Opera still matters – and Astana Opera is proof

When people claim opera has lost its audience, Astana Opera offers a simple rebuttal: over the past decade it has drawn around 140,000 audience members a year, with more than 1.5 million attending in total, and supporters are getting younger, not older.

Opera is not being preserved here. It is alive and well, being loved and bringing joy to hundreds of thousands of people. In recent seasons, more than half of its audience has been under 35, and roughly 40 per cent have travelled from outside Astana, including from abroad.

This success has been enabled by consistency. Long‑term backing from institutions such as Timur Kulibayev’s Halyk Charitable Fund and Halyk Bank has allowed the theatre to plan across seasons rather than productions: investing in training, technical capability and touring capacity alongside headline performances. That stability shapes behaviour. Audiences return because standards are reliably high, performers stay because careers are viable and rewarding. The institution grows because it has built trust.

And because it invests in the future. Astana Opera has built a pipeline for younger audiences and future performers – from its long-running Children’s Studio, established to identify and develop talent, to hands-on education formats that demystify the art form. In a recent two-day programme led by the Halyk Charitable Fund, children toured the theatre, observed rehearsals, and explored the costume, props and stagecraft workshops, before attending a performance – a unique introduction to how opera and ballet are made. Alongside this, the theatre also enrols children in craft workshops, from painting and drawing to sewing and wood carving.

Astana Opera has become one of Central Asia’s most intensively used cultural institutions. It does not chase novelty. It delivers to the highest standards: an ambitious repertoire, technical quality, and sustained investment in talent and production.

This matters because the familiar story about opera – that it is aloof, ageing and irrelevant – still circulates. It resurfaced again this February when actor Timothée Chalamet joked that “no one cares” about opera or ballet, a remark that triggered pushback from major institutions and, tellingly, a reported spike in ticket sales at venues such as London’s Royal Ballet and Opera.

Astana Opera’s trajectory makes the point more clearly than any rebuttal on social media. In the past two years alone, the company has toured extensively at home and abroad, represented Kazakhstan on major international stages across Eurasia, and hosted packed seasons of opera, ballet and orchestral work in a 1,250‑seat main auditorium.

Its international opera academy now runs competitive intakes – with multiple applicants for every place – and graduates move directly onto professional stages.

Opera’s value is often overstated in abstract terms and understated in practical ones. It does not endure because it is educational, virtuous or prestigious. It endures because, at its best, it is absorbing, exacting and communal. People attend for the same reason they always have: to experience something unique and be transported.

That is what Astana Opera delivers. When it is taken seriously – funded steadily, programmed confidently, and opened to everyone rather than mythologised – audiences keep attending. The question is not whether opera still matters. It is whether institutions are willing to invest in it, long-term, to keep it growing.