Anthony Roth Costanzo

Anthony Roth Costanzo is an American countertenor, opera director, and producer born on May 8, 1982, in Durham, North Carolina, where both of his parents were professors of psychology at Duke University. His mother was Hungarian-Jewish and his father Italian. He serves as general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, a position he assumed on June 1, 2024, under an initial three-year contract that was subsequently extended through May 31, 2029. In that role he has instituted a flexible ticket pricing policy.

Costanzo entered the performing arts at age eleven, appearing on Broadway and in Broadway national tours. His Broadway credits include Falsettos, and he also performed in national tours of A Christmas Carol and The Sound of Music. During his early career he sang backup for Michael Jackson and the Olsen Twins, performed a duet with Deborah Gibson, and began his opera work as a teenager, taking the role of Miles in The Turn of the Screw. He also performed alongside Luciano Pavarotti in the Opera Extravaganza production presented by the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.

He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University in 2004 with a degree in music, receiving the Lewis Sudler Prize in the Arts. He subsequently earned a Master of Music from the Manhattan School of Music, where he was awarded the Hugh Ross Award. Costanzo continues to return to Princeton to teach courses and master classes. His competition record includes a Grand Finals win at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2009 and first place at the Operalia competition in 2012.

At the Metropolitan Opera, Costanzo has performed Unulfo in Rodelinda, Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, both Ferdinand and Prospero in the world premiere of The Enchanted Island, and the title role in Philip Glass's Akhnaten, which he also performed at the English National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera, with his Metropolitan Opera run occurring in November and December 2019. His European debut came at the Glyndebourne Festival in Rinaldo. Additional international engagements include the Teatro Real Madrid in Death in Venice in 2014, the English National Opera in The Indian Queen in 2015, and the Finnish National Opera in Kaija Saariaho's Only the Sound Remains in 2017. He has also appeared with the Canadian Opera Company, the San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera, the Dallas Opera, the Glimmerglass Festival, the San Diego Opera, the Boston Lyric Opera, Michigan Opera Theater, Palm Beach Opera, The North Carolina Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and as a guest with Juilliard Opera.

Costanzo created the role of Jimmy López's Bel Canto at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and Jake Heggie's Great Scott at the Dallas Opera. He has also premiered works composed specifically for him by Matthew Aucoin, Paola Prestini, Gregory Spears, Suzanne Farrin, Bernard Rands, Scott Wheeler, Mohammed Fairouz, Steve Mackey, and Nico Muhly.

On the concert stage, Costanzo made his debuts with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic in 2018, performing György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and directed by Peter Sellars. He appeared in the New York Philharmonic's production of Le Grand Macabre in 2010 and sang Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall in 2009. He has performed Handel's Messiah, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, and Orff's Carmina Burana with The Cleveland Orchestra, and has appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the orchestras of Indianapolis, Detroit, Denver, Birmingham, and Seattle, among others. He has also performed with Jordi Savall in Barcelona, Paris, and Versailles, and at the Spoleto Festival USA.

As a producer and curator, Costanzo created a 2018 multimedia art installation with Visionaire involving producer Cath Brittan, artist George Condo, fashion designer Raf Simons, choreographer Justin Peck, and dancers David Hallberg and Patricia Delgado, among other collaborators. He curated and produced two sold-out runs at National Sawdust, including Aci, Galatea e Polifemo and Orphic Moments, the latter of which traveled to the Salzburger Landestheater and then to Lincoln Center's Rose Theater with MasterVoices. He also helped create presentations of The Tale of Genji with Kabuki and Noh actors, with sold-out runs in Tokyo and Kyoto. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he devised the NY Phil Bandwagon project with the New York Philharmonic, organizing small-scale, socially distanced outdoor concerts. At Princeton, he created a pasticcio about castrati in collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage and filmmaker James Ivory; the resulting documentary by Gerardo Puglia was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, qualified for an Academy Award, and aired on PBS affiliates. In 2023, he collaborated with the group Princess Goes — comprising Michael C. Hall, Matt Katz-Bohen, and Peter Yanowitz — on the track Saving Grace for their album Come of Age.

Costanzo's film work includes the role of Francis in the Merchant Ivory production A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination. He played Simon in Brice Cauvin's De Particulier à Particulier and portrayed Allen Ginsberg in the short film Starving Hysterical Naked. As an exclusive recording artist for Decca Gold, he released his debut album ARC in 2018, featuring Les Violons du Roy under Jonathan Cohen and comprising works by Philip Glass and G.F. Handel; the album was nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. He also collaborated with cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond on Only an Octave Apart, which premiered at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, traveled to London in fall 2022, and yielded a same-titled album.