For their 2024 mainstage summer festival season, Opera Theatre Saint Louis (OTSL) paired two fixtures in top-ten performance frequency, “ The Barber of Seville ” and “ La Bohème ,” with two exciting, less offered menu items. Philip Glass’s “Galileo Galilei” (2002) received just its fourth staging anywhere, while George Frideric Händel’s operatic capolavoro, “Julius Caesar” (“Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” 1724) achieved an OTSL premiere in its tercentenary. A deep roster of talent made “Julius Caesar” the vocal highlight of this season, and the sort of production that OTSL patrons will recall for years, much like 2023’s “Susannah.
” Celestial Music Descends From the Spheres to Steal My Soul Away Celebrating its recently deceased founding general director, Englishman Richard Gaddes (1942-2023), the company referenced the Glyndebourne Festival’s influence on OTSL’s now well-known garden and picnic pavilion (AKA “The Tent”). An apologia for opera in English quoting erstwhile artistic director Colin Graham (1931-2007) leads the company’s Anglophone libretti, not only issuing a shoutout to English National Opera but also reminding Americans that ROH Covent Garden too performed mostly in English prior to midcentury’s widespread air travel. With this DNA, you’d believe the company fertile ground for oodles of Handel, but in five decades, only three works by “The Great Bear” have appeared here, a 1987 “Alcina,” a 2000 “Radamisto.