This season, Arizona Opera is moving from Symphony Hall to a lemonade stand.

“The renovation of Symphony Hall is causing us enormous headaches,” says Joel Revzen, the company’s general director. “But I think to a large degree we’ve turned the lemons we’ve been handed into lemonade.”

Revzen and his staff have wrangled one week at ASU’s large but hard-to-book Gammage Auditorium, and then will settle into the more intimate Orpheum Theatre for the rest of the season.

Trouble is, the Orpheum’s pit will accommodate an orchestra of no more than 33 players. So, short of drastically reducing and rescoring a lot of standard operas — something Revzen refuses to do — that means a season without beefily orchestrated standard works by Verdi, Wagner, Puccini or Strauss. The emphasis this season is on more intimate works by Rossini, Mozart and Menotti.

The exception is the first production, pairing Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s ‘‘Pagliacci’’ (think sobbing clown) with Giacomo Puccini’s gritty “Il Tabarro”; both are short, sordid tales of adultery and revenge in the late-19th-century verismo style, which brought naturalism and common folk to the opera stage.

After that, the company scales back for its temporary move to the Orpheum, but a smaller orchestra doesn’t necessarily mean less opulent productions. Gioacchino Rossini’s version of ‘‘Cinderella’’ promises some glitter (but no singing mice).

W.A. Mozart’s serious-minded sex farce “Così fan tutte” opens the new calendar year. Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1949 “The Consul,” a stark drama about people trying to leave a totalitarian state, closes the season in April.

Scheduling problems precluded the usual fifth production, so Revzen will compensate with a February performance at the Herberger Theater, featuring six soloists plus full orchestra and chorus in a series of arias and ensemble pieces — old favorites by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Delibes and Bizet, plus attractive numbers by the likes of Dvorák and Korngold never before presented in a full Arizona Opera production.

Partly to ensure that the sets for all these shows will expand into the Tucson Convention Center Music Hall and contract for the smaller Orpheum, Arizona Opera is returning to the practice of designing and building its own sets. Since the late 1980s, Arizona Opera has rented most of its sets from other companies, a practice Revzen dislikes.

“It’s a misconception that renting sets is much, much cheaper than building them,” Revzen says. “No. 1, if you build it, you can amortize the cost over five years, and you can rent it out to other companies that don’t have the resources in production staff or creativity to do that kind of work.

“We have a phenomenal production staff here in Arizona. Other companies are already interested in renting our ‘Così fan tutte,’ just from looking at the design. And most creative directors do not want to develop a concept in someone else’s house; they prefer to work with new sets.”

Revzen is getting to know the “Consul” set quite well. Arizona Opera’s is being re-created from a design used for a production Revzen conducted in the Berkshires this summer, and he’ll be seeing it again when he conducts the work at St. Petersburg’s Kirov Opera; it’ll be the first American opera ever produced at that Russian house.

Although Revzen will continue conducting outside of Arizona — he remains on the Metropolitan Opera’s conducting staff — he says he intends to keep a sharp eye on his own company’s operation. For the first time in years, Arizona Opera ended the past season in the black and with a small surplus, thanks largely to two unexpected bequests. Vows Revzen, “This is going to be the norm, not the exception.”