Arizona Opera turns to AI for Tucson song fest finale

When Arizona Opera brings “Aida” to Linda Ronstadt Music Hall on Saturday, it will take Verdi’s tragic opera where no one has before: the world of artificial intelligence.

Arizona Opera is the first to fully integrate AI into a live opera.

The company’s 21st century reimagination incorporates projection designer and film director David Murakami‘s AI-generated film with live vocals.

But unlike a cine-concert, where the live orchestra syncs to the movie, computer operators re-edit and re-sync the AI film in real time so that the film follows the live vocals, a sort of reverse syncopation.

That technology from Runway AI didn’t exist when Murakami set out last year to create the film for Arizona Opera.

“We took this leap ... without the technology being ready yet,” Murakami said last week, days before “Aida” opened in Phoenix.

It comes to Tucson for a 2 p.m. performance Saturday, April 19, as the finale of the 2025 Tucson Desert Song Festival, with soprano and Metropolitan Opera regular Leah Hawkins making her role debut as Aida and baritone Limmie Pulliam as her love interest General Radamès.

This is the first time Arizona Opera has mounted Verdi’s grand opera since 2012, when the performance featured 50 choristers, more than 25 supernumeraries — extras who filled the crowd scenes — six dancers and 10 audience members in costumes sitting on stage.

Add to that two camels, four greyhounds and a snake and you can see why it’s called grand opera.

Saturday’s performance will feature nine vocalists singing the roles of Verdi’s characters, a chorus of 46 and 61 musicians in the orchestra performing under the baton of Conductor Stephanie Rhodes Russell as the story of the captive Ethiopian princess and the general who’s trying to rescue her unfolds on a big screen.

When he announced the 2024-25 season last spring, Arizona Opera President and General Director Joseph Specter pitched “Aida” as a concert in large part because of the expense of mounting “Aida.”

Arizona, like opera companies nationwide, is still digging out of the financial mess wrought by the pandemic and is forced to rethink how it presents opera.

“Innovation combined with a passion for the tradition is really going to be what gets us to a really positive place as an art form, as an industry,” Specter said.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Specter, who is leaving the company in June after nine seasons, knows a thing or three about innovation and thinking outside the box.

During the pandemic, when live productions were on hold and private funding was drying up, Specter and Arizona Opera released a graphic novel of “Carmen,” one of the productions that was on deck for its first post-pandemic season in 2021-22.

Specter’s definition of “Aida” as a concert performance fell into that thinking outside the box vision.

“We wanted to add a visual component to it in order to just bring the piece to fuller life for those who maybe don’t know ‘Aida’ as well,” he explained.

So he reached out to Murakami, whose projections were a big part of Arizona Opera’s 2018 performance of Wagner’s epic “Das Rheingold.”

But as Murakami noted, “Joe dreams very big.”

A little background visual turned into Specter dreaming out loud about creating a movie with AI, Murakami recalled of those initial conversations.

That was last spring-ish, Murakami said during a phone call from a rehearsal break last week in Phoenix. But it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that the AI-generated film came to life.

The Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) technology developed 10 months ago allows them to preserve the character identities through the performance and Runway Act One, the technology required to reverse sync the live vocals, was just released in October.

“So basically, you have to think about a three-hour long movie created in the course of two months by five people,” Murakami said. “That gives you a sense of ... what AI can do, which is terrifying when you think about it.”

“Having the visual storytelling was important to us,” said Specter, who will take the helm of the Scottsdale-based Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in June. “(The AI film) is consistent with everything we’ve tried to do with Arizona Opera through our years together in terms of honoring the art form, which is so special, while also trying to innovate in ways that we hope will open up the work that we do to new audiences as well.”

“It’s a big adventure for people that are a little skeptical,” he allowed. “We hope that they’ll go on that adventure with us.”

There are only a handful of tickets (starting at $30 through azopera.org) available for Saturday’s performance.