Frederica von Stade/Photo: Robert Miller

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During the early decades of the twentieth century, Ravinia was the summer opera capital of the United States. Concert opera was also the centerpiece of the twenty-two-year Ravinia music directorship of James Levine, music director of the Metropolitan Opera. That tradition stopped under Christoph Eschenbach but has continued on under James Conlon, who is also music director of the Los Angeles Opera and the Cincinnati May Festival.

There have been two alternating trajectories established to Conlon’s concert opera performances since his Ravinia music directorship began here five seasons ago: grand outdoor pavilion performances of Italian operas by Verdi and Puccini—which last year included “Rigoletto” and will pick up next season with “Tosca”—and intimate indoor Martin Theatre performances of  operas of Mozart, which two seasons ago included “Don Giovanni” and “The Abduction from the Seraglio” and this year picks up with “Cosi fan tutte” and “The Marriage of Figaro.”

Conlon is a master Mozartean, bringing lively tempos and wonderful balance and charm to chamber-music-sized ensembles made up of Chicago Symphony members. What a rare treat it is to hear Mozart operas in an 800-plus seat venue, close to the size of the theaters that Mozart had in mind when he wrote these works, rather than the too-large Harris Theater (Chicago Opera Theater) or the cavernous Civic Opera House (Lyric Opera) where nuance and subtlety are lost. Director David Lefkowich returns to direct both productions and English surtitles will be projected throughout both works. New this year is the participation of the stellar Chicago Symphony Chorus, which should be a real boost to the proceedings. (Ravinia had been using amateur choruses as a cost-saving measure but the quality differential became too jarring for that practice to continue.) Read the rest of this entry »

Dennis Kelly and Susan Veronika Adler/Photo: Rich Foreman

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There is perhaps no work in the entire Gilbert & Sullivan catalog quite as peculiar as “The Yeomen of the Guard.” The duo’s only attempt at “serious” operetta, “Yeomen” lacks most of the Victorian barbs associated with G&S and instead attempts to give us a tale of unrequited love set against the England of Henry VIII. The problem, of course, is that G&S knew very little about that time and historical dramaturgy was hardly their strength.

Ironically, despite the work’s supposed seriousness, it happens to have the odd distinction of being the only G&S work with a happy ending, though you would never know that in the Rudy Hogenmiller-directed production of the piece for Light Opera Works, given the way that nomadic jester Jack Point (George Andrew Wolff) is allowed to carry on when he gets the news in the finale that his hoped-for mate is leaving him for her husband. He had his chance to marry her (“I’m a fool,” he states earlier on, “but there is a limit to my folly”), but allowed her to marry a condemned yeoman (Colm Fitzmaurice) for his inheritance, but the yeoman, of course, escapes, with the help of an admirer of his who seduces the jailor. Read the rest of this entry »

Barbara Landis, Ricardo Herrera

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Even if you’ve never heard of Ernesto Lecuona, you doubtless have heard his music. Known as the “Cuban Gershwin,” Lecuona was the original Latin crossover king and a true Renaissance man as a composer, arranger, pianist and band leader who wrote tons of hit songs for movies and stage works that are infectious both for their rhythmic vitality and his golden gift for melody. (His title song for “Always in my Heart” was nominated for an Oscar but lost to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” and his “Malagueña” is as known as much as a pop song as it is in classical circles for Lecuona’s own virtuoso piano version.)

In addition, Lecuona wrote “serious” music as well, a battery of important piano pieces, concertos, symphonic works and, of course, was a master of zarzuela, or Spanish-language operetta that is light musical theater with plenty of comedy, dancing and singing which still thrives in Spanish-speaking countries.

Here again, if the form itself is unfamiliar, the careers of native Spanish-singing operatic luminaries who developed their vocal prowess performing zarzuelas—including Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, Alfredo Kraus, Victoria de los Angeles, Teresa Berganza, Montserrat Caballé and Pilar Lorengar, among others—probably are not. Read the rest of this entry »

Franco Fagioli and Sasha Cooke/Photo: Liz Lauren

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The celebrated music director of a major opera company once admitted to me that he thought that Mozart “invented” opera as we know it. “Never mind all of that Monteverdi nonsense,” he pontificated, the works of whom he admitted he had never seen performed, and as if that was all there was before Mozart. As it turns out, we all have a lot to learn.

How soon we forget: although Francesco Cavalli’s “Jason” was the most performed opera of the seventeenth century, it is only now being given its first professional performance in Chicago courtesy of Chicago Opera Theater more than three-and-a-half centuries after its 1649 Venetian premiere.

No, “Jason” is not quite the lost gem on the level of “Moses in Egypt,” the rare Rossini work that COT also recently resurrected. But for those who have the slightest interest in the history of musical theater and in the transition from the Renaissance to the early Baroque period—to say nothing of really great singing—“Jason” is a must-see.

When Rene Jacobs made the first full recording of the piece more than two decades ago, it tested then state-of-the-art length limits of three overstuffed compact discs, and even that was with a number of cuts. The COT performance has whittled the score down to the manageable point where “Jason” can be experienced within three hours, including a single intermission. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Liz Lauren

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The last time that you could have heard Rossini’s “Moses in Egypt” in Chicago was in 1863, when a touring Italian company happened to bring the piece to the McVickers Theatre downtown. The Civil War was raging and we had an Illinois resident with low popularity in the White House by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

Having now experienced this stellar work at the hands of Chicago Opera Theater, it is hard not to contemplate such bizarre neglect of nearly a century and a half in the face of having to regularly hear far inferior Italian operas of composers that Rossini influenced. The bottom line, however, appears to be that Rossini was the master of both comedy and drama, but his most popular later successors Verdi and Puccini by and large took up drama more than comedy, which left Rossini reduced to the master of comedy. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

For many of the even most seasoned opera goers, Gioachino Rossini was thought of as a “one-hit wonder.” “It’s true,” agrees Italian opera scholar and University of Chicago professor Philip Gossett. “For a very long time, ‘The Barber of Seville’ was the only Rossini opera you got to hear consistently in America. But this is a composer who wrote some forty operas and they were all extremely successful.”

Overtures to Rossini operas have always been staples of the concert hall and popular culture—the Lone Ranger, for instance, rode out both on radio and television to Rossini’s overture to “William Tell”—but the last time, say, that Chicago had a chance to hear a full performance of Rossini’s “Moses in Egypt” that Chicago Opera Theater will be reviving this weekend was back in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was president.

Why the delay? Read the rest of this entry »

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As every art singer and lieder lover knows, Schubert’s “Winterreise” (“Winter’s Journey”) is indeed a journey, an epic narrative that depends on the singer and the pianist to “tell” its story over twenty-four songs. So why not make this explicit and actually “stage” what is going on in the text and music?  That is the deceptively simple thought behind Chicago Opera Vanguard’s staging of “Winterreise.”

Director Eric Reda gives us a bleak, dark, in-the-round setting with two spinet pianos and DVD projectors situated across from one another and surrounding the audience, separated by white translucent material suspended from the ceiling that will be transformed and constantly relit along the journey. Read the rest of this entry »

Danielle de Niese, Kyle Ketelsen/Photo: Dan Rest

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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

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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

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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 »