The Royal Opera House Muscat announced its 2026 to 2027 season on Monday 31 August, marking fifteen years since the house opened in 2011. The anniversary season runs from October 2026 to May 2027 and comprises 28 shows across 43 performance nights, according to Muscat Daily and the Oman Observer.
The programme sets European grand opera and ballet beside leading names in Arab song, an Omani instrumentalist and a new opera about Sindbad. The Oman Observer describes the house as the first opera house in the GCC and Oman’s flagship performing arts institution.
An opera house at fifteen
The house was built by royal decree of the late Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who was known as a lover of classical music. Fifteen years on, the season shows how far its ambitions have moved from hosting visiting productions towards making its own.
The clearest sign is Sindbad: The Omani Sailor, which the house itself produces with Müpa Budapest and the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The sailor of the Thousand and One Nights has long been associated with Oman’s seafaring past, and an opera on the subject, made in Muscat, gives the anniversary a home-grown centrepiece.
The European programme
The season opens with Verdi’s Rigoletto, a co-production with the Lithuanian Opera and Ballet Theatre. It is described as the final operatic vision of the director Franco Zeffirelli. Opening a fifteenth season with a work by a director so closely tied to grand opera is a statement of intent.
Dance has a prominent place. The Teatro alla Scala Ballet is due to perform Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote, a full-length work built on bravura solos and Spanish colour.
The singers and instrumentalists include two debuts. The mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča makes her Oman debut, and the Oman Observer says she appears with the Orchestra of Teatro Regio of Turin. The accordionist Ksenija Sidorova also makes her first appearance, with the European Philharmonia Orchestra. A Grand Opera Gala is planned with the Bolshoi Theatre of Belarus Symphony Orchestra, and the organist Cameron Carpenter is due to give a pipe-organ concert.
Families are not overlooked. The Magic Flute: Defeating the Monsters is a family adaptation of Mozart’s opera, performed with the Muscat Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia della Scala and the ROHM Children’s Choir. Also announced are The Nutcracker on Ice and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in concert.
Arab voices and Omani music
The Arab programme is among the season’s strengths. Marwa Nagy performs an Omani Women’s Day concert, and appears again with Yosra Mahnouch in an evening titled Kulthumiyat. Nawal and Nabeel Shuail have a concert, and Medhat Saleh and Mohammed Assaf appear in A Tribute to the Nightingale. Aseel Abu Bakr closes the programme.
The sources do not give the singers’ nationalities or say whom the tribute evening honours, so those details are best checked with the opera house.
Instrumental music has its own evening. Homage to the Qanun pairs the Omani qanun virtuoso Wahab Al Dhanki with the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra and the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra. The qanun is a plucked zither with a long place in Arab classical music, and this concert sets it beside two orchestras.
During Ramadan, the Oman Observer reports, the house will host evenings of Sufi and inshad music from Oman and Syria. Inshad is devotional song, and these concerts offer a gentler programme for the month.
More than a concert hall
An exhibition titled 15 Years of Stage and Splendour will show costumes, artefacts and archives, giving visitors a look behind the curtain at what it takes to run an opera house on the Arabian Peninsula. For a young institution, the archive is also a way of recording that it has a history.
Planning a visit
Neither of the two reports gives dates for individual performances or ticket prices. Those details are on the opera house’s website, rohmuscat.org.om, and readers should take dates and prices from there before booking.
With 43 nights spread over about eight months, there are many chances to see a production, and the programme mixes family shows with evening concerts. For visitors from elsewhere in the Gulf, a night at the opera could anchor a short stay in Muscat.
What the announcement establishes is a season of scale, with something for opera lovers, ballet audiences, families and listeners of Arab song alike. Twenty-eight shows, an anniversary exhibition and a home-made opera suggest an institution confident enough to look back as well as forward.
Sources: Muscat Daily, Oman Observer