Timucua, the combined residence and concert venue created by Benoit Glazer and his wife, Élaine Corriveau, will allow opera companies from Central Florida and elsewhere to cut loose during the annual Timucua Opera Festival. | Courtesy Timucua Arts Foundation
No offense to the merry widows and magic flutes of the world, but opera can go beyond the tried and true. That’s the rationale behind the Timucua Opera Festival, which in its second year will again embolden companies from our region and beyond to take risks on new, obscure or otherwise challenging works.
“That’s my mandate to them: Be adventurous artistically,” says Benoit Glazer, artistic director and cofounder of the Timucua Arts Foundation. “I’m proud of being able to help these much bigger companies do things that they would not normally do.”
That could be something as simple but scary as mounting a baroque opera, a form that traditionally isn’t performed here, says Glazer, but which Opera Orlando will tackle with Handel’s Acis and Galatea (Friday and Sunday, March 20 and 22, times TBD).
Glazer himself—a former music director of Cirque de Soleil’s La Nouba—will be represented as a composer in the debut of his In My Lifetime (Sunday, March 1, time TBD), as performed by BCO, a community chamber orchestra, and mezzo-soprano Sarah Purser.
Other standouts on the schedule will include the world premiere of a yet-unnamed all-female opera composed by Keri Lee Pierson and Jessica Ackerley, and performed on International Women’s Day (Sunday, March 8, time TBD), as well as A Muskrat Lullaby (Saturday, March 14, 2:30 p.m.), a children’s opera by Musical Traditions Inc., a Windermere-based outfit with Slavic roots.
One of the more high-profile events will be María de Los Ángeles (Saturday, March 21, time TBD), a piece written specifically for the festival by Nathan Felix, an Austin, Texas-
based composer who maintains close ties to Orlando. (His Symphony in the Sky, described as “an interactive music experience on headphones,” was featured at the 2025 Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival.)
Glazer says that just about every local opera company will be represented on the roster of eight featured organizations from Central Florida, Michigan and Texas. And in a first for the festival—which last year had only a piano as backup—several performances will feature accompaniment by the Fernwood String Quartet.
The famous Timucua sound system, which can be programmed to replicate a host of acoustical environments, will be customized not only from program to program but from selection to selection. “This is actually the best place in town to hear opera,” says Glazer. “Especially opera in a chamber setting.”
As most locals know, Timucua’s “White House” venue in the SoDo neighborhood is, in fact, also the home of Glazer and his talented wife, Élaine Corriveau, who have created an intimate, three-story mini concert hall that annually hosts 150 shows that represent every musical genre as well as plays and spoken-word poetry.
For the Opera Festival, Glazer has hit upon an added enticement to interested artists: He has offered a financial guarantee for each booking—which will make it easier for ensembles to gamble on works with which audiences are less familiar.
Most operas, in fact, already have second performances planned. But those encores won’t be finalized until ticket sales are further along, around mid-February. (That’s why some performance times haven’t yet been determined.) Best of all for opera fans, ticket prices have been set at $30 or less. At last, a way to go baroque without going broke.
Timucua Arts Foundation is located at 2000 South Summerlin Avenue, Orlando. For more information, call or visit the website.
