Danielle de Niese, Kyle Ketelsen/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

Sir Peter Hall’s stellar production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” has been a regular visitor here since Lyric first premiered it back in 1987. For the first time, however, Hall himself did not make the trip to direct, and so Herbert Kellner took over the reigns, adding much freshness in the process. British conductor and English National Opera music director Edward Gardner was to have made his Lyric debut conducting these performances, but withdrew to be with his wife in England for the birth of their first child. Luckily, Sir Andrew Davis, who made his own Lyric debut with this original production twenty-three years ago, was on hand, and knows this score inside and out. Even the original choreographer, Kenneth von Heidecke, was brought in to stage the infamous wedding-dance scene that, as fans of “Amadeus” may recall, caused a stir with the emperor’s court because dance in opera had been banned. Of course, that was the least of the emperor’s problems with a work that was revolutionary in every sense, from its subject matter of servants besting aristocrats to Mozart’s musical treatment, which set in place a new musical-theater template that has lasted into our own day. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Groves

RECOMMENDED

Aaron Copland used to routinely credit Berlioz for having virtually created the modern symphony orchestra.  Until Berlioz, composers wrote for orchestra as if it were basically an enlarged string quartet with winds used for timbral contrast and with strings and winds having very separate and clearly identifiable roles. It’s as if composers had only been painting in primary colors. With Berlioz, however, the full palette of the tone-color possibilities of the orchestra exploded with his daring blend of instruments in various combinations that created new sonorities that composers such as Mendelssohn and Rossini found incomprehensible and offensive; they actually assumed that he didn’t know any better.

This in part explains why it took the ultra-conservative and Italianate-centered Lyric Opera some half a century to present a single work by Berlioz. And once the company was ready psychologically to risk it a few years back for the Berlioz bicentennial, the expense of doing so scared it off in the wake of the economic downturn following 9/11: we still have yet to hear the promised “Benvenuto Cellini” that was forsaken for the box-office safety net of Gilbert & Sullivan.

The company decision to present a staged version of Berlioz’ oratorio “The Damnation of Faust” this season was a fairly safe one in a town where the piece had been a virtual party piece for Solti and the Chicago Symphony, even having been used as the basis for a memorable European tour that was the only time that the CSO Chorus went along. Still, the musical challenges of the work are enormous, way beyond anything Lyric had attempted since first mounting Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in the 1990s. The artistic resources of the company would be fully put on the line, admirable during a time of economic uncertainty. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicole Cabell, Giuseppe Filianoti/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

Who would have thought that this silly opera buffa of the bel canto era would end up being one of the highlights of the current Lyric Opera season?  Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love” is one of those works that endures primarily because of its rapturous melodies. Its far-fetched “plot,” such as it is—an illiterate country boy in love with a wealthy land owner who competes for her affections with a lout of a military officer by buying a barker’s magic love elixir—is hardly compelling. One opera lover was overheard complaining that in contrast to the current Lyric “Tosca,” where every main character ends up dead, how boring it is that everyone in “Elixir” actually lives. Oh well.

Death tolls aside, there are aspects of this production that make it a “must see.” The quality of the singing itself is extraordinary and, overall, this is the finest “Elixir” to be heard here in many, many years. Lyric has routinely used “Elixir” to spotlight a particular singer—this was the second opera Pavarotti ever sang here—but the supporting cast has usually been immensely uneven, making this a long evening when you hear singers with stodgy voices attempt to traverse the many runs, scales and trills of the piece. Here, however, we actually have a cast who not only can actually sing this stuff, but that is credible dramatically in doing so. Read the rest of this entry »

Lucio Gallo,Violeta Urmana/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

The second time is the charm, as it turns out, with Puccini’s “Tosca.” The Italian warhorse, the most-often performed opera in Lyric Opera history, opened the season last September full of stars thoroughly miscast in Puccini’s melodrama. Happily, this time around, ironically with a “B” cast, things are much better in virtually every respect.

Making her long-overdue Lyric Opera debut, Lithuanian soprano Violeta Urmana is everything you could want in a Tosca: jealous at the drop of a hat with a fiery temper, conniving and manipulative enough to secure passage for herself and her lover and still commit murder, and yet at the same time, she is a tender lover and sensitive artist. I suspect her darker vocal color will not be to everyone’s taste—she was originally a mezzo-soprano but switched to upward roles in recent years—but if viewed as an extension of the character and as a refreshing take on an overdone role, her approach works wonderfully well.

Likewise, Italian tenor Marco Berti, also making his Lyric Opera debut, embodies the fiery yet sensitive spirit of Cavaradossi, who can be concerned about making Tosca jealous one moment by the choice of models in his paintings, and be defiant in the face of torture and execution (this Cavaradossi clearly never buys that this is to be a “mock” execution) the next. Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth Futral/Photo: Dan Rest

“I will wear the orchestra out with my dance card,” says the Merry Widow herself (Elizabeth Futral) at the Act I party where her countrymen are trying to make sure that her fortune stays within their country. The irony is that the old gal almost didn’t have an orchestra at all, as the Lyric Opera Orchestra, which had been playing without a contract since the season began nearly three months ago, had threatened a strike by curtain time of Saturday’s opening. A tentative agreement had been reached early Friday morning, averting a work stoppage.

Lyric Opera has always had a snobby attitude about “The Merry Widow.” Lyric founder Carol Fox wouldn’t touch it since it was an operetta and not an opera, but Ardis Krainik found herself presenting it twice during the 1980s: the first with Evelyn Lear in the company’s first-ever production, and again in 1986 as a vehicle for Kiri Te Kanawa, although Te Kanawa pulled out and Maria Ewing took her place. This third-ever company production sees the pendulum swing to the opposite direction, given that it was conceived around veteran Chicago director Gary Griffin and the vast majority of those involved with it come from the theater world rather than the opera world. That’s great in that it means that those long sections of spoken dialogue are performed by genuine actors, but when the singing begins, we’re often hearing “show” voices rather than operatic voices, which means that the music often loses its sparkle and luster. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Collins, Liora Grodnikaite, Judith Forst, Karita Mattila/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

The operas of Leoš Janácek came rather late into the Lyric Opera canon, but the first opera from his so-called mature period, 1921’s “Káta Kabanová,” is making its first return visit since it was first heard here back in 1986. At that time, Lyric’s then-general director Ardis Krainik pushed the piece’s connections to Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” in the hopes that Lyric’s conservative Italian-repertoire-centered audiences would accept the piece.  Twenty-three years later, “Katya,” as it is often referred to in English, is still a tough-enough sell for Lyric audiences that those loose connections are once again being brought out of moth balls.  Yes, it is true that Janácek loosely claimed such an inspiration, but aside from the virtually opposite music worlds that these two early twentieth-century operas occupy—Puccini looking back to a previous century, Janácek a composer of his time who sought to innovate and look ahead—the heroine of “Butterfly” remains faithful to her husband whereas “Katya” is the one who cheats on her husband. Despite the considerable sympathy that is built up for Janácek’s heroine, that remains a crucial dramatic difference. Read the rest of this entry »

Salvatore Licitra, Sondra Radvanovsky/Photo: Valerie Bromann

RECOMMENDED

Giuseppe Verdi’s “Ernani,” an early work that is rarely performed, is being heard for only the second time in Lyric Opera’s fifty-five year history, the last time having been some twenty-five years ago. Based on the Victor Hugo play “Hernani” that is set during the Spanish Renaissance, the play caused a sensation in its day but is ironically now as much remembered for having inspired Verdi to write an opera around it. Hugo’s original and convoluted plot was so reduced and reworked to its bare bones in Verdi’s opera that Hugo was understandably furious. Indeed, its tedious plot and the fact that Verdi’s music often has little to do with what is being dramatically conveyed make it an occasional undertaking for only the most Italianate-obsessed of opera companies. Why then recommend it?  Because unlike the most popular works of Verdi that so often sell themselves at Lyric that the company can often get away with assembling second-rate casts, “Ernani” is such a tough sell that you need a sterling cast to make it succeed. (The 1984 production did not succeed on any level.) Read the rest of this entry »

Rene Pape/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

It used to be that Gounod’s “Faust” was the most popular opera in the entire repertoire, bar none. It was “Faust” that opened the old Met in 1883—in Italian, no less—and its popularity was such that a performance of the work opened nearly every opera season, every year.  It was Gounod’s “Faust” around which Gaston Leroux set his “Phantom of the Opera,” and the 1925 Lon Chaney film version actually included entire scenes from the opera. Indeed, when speaking of his twelve years spent as a music critic, George Bernard Shaw used to joke that ten of those were spent listening to “Faust.” Even in Germany, where Goethe’s “Faust” is a religion all of its own, the opera has always been popular, though so unfavorably compared to Goethe that German-speaking countries often presented the opera as “Marguerite” in deference to the German poet.

At Lyric Opera, “Faust” has always been popular, and even as it became less performed in other houses, Lyric kept the “Faust” tradition burning brightly. Read the rest of this entry »

James Morris, Deborah Voigt/Photo: Dan Rest

In these trying economic times, Lyric Opera management is taking no chances: not only is the company presenting one of its most conservative seasons in the company’s fifty-five year history, but it broke off contract negotiations last Friday night with the Lyric Opera Orchestra, which had rejected a shorter season and wage freezes, i.e., a significant reduction in pay.  That management appears to have the upper hand was indicated by the fact that the Orchestra went ahead and performed at Saturday’s gala season opener without a contract. In better times, the Orchestra would have been on strike and the performance cancelled, but at least orchestra members were passing out pamphlets to the black-tie and gown set that walked down the red carpet leading to the doors of the Civic Opera House explaining their plight. Inside, too, there were indications that the recession was having an impact: the usual opening-night complimentary champagne became $9 a glass after Act I; the party favors handed out at evening’s end—a company poster—were “one per couple,” ushers literally grabbing them out of patrons’ hands who hadn’t heard.

Inside, the company was presenting its most-oft-performed tried-and-true Italian warhorse, Puccini’s “Tosca,” an opera by an Italian about Italians and written for Italians, and in most past seasons of the company long known as La Scala West, sung by Italians, or at least an Italian somewhere in the cast or in the orchestra pit. Not this time around. Soprano Deborah Voigt, a stellar Wagner and Strauss interpreter (neither are being heard in this budget-crunching season) and best known outside of the opera world for her celebrated weight-loss surgery after being fired by Covent Garden because her ample size made her unable to wear a kinky designer’s costume, sang the title role, a strange bit of miscasting. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A Lyric Opera donor cancelled his subscription a couple of seasons ago, and wrote across his cancellation that when Lyric starts paying serious attention to opera as a current art form, he would consider reinstating his subscription and his donations.  Even over at Chicago Opera Theater, which has always been more adventurous than Lyric, you usually get a single twentieth-century opera in a three-opera season and, this year, that opera was almost forty years old.

Enter Chicago Opera Vanguard, a new presenter in the City’s ever-evolving cultural landscape that is climaxing its inaugural season (called season 0) of cutting-edge opera with the long-overdue Chicago premiere of British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s transposition of the Oedipus myth to the Margaret Thatcher era, “Greek.”  Based on the 1980 Stephen Berkoff play of the same name and commissioned by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich Biennale Festival, Turnage’s operatic treatment is the work that established his reputation as the wunderkind of British new music, a reputation that would later propel him across the Atlantic to become a Chicago Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence in 2006. Read the rest of this entry »