Ferruccio Furlanetto/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

“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

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Anna Stephany and Ensemble/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

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

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Nadia Krasteva/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

For those Lyric Opera subscribers who missed the October performances of “Carmen” and instead have tickets to the March performances, there is good news: this recast incarnation is a far stronger production.

The fall production had been planned around the Lyric debut of mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich in the title role a mere five years after the company had last presented the popular warhorse, only to have Aldrich cancel due to complications from a pregnancy. Lyric’s solution was to cast the Carmen it had originally scheduled for a single matinee that Aldrich could not make—Iowa mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner—in all of the Carmens that Aldrich was originally scheduled to sing.

The result was a Carmen with a pleasing voice and stage presence, but a seductress in search of seductiveness, a low-energy temptless temptress. It is fascinating that Bulgarian mezzo-soprano Nadia Krasteva is neither more attractive—nor does she have a better voice—than Goeldner, but my, oh my, what a difference dramatically, which in this iconic role, counts for so much. This is a Carmen with swagger and attitude, a creature of wild and reckless freedom, which is not only what attracts Don José to her, but remains her lasting appeal to audiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Alice Coote, David Daniels/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

“War Follows You Home,” read the posters promoting Peter Sellars’ new production of Handel’s “Hercules” at Lyric Opera. Unlike his last production here—John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic,” where Sellars concocted his own libretto from nuclear formulae—Sellars has this time taken an existing work, an oratorio by Handel, and via extensive cuts and staging, cobbled a narrative that has tried to wrestle Handel’s work closer to its original source material, Sophocles’ “Women of Trachis,” that had been hopelessly optimized by Handel’s adapter. And yes, it works. Brilliantly, in fact.

What Sellars sees is that there is a profound parallel between the Sophocles telling of the post-labors Hercules’ homecoming into what has become an alien and uncontrollable world and the post-traumatic-stress syndrome of American troops returning from our own recent wars. The casualty in all of this, unfortunately, is much of Handel’s music, which has been gutted and restructured to conform to Sellars’ particular interpretation; entire choruses, arias, instrumental pieces, characters and subplots—even the glorious finale itself which portrays an apotheosis of Hercules into the arms of his father Jupiter—in short, anything that doesn’t fit Sellars’ directorial overlay, is simply disrespectfully discarded. Read the rest of this entry »

Sondra Radvanovsky, Frank Lopardo/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

It is unclear why Lyric Opera is suddenly marketing this Verdi opera under the translation title “A Masked Ball” rather than the Italian title “Un ballo in maschera” that it is known by internationally, even when it has been presented in other languages (the Met premiered it in German!). So do we start calling “La traviata” “The Fallen Woman,” “Il trovatore” “The Troubadour” and should we start adding an “h” to Verdi’s “Otello?”

To further complicate matters, Verdi had to set “ballo” in seventeenth-century Boston, believe it or not (translation, “once upon a time” or “in a galaxy far, far away” as far as nineteenth-century Italian audiences were concerned), so that a European monarch would not be assassinated onstage. Instead, Riccardo, the philandering “Duke of Boston” gets his own, and Italian censors were okay with that.

“Ballo” is vintage Verdi in his middle-period glory; legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti considered this his favorite role—it was the last staged opera he sang at Lyric—and indeed, it is the perfect “tenor” opera, although finding the perfect tenor to sing it is another matter altogether.

Happily, Frank Lopardo foots the bill surprisingly well, having not only the vocal chops but the dramatic range to add some welcome depth to the lead character. Riccardo is known in this version as Gustavo, attempting to restore Verdi’s “intention” of making the character the assassinated eighteenth-century King of Sweden Gustavus III that the libretto was loosely based on; even the court here is eighteenth century, complete with characters in powdered wigs for the final party scene. Read the rest of this entry »

David Daniels (top) Esteban Andres Cruz/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

For those who musically associate Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with the mirthful music of Mendelssohn, Benjamin Britten’s modern operatic setting of the Bard’s comic masterpiece will come as something of a culture shock.

Written for the 1960 opening of an expanded Jubilee Hall at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival, the composer’s decision to write an opera for that reopening was made so late in the process that a ready-made libretto was needed. Britten and his longtime companion, the tenor Peter Pears, set about taking the Bard’s original text and streamlining it to its essentials, ultimately cutting the play’s prose in half and cobbling the remainder into a libretto that unlike, say, Verdi’s operatic Shakespeare adaptations which also needed to be translated into Italian, form a marriage of language and music that brilliantly preserves the character of the original. Here actual lines and soliloquies are recognizable not merely for exposing plot details—in many ways, the least essential element of the original play in any case—but for their sheer linguistic beauty with the added dimension of their being sung, or in the case of Puck, recited to notated rhythms against the score. Read the rest of this entry »

Katharine Goeldner, Yonghoon Lee/Photo: Dan Rest

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is not the only arts organization that has experienced an unexpected cancellation this fall: Lyric Opera planned an entire production of Bizet’s “Carmen” around the Lyric debut of mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich in the title role a mere five years after it last presented the popular warhorse, only to have Aldrich cancel due to complications from a pregnancy.

Though one sympathizes with Lyric, a pregnant Carmen canceling can hardly be a surprise, especially when Aldrich also recently cancelled an engagement at the Met. Lyric’s solution was to simply cast the Carmen it had originally scheduled for a single October 29 matinee that Aldrich could not make—Iowa mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner—in all of the Carmens that Aldrich was originally scheduled to sing.

There is no question that Goeldner, heard here as Suzuki two seasons ago in “Madama Butterfly,” has a pleasing voice and stage presence, but when you’re doing “Carmen,” the one opera that virtually everybody knows—even those who have never been in an opera house thanks to countless parodies, cartoons, sitcoms, plays, movies, commercials and the like—you need someone who can be dramatically as well as vocally convincing as the gypsy temptress. Read the rest of this entry »