'Aknaten' Returns to L.A. Opera with Spellbinding Force
/By Truman C. Wang
3/2/2026
Photo credit: Cory Weaver
John Holiday as Akhnaten (with So Young Park, at right, as Queen Tye)
There is something audacious about reviving a three-hour opera sung partly in Ancient Egyptian and Akkadian — and something even more audacious about the fact that it works, gloriously. Philip Glass's 1983 portrait of history's first monotheist, Akhnaten, returns to Los Angeles by popular demand, and it's easy to understand why audiences keep coming back.
Director Phelim McDermott's production is a spectacular act of theatrical imagination: Tom Pye's towering sets loom like fever dreams of the ancient world, Kevin Pollard's costumes dazzle with animal heads and exotic plumage, and Sean Gandini's acrobats and jugglers add a ritualistic circus energy that feels somehow exactly right for a pharaoh who thought he could reinvent religion. The whole thing moves with the glacial, hypnotic confidence of the Glass score itself — repetitive in the best possible sense, like a spell being cast.
Into this spectacle steps countertenor John Holiday as the pharaoh, an otherworldly figure both physically and vocally (‘full-frontal male nudity’ audience discretion is advised.) Holiday's high-pitched instrument is a marvel — floating and plangent, radiating the peculiar combination of visionary charisma and political obliviousness that doomed the historical Akhnaten. Beside him, mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce brings warmth and weight to Nefertiti, and their Act Two duet is, as it should be, the evening's emotional center. Soprano So Young Park commands the stage as the formidable Queen Tye, and Grammy-winning bass Zachary James — reprising his role as the late Amenhotep III — is a magisterial, sepulchral presence as narrator-ghost, the kind of low voice that seems to come up from the bowels of the earth.
Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska makes her L.A. Opera debut here, and she handles the Glass idiom with assurance, keeping the orchestra's relentless arpeggios from curdling into mere wallpaper while allowing the score's trance-state beauty to fully unfold. It is no small feat.
Akhnaten will not be to every taste. It has no real plot in the traditional sense — just ceremony, ritual, ecstasy, and collapse. But for those willing to surrender to it, this production offers something rare at the opera house: the sensation of watching something genuinely strange and genuinely beautiful at the same time.
Schroeder Shelby-Szyszko (center) as Young Tutankhamun
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.