has since been performed throughout the U.S. and in Europe.