By Dennis Polkow

“Enraptured” is the word most often used to describe experiencing Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at Lyric Opera (through March 8), heard here for the first time in thirty-one years. Under retiring general director William Mason, the thinking was to generally alternate seasons between Wagner and Richard Strauss, the two most expensive composers to produce in an opera house because of the large size of the orchestras needed to perform them.

But last year, neither composer was performed, and since next year’s Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” only requires a chamber orchestra, couldn’t Wagner have been included next season as well? Grabbing a bite in his backstage dressing room at the Civic Opera House before a matinee of Puccini’s “La fanciulla del West,” Sir Andrew Davis titters with audible delight at the suggestion.

“You know I love these works deeply,” he says, “but they are very expensive to produce. Aside from the orchestra, there is the cast size and you cannot skimp on Wagner. How many great Lohengrins are there in the world today? One? Two? And imagine, the best one is sitting right there,” says Davis, pointing to South African tenor Johan Botha, who has entered the room.

“I can only sing ten to twelve Wagner performances a season,” admits Botha, “and this year, I am doing seven of them in Chicago. That means that the Met, Vienna, anywhere else in the world that wants you to sing Wagner has to wait because you can only sing in one place at a time.” Read the rest of this entry »

Johan Botha, Emily Magee/Photo: Dan Rest

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Clocking in at four-and-a-half-plus hours and taking thirty-plus years to get back to Lyric Opera, “Lohengrin” is once again riding in on a swan—or in this case, a projected swan silhouette—for a stunning evening of musical theater as only Wagner could provide it.

No, this is hardly the new production that was originally promised, but a truncated version of the colorless whitebox version seen here in 1980 with Eva Marton’s memorable Elsa and “staged” this time around in a static and at times, ridiculous manner. But no matter. Close your eyes and feast on the glorious sounds, a rare Chicago opportunity to savor Wagner’s sixth and last opera, per se, as the true Wagnerian revolution that would forever change music would commence in earnest with his next work, “Tristan und Isolde,” which would usher in the new art form that Wagner would dub music drama.

“Lohengrin” is a work with one foot each in opera and music drama: the characters are the most psychologically developed to that point, and the drama component is as important as the music, a rarity as of yet, and of course, the work has some of the finest choral singing of any opera. Pity that longtime Lyric chorus master Donald Palumbo never had a crack at “Lohengrin” in Chicago before the Met spirited him away from us, but current chorus master Donald Nally, who is retiring after this season, really pulled out all of the stops and had the Lyric Opera Chorus sounding their most glorious of his time here. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from the Lyric Opera:

William Mason’s final season as general director
Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 57th season begins Saturday, October 1, 2011, at 6:30 p.m.
THE TALES OF HOFFMANN starring Matthew Polenzani, James Morris, Anna Christy, Erin Wall, & Alyson Cambridge

Also next season: Lucia di Lammermoor*, Boris Godunov, Ariadne auf Naxos, The Magic Flute, Aida, Show Boat*, and Rinaldo*
72 performances of 8 operas in the 25-week season
*THREE NEW PRODUCTIONS to be seen at Lyric in 2011-12 including two Lyric Opera premieres Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Dan Rest

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For those who think of Sergio Leone as having made the first “Spaghetti Westerns” in the mid-1960s, think again. More than half a century earlier, the Metropolitan Opera commissioned Giacomo Puccini to write a first-ever world premiere for the company that became a quirky Italian take on the American Old West.

Although an American subject had not been specified, Puccini’s previous opera, “Madama Butterfly,” had taken place in an exotic locale (Japan) with an American character who even struck up notes of the National Anthem in an aria. Puccini went to the same American playwright as “Butterfly,” David Blasko, and adapted his “Girl of the Golden West,” a reference to California in the days of gold fever.

Written by a composer best known for his melodies, “La fanciulla del West” has not enjoyed the same popularity of other Puccini operas precisely because what arias are there in this work, are contained within an expansive harmonic vocabulary that is the closest to Puccini’s own time of all of his works. Puccini was, after all, a twentieth-century composer still writing in a nineteenth-century style, though “Fanciulla” is his first work to give a sonic taste of his own century despite it being set in 1850. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Dickie, who has been a major force in Chicago performance culture since taking the helm at COT back in 1999, is announcing his plan to return to London in 2012. Here’s the press release:

General Director Brian Dickie to leave

Chicago Opera Theater in August of 2012.

CHICAGO, IL (January 13, 2011) – General Director Brian Dickie announced that he will step down as General Director of Chicago Opera Theater at the expiration of his contract in August of 2012, and will return home to London with his family.

2012 will mark Brian’s 50^th year in opera management and administration. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Those who only like their Gilbert & Sullivan served up with all of the trimmings—trained voices, full orchestrations, full chorus, et al—would be well-warned to stay away from Sean Graney’s musically minimalist version of “Pirates of Penzance.” Its famous melodies are merely approximated, by and large, by Graney’s small troupe of committed actors who dabble in singing, and Sullivan’s orchestrations are stripped down to the lowest-common-denominator guitar chords, largely strummed by the performers themselves hootenanny style, sometimes incorporating clarinet, banjo, mandolin, ukulele and accordion.

And yet the charm, energy, integrity and youth of the Hypocrites re-imagining of this familiar warhorse is so contagious and so dramatically convincing that their spirited irreverence suggests a contemporary approximation of how G & S might have been experienced in their own time. Read the rest of this entry »

Toby Spence, Andriana Chuchman, Neal Davies/Photo: Dan Rest

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Whenever an opera director makes the decision to “update” the specific time and place of a work—a common occurrence in the opera house—the key question aside from whether or not the libretto or music will support such a shift is: why? How does the work benefit from switching the original and intended time and place to another? Is an allegory being made that can be justified by the transposition?

In the case of Lyric Opera’s new production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” the imaginary, fairy-tale Japan has been cast aside by director Gary Griffin in favor of the Japan of the 1920s. In other words, a “once upon a time” scenario of a Japan that never really existed has been replaced with a very specific Japan where something quite real and not very funny was going on that would ultimately have grave consequences for the world.

The only “Mikado” of the 1920s would be none other than Emperor Hirohito himself, and when the Mikado—played by James Morris—makes his entrance by 1930s motor car in Act II, he is wearing the same military uniform that Hirohito made so infamous during the Second World War. Not since Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” have we had a singing World War II-era dictator on stage, but the distracting problem in the case of “The Mikado” again is: why? Read the rest of this entry »

Renée Fleming/Photo: Dan Rest

By Dennis Polkow

When Lyric Opera recently sent out engraved invitations for a “special announcement” that also included “distinguished guest” Renée Fleming, opera websites were abuzz with wild rumors that the opera megastar would be taking over the company as successor to Lyric’s general director William Mason, who is retiring after the 2011-12 season.

Such speculation seemed bizarre at the very least: why would Fleming, currently the most popular operatic soprano on the planet and at the height of a spectacular career, give all of that up to take an administrative position at an opera company?

As media, donors and the cultural elite of Chicago began gathering late Thursday afternoon on the stage of the Civic Opera House, it was clear that something big was indeed up. The two dailies were given advance word, but the rest of us learned only an hour before the official announcement via email that Fleming had accepted a position as Lyric Opera’s first-ever “creative consultant” for a five-year period “effective immediately,” which also included guarantees of Fleming performing here across that time in a concert appearance, a gala, an opera and a “staged concert opera.” Fleming had also been elected to Lyric’s Board of Directors as a vice president, as had Lyric Opera’s decade-long music director Sir Andrew Davis.

All of this was stunning news on so many levels, particularly given Lyric Opera’s long and conservative identity. Anyone who knows the company history knows that change happens slowly and reluctantly. Of the three general directors that Lyric Opera has had in fifty-plus years, the first was its founder, the second her assistant and the third a company insider who had been involved for most of Lyric’s history. The company has had only two music directors. Only a coup could have brought about such radical change so quickly and decisively, and indeed, as Lyric Board president and CEO Richard P. Kiphart began addressing the gathering, a clearer picture began to emerge. Read the rest of this entry »

Sondra Radvanovsky, Frank Lopardo/Photo: Dan Rest

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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

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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 »