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The third time is the charm, as it turns out. Handel’s “Teseo” (“Theseus”), crowning Chicago Opera Theater’s spring season and the penultimate opera of Brian Dickie’s general directorship, is also the last of COT’s Baroque opera “Medea” trilogy that began with 2010’s production of Cavalli’s “Giasone” (“Jason”) and continued with last year’s production of Charpentier’s “Médée” (Medea). Taken as a whole, this cycle stands as one of the most important artistic initiatives COT has brought us.

Medea was last seen in the climax of “Médée” setting fire to Corinth and murdering her two children, but between Charpentier’s opera and Handel’s she has made her way to Athens to seek asylum and betrothal from King Egeo who has no heir since his only son Teseo is unknown to him due to a promise the king made to Teseo’s mother. In Handel’s “Teseo,” the young hero fights for the king without either knowing their identity and with both courting Agilea. The king plots to kill Teseo while Teseo is magically seduced into cohorting with Medea, and so on. If it all sounds a lot like Handel’s “Rinaldo,” seen recently at Lyric Opera though set during the Crusades, only the setting and names are substantially different. Read the rest of this entry »

Sara Heaton and Paul LaRosa/Photo: Liz Lauren

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Brian Dickie has certainly given Chicago many firsts and many thrills in his twelve years as general director of Chicago Opera Theater, but Dickie has saved one of his best for last: the professional Chicago premiere of a satirical musical by, of all people, Dmitri Shostakovich.

With Stalin having declared modernism and the avant-garde anathema in 1936, operetta became a regime-approved art form and began flourishing during the Soviet era. Operetta houses were built next to theaters and opera houses, large orchestras and repertory casts engaged, and an entire generation of Soviet composers began writing a new species of still popular Russian operetta that remains largely unknown in the West. Read the rest of this entry »

Quinn Kelsey and Hui He/Photo: Dan Rest

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On paper, at least, the first cast of Lyric Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Aida” that opened in January looked as if it would be the premier cast, and indeed, had a lot going for it with Verdi heroine extraordinaire Sondra Radvanovsky as Aida, Italian tenor Marcello Giordani as Radames and mezzo soprano Jill Grove as Amneris. And yet for all of its superb singing, somehow the dramatic intricacies of the love-pyramid aspect of the opera left much to be desired.

The second time is the charm, as it were, for those who want high drama with glorious singing. Making a spectacular Lyric Opera debut is Chinese soprano Hui He, all that you could ever ask for in an Aida. Not only does He sing with a voice powerful enough to fill the rafters of the Civic Opera House—a rare find these days—but she does it with purity of tone and with immense attention to Verdi’s dynamic markings. Her pianissimo high notes float beautifully; He never feels the need to show off how loud she can bring off her high notes as Radvanovsky likes to do. He is also able to flesh out the character of this tormented lovesick princess who keeps her dignity while serving as a slave in the court of a country with which her own nation is at war. Read the rest of this entry »

David Daniels, center/Photo: Dan Rest

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Long before the renaissance of Handel’s operas being performed in their complete form, virtually everyone knew an aria or two from his opera “Rinaldo.” Such pieces, in fact, as they were heard in vocal recitals and on recording anthologies were the only glimpse many opera lovers had into this vast world at a time when Handel operas by and large were still largely unknown to contemporary audiences.

The first Handel opera ever performed at Lyric Opera was, in fact, a concert version of “Rinaldo” back in 1984, and a year later for the Handel tricentennial Lyric staged its first Handel, though not an opera, his oratorio “Samson.” Lyric Opera has come a long way from those days when singers would stand statically and wobble their way through Handel’s vocal lines with excessive vibrato at a snail’s pace. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Robert Kusel

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In the world of musical theater, the genre is divided between B.S.B. (Before Show Boat) and A.S.B (After Show Boat), so revolutionary a work was “Show Boat” when it first premiered nearly eighty-five years ago. So revolutionary, in fact, that we have to almost remind ourselves that “Show Boat” began life as a 1926 novel by Edna Ferber.

Composer Jerome Kern read “Show Boat” upon its publication and immediately became excited about transforming the story to the musical stage. He even called a journalist friend to arrange a meeting with Ferber, who told Kern that she couldn’t imagine her dark tale taking life as a musical comedy. Kern won her over and soon hired a then largely unknown thirty-year old librettist by the name of Oscar Hammerstein II to write the book and lyrics for the show. 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 »

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 »