Bravi, Blo!

There is a moment in every opera performance when hundreds of individual experiences become one. House lights fade. The orchestra begins. Conversations give way to silence as strangers settle into a shared act of listening, drawn together by music, story, and the possibility of being moved by both.

For Boston Lyric Opera’s Stanford Calderwood General Director and CEO Bradley Vernatter, that moment is more than a signal for the start of a show. It’s a reminder why an opera company exists, and why BLO’s 50th anniversary is far more than a milestone marker. He believes the opera company’s greatest achievement after 50 years is not simply enduring in a city where previous companies struggled, but that it continues to create collective experiences involving and connecting more artists–and audiences–across generations and communities.

“I’m doing this job in service of our mission, our community and neighbors, the legacy of our artists and staff, and board members who built BLO over five decades,” Vernatter says. “I also do it in service of the company’s future and the people whose lives it will enrich for the next 50 years.” It’s a characteristically expansive, institutional, and forward-looking statement from someone who’s been working at the company for more than a quarter of its life. And it speaks to a peculiar reality of Boston Lyric Opera’s genesis.

Boston has long been a city that loved opera but struggled to sustain the companies that produced it. The ambitious Boston Opera Company flourished briefly in the early 20th century before collapsing, and other organizations followed a similar pattern, achieving artistic distinction only to succumb to financial realities. By the 1970s, a thriving opera culture existed without a lasting institution to anchor it.

The answer, when it came, was collaboration rather than grandeur. In 1976, the Associate Artists Opera, led by Ernest Triplett, and the New England Regional Opera, founded by Dr. Richard Marshall, merged with Rafael deAcha and Kimberly Daniel’s New England Chamber Opera Group to create Boston Lyric Opera. The founders’ greatest innovation was less artistic than organizational: They recognized that Boston’s opera creators would be stronger together than apart.

Half a century later, that patient approach has yielded something remarkable. Boston Lyric Opera enters its 50th anniversary season with a budget exceeding $15 million, placing it among the nation’s largest companies. Since 2019, attendance by audiences 18 to 34 has tripled, and racial diversity among ticket buyers has increased by 70%. Its board has grown and diversified too, with 18 new members joining over the past few years. The company has commissioned new works and expanded its work year-round, creating 800 paid opportunities for artists each year, expanded its educational and community programs, and established a creative foothold in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood.

Those accomplishments might suggest an organization that has finally arrived. But for Vernatter and Artistic Director Nina Yoshida Nelsen, they represent something else: proof that the same collaborative spirit that gave birth to Boston Lyric Opera remains the key to its future.

At the center of this moment are two complementary leaders who are always thinking about the impact they can have on the art form and the city—a partnership central to BLO’s next chapter. Vernatter is a producer and strategist who thinks about how opera companies work. Yoshida Nelsen is a performing artist whose experience onstage informs every artistic decision she makes.

Building a Home for Opera

Bradley Vernatter likes to joke that he never expected a career in opera would require him to become something of a real estate developer. “I’ve worked in opera my whole life,” Vernatter says. “I came to BLO to work in opera. But what I walked into, what I inherited, is the challenge of finding space for this art form in the city.”

Before the unexpected crash course in real estate education, Vernatter arrived at the company through the artistic and producing sides of the profession. He studied music, performed a bit, and worked at major companies including Ireland’s Wexford Festival Opera, where he saw firsthand how a permanent home shaped the artistic life of an institution. At BLO, he succeeded Esther Nelson, assuming a position that held both the company’s executive and artistic leadership.

Vernatter deftly moved the company through the COVID shutdowns, overseeing groundbreaking and award-winning digital productions, bringing live opera back first in an outdoor concert venue and eventually back into theaters. Using his artistic skill, he brought the company extraordinary new stories like Rhiannon Gidden’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera “Omar,” forged collaborations with other arts groups like Commonwealth Shakespeare to produce “Romeo & Juliet” on the Boston Common, all while managing a wide range of other complex business decisions and fundraising.

When Nelsen first auditioned for Boston Lyric Opera as a graduate student at Boston University, she wasn’t thinking about rehearsal studios or organizational strategy. She simply wanted a chance to sing, but she didn’t get one. Nearly everyone else in her master’s program was asked to work with the company. She was not.

“It was devastating,” she recalls.

Neither Vernatter nor Nelsen imagined they would one day lead Boston Lyric Opera. Their very different paths ultimately converged around two questions: where opera belongs and who gets to shape it.

For Vernatter, the first question proved unexpectedly practical. An opera company needs far more than a stage. It needs financial resources, rehearsal halls, costume shops, scenery storage, meeting rooms, and places where artists can spend weeks creating together before an audience ever hears a note.

For decades, BLO improvised. Productions rehearsed in basements, ballrooms, and soundstages across the city. They performed in traditional theater spaces but also in churches, basketball arenas, cruise terminals, and other inspirational, large-scale spaces. The company became remarkably adept at making any place feel like a place for opera. Resourcefulness became part of its identity. But it also imposed limits.

When preparing Terence Blanchard’s opera Champion after the pandemic, Vernatter remembers, the company rehearsed in a remote film studio that met its space needs but was difficult for artists to reach and poorly suited to daily creative work.

“We want to provide welcoming experiences for everyone,” Vernatter says. “But that was just one example of how we weren’t able to control our environment in a way that reflected our values.”

Shortly before live performance returned post-pandemic, Nelsen was continuing her journey to BLO at an entirely different point in her career. Years after her unsuccessful student audition, she returned as an established mezzo-soprano with an international performing career. She was to meet a BLO artistic team member at a studio space in New York, hoping to land a role in the company’s planned production of "Madame Butterfly."

That second audition became a great personal story about persistence. She arrived soaked from a rainstorm to find her pianist hadn’t shown up, and began singing a cappella until another pianist passing through agreed to jump in. “‘That was the worst audition ever,” Nelsen remembers. The next day, she got the role. Nelsen now recalls it as the opportunity of a lifetime.

The story has become a favorite inside BLO because it says something about the organization itself. Resilience matters. Adaptability matters. Sometimes the unexpected reveals more than the carefully planned. The "Butterfly" production Nelsen landed in was scuttled in part by COVID, then reshaped by the societal and racial reckoning that followed attacks on Asian and Asian American communities in the U.S.

After appearing in an October 2021 outdoor performance of "Cavalleria rusticana," Nelsen was invited to become an Artistic Advisor and dramaturg for BLO. She helped lead the company’s ambitious year-long examination of "Madama Butterfly" (“The Butterfly Project”) that brought artists, scholars, and Asian American community members into thoughtful public conversations before a production was ever staged. “It was the first time any company listened to me as an artist,” she says.

For Nelsen, whose Japanese American family was affected by wartime incarceration, the work was deeply personal. The experience convinced her that opera companies could do more than produce performances. They could create space for dialogue before the curtain rose. That idea resonated with what Vernatter was aiming to create with bricks and mortar.

In 2024, BLO announced a long-term expansion at Midway Artist Studios in Fort Point, growing from 2,000 square feet of office space to 16,000 square feet that also included rehearsal, production, education, and performance space now known as the Opera + Community Studios.

For Vernatter, the project solved a practical problem while advancing a larger vision. For Nelsen, it created a place where artists could gather, experiment, and build relationships long before opening night. And it gave the company a chance to establish venue management experience.

The studios are intentionally more than an opera headquarters: theater companies rehearse there; publishers celebrate magazine launches; design and dance companies transform it with installations and movement. And it’s been growing as a place for civic engagement beyond traditional arts as well. “There is an entire ecosystem of artists, arts organizations and groups promoting public dialogue who can create together here,” Vernatter says.

The studios are intentionally more than an opera headquarters: theater companies rehearse there; publishers celebrate magazine launches; design and dance companies transform it with installations and movement. “There is an entire ecosystem of artists and arts organizations creating together,” Vernatter says.

Opera has always depended on collaboration—not only among singers, musicians, directors, and designers—but increasingly with the communities whose stories it seeks to tell. When Nelsen became Artistic Director in 2024, it formalized a change already underway. Artists were no longer being asked simply to interpret productions. They were helping shape them from the beginning.

Seen together, Vernatter’s investment in place and Nelsen’s investment in process are expressions of the same philosophy. One is building a home where artists can do their best work. The other is redefining what happens inside it.

After nearly five decades spent adapting to borrowed spaces, Boston Lyric Opera has discovered that its greatest strength was never simply learning how to perform anywhere. It was learning that the strongest institutions are built around people first.

Two Leaders, One Conversation

Spend even a few minutes with Bradley Vernatter and Nina Yoshida Nelsen together, and it becomes clear their relationship is built as much on curiosity as on complementary expertise. Their conversations move easily between artistic possibility and practical reality, each pushing the other’s thinking in ways that neither could accomplish alone.

“Brad has not only become my mentor,” Nelsen says, “ he’s also the greatest partner, support, and collaborator I could ask for.” Coming into the role of Artistic Director, she understood opera from the perspective of a performer, not a producer or arts administrator. “I can come to him with anything and have an incredible thought partner. We’re at our best when we’re riffing off each other.”

Those exchanges often begin with an artistic idea before quickly expanding into questions of logistics, resources, timing, and possibility—not as obstacles to creativity, but as part of the creative process itself.

Over time, Vernatter came to believe that Boston Lyric Opera’s future required two distinct leadership roles: one focused on strategy, finances, and organizational growth; the other devoted to artistic vision and the experience of the people who create the work. The challenge was finding someone to make that partnership real. A global Artistic Director search led back to Nelsen, who had already proved her commitment to the vision of a community-centered company with great ambitions.

“I could not have imagined a better partner and more trusting relationship,” Vernatter says. Rather than distancing him from the artistic side of the company, he says, the partnership with Nelsen has deepened his understanding of what artists need to thrive and how an institution can better support them—onstage and throughout the creative process.

That mutual respect is increasingly reflected in Boston Lyric Opera itself. Vernatter’s focus on building a stronger institution and Nelsen’s commitment to expanding whose voices shape the art form are not competing visions. They are two parts of the same conversation, one that is evident throughout the company’s 50th anniversary season and in its increasingly expansive understanding of what opera can be.

An Anniversary That Looks Forward

For a company marking its 50th anniversary, Boston Lyric Opera has assembled a season that spends surprisingly little time looking backward. The 2026/27 lineup honors the type of repertoire that sustained the company for five decades, from Rossini’s “William Tell” and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” to Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades,” and André Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Acclaimed artists Lawrence Brownlee, Nadine Sierra, and Ailyn Pérez—each with meaningful connections to BLO at earlier stages of their careers—return as part of the celebration.

Yet the season’s most revealing throughline is not nostalgia. It’s renewal. For Nelsen, opera’s enduring power lies in its ability to illuminate the human experience from many different perspectives. “Opera gives us an opportunity to look at humanity from so many different lenses,” she says.

That philosophy extends beyond reimagined classics. It means creating new work that reflects the city that Boston has become. Among the anniversary season’s most ambitious projects is a new community opera by composer Carlos Simon and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, co-commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It’s being developed through community workshops and conversations across Boston, and will be performed with hundreds of young people. The work will draw its stories, memories, and voices directly from the communities it serves.

“Opera is an art form that, in its very DNA, requires an extraordinary number, a tremendous number of people to make it happen,” Vernatter says. “What we do is all about community building.”

That collaboration begins long before the curtain rises. A production like the 50th Season opener, "William Tell," will gather hundreds of singers, instrumentalists, directors, designers, craftspeople, technicians, administrators and volunteers before thousands of audience members ultimately share the performance.

Supported by stronger board leadership and successful fundraising, Vernatter and Nelsen are focused less on how an opera company survives in Boston than on how it becomes indispensable to the city’s cultural life. 

The search for a permanent performance home, one that amplifies the connections between civic and cultural spaces and offers room for all art forms, is a key priority and part of its strategic plan.

Boston Lyric Opera survived because it learned to adapt—specifically, to collaborate, to be inspired by new places, and to welcome audiences beyond opera’s perceived boundaries. 50 years later, those hard-earned lessons have become the company’s defining strengths.