Charles Castronovo/Photo: Dan Rest

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The perfect Mozart opera? Most would pick “The Marriage of Figaro,” some “Don Giovanni,” perhaps a handful even “Così fan tutte,” all Mozart collaborations with brilliant librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. And yet, for comedy, fantasy and intrigue, “The Magic Flute” has to top the list. A product of those much romanticized last months of his short life, this is Mozart at his most witty, his most charming and at the full height of his soon-to-be-silenced miraculous musical powers.

The memorable August Everding production that Lyric Opera is still using dates back to the mid-1980s and has frankly had more revivals than I can count with casts of various quality levels. After a quarter of a century of use here and elsewhere, apparently some of the pieces could barely be repainted and lighting had to be adjusted to compensate for the age of some of the scenery. If so, this is never obvious in the current revival. Read the rest of this entry »

Amber Wagner, Brandon Jovanovich/Photo: Dan Rest

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During the recently ended Bill Mason era at Lyric Opera, the philosophy was that works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss had to alternate for attention to contain costs of the huge orchestra needed for these works. This year, however, the Strauss opera presented, “Ariadne auf Naxos,” employs a chamber orchestra, yet nonetheless was left to stand as the single season ambassador to represent the vast canvas of German Romanticism.

This production was originally mounted for soprano Deborah Voigt, who had sung the role here in 1998 and was to have sung this revival, “Ariadne” being one of her signature roles. However, soon after a Chicago Symphony concert over the summer spotlighting Strauss and Wagner roles associated with her where Voigt was having obvious vocal trouble, she abruptly withdrew from these performances with a statement that she was “focusing increasingly on dramatic soprano roles and thus has decided to drop the part from [her] repertory for the time being.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ferruccio Furlanetto/Photo: Dan Rest

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“Boris Godunov” is making a return appearance to Lyric Opera for the first time in some seventeen years, a long time to go without hearing the crown jewel of Russian opera. What is needed to make it work is a bass extraordinaire who doesn’t come around all that often. Lyric had to wait its turn to obtain the services of Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, who is making his Lyric debut with this role.

One could quibble about the size and color of the voice, which is not the dark timbre often associated with classic performances of the tortured czar. But the nuances of Furlanetto’s characterization are profound and the shading of his voice expressive of the myriad of moods that need to be conveyed. Making a splendid contrast with Furlanetto is the darker sound of Italian bass Andrea Silvestrelli as Pimen. Read the rest of this entry »

Susanna Phillips/Photo: Dan Rest

It is telling that in a series of promotional videos that Lyric Opera music director Sir Andrew Davis and creative consultant Renée Fleming made to promote the new season, Davis admits that he is not partial to the bel canto repertoire before he nonetheless waxes on about the melodic appeal of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

The strategy for the company’s new production of “Lucia” is to depend on the vision of a former Lucia, Catherine Malfitano, to direct, apparently with the hope that the drama she once brought to the role—the actual singing of it was never her strength—would somehow translate to another portrayal and to an entire production. Would that it were so.

Instead, the end result comes off as a bewildering affair, marked by portrayals that seem detached as to what their specific character—to say nothing of anyone else’s—is doing in this opera. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Polenzani and Anna Christy/Photo: Dan Rest

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The projected translation “I stumbled on a barren landscape” received a hearty laugh at Saturday’s lavish Lyric Opera opening night, given that much of Wacker Drive surrounding the Civic Opera House is in such a state of reconstructive disarray that just accessing the Opera House became a pre-opening-night scavenger hunt for patrons, some joking aloud about what formal hard hats might look like.

It seems hard to believe that it has been nearly thirty years since we have heard Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann” at Lyric Opera, first presented in 1976 and remounted in 1982. Like last year’s “Lohengrin,” which was also absent from the company repertoire for nearly three decades, it becomes a treat just to hear it again after such a long drought. And given that the episodic opera itself is framed by a party setting, it seemed oddly appropriate to perform “Hoffmann” on opening night when the audience itself is a virtual extension of the opera’s festivities.  Read the rest of this entry »

Renee Fleming/Photo: Andrew Eccles

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 Although billed annually as “Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park,” there have been some years where the billing has had a noticeable dog star or two. But this year, the first such concert since soprano Renée Fleming was named creative consultant at Lyric Opera, Fleming’s presence as the reigning superstar soprano in the world today boosts up the luminosity factor of this pre-season concert considerably.  

Coming as it does on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11—an occasion when Fleming soothed the soul of the nation with the balm of her voice at services at Ground Zero—Fleming offers “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” as an opening piece and commemoration of that occasion. Read the rest of this entry »

Danielle Knox and William Bennett/Photo: Rich Foreman

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Light Opera Works actually giving us—well, light opera works—is always a special treat, given how much emphasis the company has come to place on musicals in recent years. And the only operetta offering of the season is tailor-made for the resources of the Evanston-based company: Sigmund Romberg’s delightful “The Student Prince,” which has not been done at LOW in a decade.

Part “Prisoner of Zenda,” part “Wuthering Heights” set to waltz music and frothy melodies, it is easy to forget that the work is a thoroughly twentieth-century confection that began life on the Broadway stage. It was, in fact, the longest-running show of the 1920s, with more performances during that decade than the far more forward-looking work now so indelibly associated with that time, “Show Boat.” Read the rest of this entry »

Catalina Cuervo

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Here’s something you won’t see at Lyric Opera, and not likely even at Chicago Opera Theater: a tango opera. We tend to think of the tango as largely an instrumental genre and of its greatest exponent, Argentine composer and bandoneón virtuoso Ástor Piazzolla, as the master of the genre.

In 1968, however, Piazzolla wrote an opera with Argentine poet Horacio Ferrer since, as Piazzolla remarked when they first met, “You are doing in your poetry what I am doing in my music.”

The end result, “María de Buenos Aires,” is a large-scale work that is to the tango what Johann Strauss II’s “Die Fledermaus” is to the waltz: not a mere pastiche of one sung dance after another, but a cohesive narrative told via tango, in this case incorporating various types of tango, including traditional, romance, song, modern, milonga and yes, even waltz, along with folk music from the Pampas. Read the rest of this entry »

Anna Stephany and Ensemble/Photo: Liz Lauren

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A Chicago premiere, more than three centuries after a work was first performed? Welcome to Charpentier’s “Médée,” that seventeenth-century chestnut that as a byproduct of the court of Louis XIV fell into neglect until being rediscovered by the modern early music movement of the 1980s and nineties. It had been a long-stated desire of retiring Chicago Opera Theater general director Brian Dickie to present the Chicago premiere of this work—often considered the crown jewel of French Baroque opera—and this he did at long last, over Easter weekend.

This is the second of COT’s “Medea” trilogy that began with last year’s production of Cavalli’s “Giasone” (“Jason”) and which will conclude with next year’s production of Handel’s “Teseo” (“Theseus”). The carryover for all three productions is the sturdy presence of Baroque Band—the Chicago-based period-instrument ensemble that British violinist Garry Clarke founded here in 2007—and Scottish conductor and early music specialist Christian Curnyn who, as he did with “Giasone,” did a stunning job with his harpsichord continuo playing as well as keeping the action moving ahead in a spirited manner.  Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Albrink/Photo: Paula Aguilera

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Combining all of the art forms as it does in a live setting,  opera is the ultimate human creation. A cursory look at the history of the genre reveals that, at its best, opera remains a step ahead of culture whether in the form of the cutting-edge eighteenth-century operas of Mozart, or the nineteenth-century “music dramas” of Wagner, which even managed to foresee much of what became twentieth-century cinema. Despite some notable exceptions, however, it was more common for opera productions to be more adventurous than the operas themselves during the twentieth century, largely a century of re-imagining new ways to stage old works.

Contemporary examples of opera where one or two elements are innovative are not uncommon, but new operas where every possible element pushes the envelope and which nonetheless manage to become much more than the sum of its parts are ultra rare. Tod Machover’s “Death and the Powers,” which is receiving its Midwest premiere by Chicago Opera Theater after premiering in Monaco last September and after having its American premiere last month in Boston, is such a work. Read the rest of this entry »