IN Series is proud to announce our 2025-2020 Season
FEATURING SIX PREMIERE PRODUCTIONS
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST | World Premiere Staging
Music by Alessandro Stradella
New English text by Bari Biern
Co-production with Catapult Opera
October 2025
340 Maple Dr. Washington, DC| Baltimore Theater Project
From the pen of one of the most audacious, salacious, and extraordinary composers ever to live (whose life was so fantastical that multiple operas were composed about it), comes this 17th century version of the biblical Salome story. Every bit as compelling, gruesome, and at once horrifying and intoxicating as the Oscar Wilde play written over two centuries later, this oratorio has become infamous for its incredible score, unlike any other music, and its dramatic power. It marked even the concert debut of a young Maria Callas in 1947 singing the role of the stepdaughter Salome who demands of Herod the head of John the Baptist, and will do anything to get it. Written as a concert work, this production marks the first time Stradella’s masterpiece is brought to life on the stage.
THE DELTA KING'S BLUES | World Premiere
Music by Damien Geter
Libertto by Jarrod Lee
December 2025
340 Maple Dr. Washington, DC| Baltimore TBD
The first full opera commissioned by IN Series, this World Premiere of THE DELTA KING’S BLUES marks the culmination of a multi-year project to celebrate the legacy of legendary guitarist Robert Johnson with a “blues opera” that tells the Faustian story of the bargain he struck with the devil - selling his immortal soul to learn the language of the blues, America’s original music. An orchestra mix of blues and classical musicians joins a cast of leading artists from around the country and an immersive juke-joint experience that sings, dances, hollers, laughs, and mourns in a brilliant new score by Damien Geter and texts for Jarrod Lee.
PASSION PLAYS | A Festival
New works by Timothy Nelson, Maribeth Diggle, Adrienne Torf
March-April 2026
Dupont Underground | Baltimore Theater Project
This festival brings three new music-theater works to life, each exploring different aspects of human passion, suffering, redemption, each with a unique musical landscape, and all featuring world class artists using music, drama, and meaning to spark transformation.
ONLYTHE AIR - Old music is given new meaning in an original theater piece that includes that searing and unforgettable arias from J.S. Bach’s masterpiece, and a new spoken re-languaging of the Gospel text that reshapes the work into an exploration of profound human loss and grief, and the promise of hope. This miniature approach to one of the repertoire’s largest works seeks to discover its essential emotional power in a ritual staging aimed at the soul of its audience. New English texts from Shana Oshiro and Joshua Borths.
PASSIO - Drawing inspiration from the traditional Passion narratives, PASSIO reimagines ancient human themes - betrayal, death, hope, resurrection - through the lens of female experience across cultures and generations. The score, composed collaboratively by Lucie de Saint Vincent and the ensemble, blends fortepiano, jazz, blues, South Asian percussion, Baroque strings, and extended classical vocal techniques to build a sound world that echoes the ancient and promotes the urgent. This is not just a performance - it’s a collective act of remembering and reimagining, where personal stories of sacrifice are placed boldly in the center of ritual.
*FOR WOMEN SERVING TIME - Persian-American poet and scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz joins jazz pianist and composer Adrienne Torf come together to make a new piece of opera-theater that fuses Faure’s Requiem, jazz elements, and Brechtian theatrical traditions in a powerful contemplation of the human experiences contained in “ female incarceration in America”. This extended poem-opera sheds light on the lives and resilience of women in the U.S. prison system, their hopes, dreams, fears, and day to day experiences, offering a voice to a population often overlooked. Six acclaimed local performers join the composer herself, leading an instrumental ensemble from the piano, to animate the important original work.
*Baltimore performances offered
THE SONG OF SAKUNTALA | World Premiere
Music by Timothy Nelson
Texts by Sarojini Naidu Rabindranath Tagore, Vidyapati
June 2026
340 Maple Drive DC| Baltimore Theater Project
WIth its story taken from India’s most famous dramatic work, Kalidasa’s 5th century play Shakuntala, itself made into an opera by composers such as Alfano and Schubert, this new opera by IN Series Artistic Director Timothy Nelson fuses Western baroque instruments with Indian classical instruments to create a “dance-opera” on the themes of love, loss, and redemption. Its libretto is formed from the texts of formational Indian poets from across centuries, as well as the sacred Mahabharata words. This danced production will be directed and choreographed by Hari Krishnan. Imagined in the still of a concert of Indian classical music, it promises an evening like a “single song, permutated across the hours, in a mood of evocation and remembrance and longing illuminated by swirling, dizzying aspiration - meditation, yearning, whispering, calling, chanting, talking and touching late into the night.”
DC AND BALTIMORE SUBSCRIPTIONS AVAILABLE MAY 15TH
PLUS + FOR EARLY BIRD SUBSCRIBERS ONLY
THE ALCESTIAD | American Premiere
a musical reading
Music by Louise Talma
Libretto by Thornton Wilder
July 20th, 2025
Martin Luther King Library Auditorium
Composer Louise Talma and playwright Thornton Wilder collaborated on the 1962 opera THE ALCESTIADE, which became the first opera by an American woman to be performed in Europe. It was widely acclaimed when it premiered, but has never been heard in the United States. This long-awaited concert performance of the third act of this landmark opera is the first chance American audiences will have had to hear this music, and includes a cast of IN Series favorites.
