Acclaimed countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo plays many roles, both on- and offstage, among them opera singer, arts administrator, and producer.
When he makes his anticipated Bay Area recital debut on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at Herbst Theatre, the Grammy Award-winning Costanzo will demonstrate a similar range. His intimate program, accompanied by pianist Bryan Wagorn and presented by San Francisco Performances, will cover everything from Handel arias to songs by Philip Glass, with a tribute to Barbra Streisand thrown in for good measure.
“Anthony is such a great artist. He’s so intelligent, creative, and really cares about the people around him,” said Wagorn, a New York City-based pianist and assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera who has worked with Costanzo since 2008.
And while the pair have performed the San Francisco recital program dozens of times, Wagorn noted that “it’s special to have a collaboration where every time, we discover new things.”
For Costanzo, that eclectic mix of repertoire makes intuitive sense.
“What’s most important, especially these days, is authenticity and how the voice is a primal expression of self,” the 42-year-old said on a recent Zoom call from his home in New York City. “What’s interesting is not only the skill that classical singing takes but also the humanity it has the potential to express.”
He sees that potential everywhere, especially in a pair of composers born 250 years apart. “Handel defined me, and Glass changed me,” said Costanzo, whose debut solo album, ARC: Glass/Handel, was released in 2018 on the Decca Gold label.
“Countertenors [have] tended to exist on the fringes of the operatic mainstream,” he added, explaining how the high male voice type fell out of favor after the Baroque era, only to experience a resurgence in popularity in the second half of the 20th century.
Costanzo shot to fame in the title role of Glass’s monumental 1984 opera Akhnaten, making the part his own in productions at Los Angeles Opera in 2016 and the Met in 2019 and 2022. As the sun-worshipping Egyptian leader, he appeared in the opera’s opening scene completely naked.
“It was really a performance about creating atmosphere with voice, movement, [and] physicality, letting that draw the audience in for a four-hour performance,” he said. “I had to learn a different kind of engagement as a performer — the vulnerability of being totally naked for six minutes in slow motion, in front of the audience.”
Still, that didn’t faze Costanzo, who’s been performing professionally since age 11, including on Broadway and in films. In recent years, there’s been no shortage of great operatic roles composed for countertenors, whom you might call the rock stars of today’s classical world.
“Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, [and] Prince were all countertenors,” Costanzo pointed out.
“I’m fascinated by what draws the public to the high-voiced male and why that always has been a part of culture,” he went on, listing other musical and theatrical traditions that historically featured falsetto voices, such as Hawaiian folk and pop, Mexican ranchera, and Japanese kabuki. “Yet when we encounter it in operatic form, it feels so far [removed] and yet so alluring and, in certain moments, so familiar.”
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What also feels familiar to Costanzo is his latest administrative role: general director and president of Opera Philadelphia.
Before beginning his tenure last June, he already had ties to the company, including performing as a shepherd boy in a 1996 production of Puccini’s Tosca that starred tenor Luciano Pavarotti. The countertenor more recently headlined a 2022 fundraising concert for the company with his friend and collaborator, cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, presenting a program dubbed “Only an Octave Apart,” based on the pair’s studio album of the same name.
These days, Costanzo balances a heavy performance schedule with OP, overseeing fundraising, audience development, community initiatives, and artistic planning, to name a few areas of concern.
“I wanted to think about some new models for our industry, which is struggling,” he said. “I wanted to have an impact and felt like this was an amazing company with an amazing artistic legacy and foundation that I could build on.
“It wasn’t huge like the Metropolitan Opera or San Francisco Opera, [so] there was the possibility to innovate. For me, innovation is about taking risks — not only with the art but with the structural model.”
To that end, Costanzo began the initiative Pick Your Price, where all tickets for OP’s 2024–2025 season were available for as little as $11. The program, the first of its kind begun by a major American opera company, is a radical move aimed at bringing the art form to more people.
“We not only sold out every show for the entire season through May,” exclaimed Costanzo, “we brought in 67 percent [first-time] ticket buyers. It was so emotional to see that if you offered people access to try something, because it costs less than a movie, that they would buy tickets.
“Think about how we program [the opera] Carmen over and over and over again because we need to sell $150 tickets. That limits our audience.”
Costanzo’s time at OP has already proved a resounding success, with the company having canceled all of last season’s debt in his first two and a half months on the job, he said.
For a boy who grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and who this year alone originated roles in multiple operatic world premieres, including George Lewis’s The Comet in Los Angeles and Gregory Spears’s The Righteous in Santa Fe, there’s no telling what’s next.
Costanzo just came off a monthlong run in The Marriage of Figaro — well, a one-man rendition of Mozart’s opera that he created and starred in for the inaugural performing arts season on Manhattan’s Little Island. He’s also writing a book, Countertenor, publication date yet to be announced.
“Every day has been really packed — but packed full of making art,” he said, “which I was put on this earth to do.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.