“You have to go to everything; I don’t know what you would miss,” says Roberto Kalb of the Detroit Opera’s upcoming 2026-27 season.
Kalb, a conductor and the Detroit Opera’s music director, says the opera specifically curated the season so “nothing was missable.”
“Every single piece has something so unique that really, it lends itself to buying the whole package,” he insists. The package includes an experimental piece by Philip Glass, fan favorite Fiddler on the Roof, and opera classic Tosca (in Kalb’s words, “Puccini at his finest”), with “our wonderful” Detroit Opera Chorus and Orchestra accompanying each performance.
A theme of faith loosely organizes the season: “how [faith] plays into our society and how [it] is represented through pieces of art,” says Kalb, who calls the theme a “broad guiding light of programming” rather than a strict template.
The season opens with Puccini’s Tosca (Nov. 1, 5, and 7) — or “one of the greatest masterpieces of Western music,” according to Kalb.
Louisa Proske, whom Kalb describes as “one of the most exciting directors alive today,” heads the production, which premiered at the 2025 Glimmerglass Festival.
Proske has relocated the opera (which Puccini originally set in Napoleonic-era Rome) to an unspecified totalitarian country “in a pretty vagued-out second part of the 20th century,” she says. The production leaves the exact setting and time period intentionally ambiguous.
Proske says Tosca “[works] on so many different levels. It works on the level of a political thriller — it’s like a John le Carré novel. It’s perfectly constructed.”
But it’s also “a deep reflection about artists in times of political oppression and in times of tyranny,” she says.
The cast includes tenor Nathan Granner, who performed in last year’s Central Park Five, as Mario Cavaradosi; bass baritone Alfred Walker as Scarpia; and, in the lead role, South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha. The Detroit performance marks a first for Rangwanasha, who debuted with the Metropolitan Opera in 2025 to critical acclaim and now makes her world debut as Floria Tosca.
“No one in the world has ever heard her sing this, and Detroiters get to hear her sing it for the first time,” Kalb says.
The season continues with Fiddler on the Roof (March 14, 18, and 20, 2027), a “beautiful, very intelligent production,” according to Kalb, who says the Detroit Opera “decided to treat [the musical] in a very operatic way,” with opera singers performing the principal roles and an even “more robust” orchestration “than you might hear in a Broadway show.”
“We’re really excited about the cast,” Kalb says. Roland Wood, a British baritone with “a glorious voice” and a dynamic stage presence, will play Tevye. (Kalb describes him as “one of those stage animals.”)
The opera will stage a one-night-only performance of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, a 1980 opera about Mahatma Gandhi, on April 17, 2027, to honor the composer’s 90th birthday.
Kalb says the “meditative” — even “transformative” — opera is “like nothing that people have ever heard before.”
“It just washes over you,” he says.
That sensation and the desire to create “an immersive experience for audience members” inspired Satyagraha’s director, James Blaszko, according to Kalb. The lightly staged production will largely feature local singers.
“Just let your mind wander and absorb the sounds that are coming to you,” Kalb advises. “You will lose your sense of time.”
This story originally appeared in the October 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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