With a stirring lead performance by John Holiday, the Philip Glass opera returns to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, transforming ancient myth into a haunting meditation on power today.
By John Lavitt
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 03-03-2026
Few operas explore the intoxicating pull of absolute belief as potently as Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. Now revived at the LA Opera in a visually stunning production, director Phelim McDermott and conductor Dalia Stasevska (in her company debut) transform Glass’s minimalist masterpiece into a profound meditation on how charisma, ritual, and spectacle forge a cult of personality. And not just any cult of personality, but one of staggering ego and deadly devotion that proves capable of reshaping an entire civilization.
At the center of this mesmerizing ritual stands countertenor John Holiday. His performance in the title role is nothing short of spellbinding. Holiday’s tone floats above the orchestra with an eerie purity, at once ethereal and commanding. This is no conventional tyrant. Holiday embodies Akhnaten as a visionary, a man wholly intoxicated by his own revelation. The effect is deeply unsettling. His serene vocal lines project a calm conviction that slowly crystallizes into authoritarian certainty, pulling the audience into the pharaoh’s singular vision as inexorably as it pulls the Egyptian court.
Two formidable women powerfully reinforce the opera’s emotional and political architecture. Mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce delivers a luminous Nefertiti, her musical partnership with Akhnaten creating an almost sacred aura around the royal couple. Their duets feel less like romantic exchanges and more like the liturgy of a new religion, sanctifying the mythic authority the pharaoh seeks to establish.
Amplifying that influence from a position of regal gravity is soprano So Young Park as Queen Tye. Park grounds the drama in the political realities behind the mysticism, her presence a living link to the tradition and power that Akhnaten ultimately attempts to erase. Together, Holiday, Pierce, and Park form a magnetic triangle of revolutionary zeal, inherited power, and the lineage it seeks to overwrite.
Glass’s score—arguably one of the composer’s most compelling—unfolds in waves of rhythmic repetition that feel hypnotic rather than mechanical. Under Stasevska’s precise baton, the orchestra maintains a steady, ritualistic pulse. The music does not rush toward climax; instead, it slowly envelops the listener, mirroring the gradual, total consolidation of Akhnaten’s ideological control.
McDermott’s staging makes this sense of ceremonial power manifest. Towering set pieces, gravity-defying acrobats, and astonishing jugglers populate the stage, transforming the opera into a living, breathing monument. These are not mere spectacles for their own sake. They evoke the machinery of propaganda—the rituals and carefully curated wonders through which a ruler constructs divine legitimacy. Every choreographed movement reinforces the sense of a society being systematically reorganized around a single, radical vision.
Drawing on ancient texts, the libretto anchors the drama in historical myth while allowing Glass’s music to carry the emotional narrative. Sung in English, Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, and Akkadian, the production underscores the universality of its themes: how revolutionary ideas can inspire awe even as they dismantle the established order.
By the time Akhnaten’s utopian experiment begins to unravel, the audience falls under its spell. That is the singular brilliance of this revival. It refuses to present Akhnaten as a mere historical curiosity. Instead, it reveals the seductive, terrifying mechanics of visionary power itself. At the LA Opera, Akhnaten is not just an opera about ancient Egypt. It is a haunting portrait of how a single charismatic voice can reshape the spiritual imagination of an entire world. Moreover, it is a warning to listen beyond the intoxication of sound and fury.
