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 »

Johan Botha, Emily Magee/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

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 »

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

RECOMMENDED

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 »

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

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 »

Nadja Michael/Photo: Robert Kusel

By Dennis Polkow

When outgoing Lyric Opera general director Bill Mason first announced that Chicago Shakespeare founder Barbara Gaines would be making her operatic directorial debut with Verdi’s “Macbeth,” I was skeptical. Not that there wasn’t much to admire in Gaines’ imaginative stagings of more than thirty classics by the Bard at CST; it was the fact that she admitted that her previous opera exposure had been being “dragged” to the old Met as a young girl by her grandmother, that she didn’t know Italian, couldn’t read a score and would be learning the work off of CDs, and had not even known that Verdi had written an operatic adaptation of “Macbeth” before being asked to direct it. As artistic director of CST, would Gaines be willing to hire a director who barely knew the Bard and was illiterate and couldn’t read Shakespeare, I wondered?

Yet as Gaines’ new production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” that premiered at last weekend’s black-tie Lyric Opera Opening Night Gala overwhelmingly demonstrated, it doesn’t matter how you get there—Gaines even admitted having read “Opera for Dummies”—what matters is the end result. And in this case, the end result is something quite extraordinary. Read the rest of this entry »

U2’s Bono (left) posing to support Lyric Opera and Sir Andrew Davis (right) attempting to sport the Bono look (Courtesy of Lyric Opera)

RECOMMENDED

It was ten years ago that then-new Lyric Opera music director Sir Andrew Davis gave Lyric Opera’s first ever free pre-season outdoor concert, at that point in the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park. The original idea was to offer a season preview to tantalize the public for the upcoming opera season by presenting highlights performed by the same stars who would actually be in those productions.

Over the years, however, the concept has become a catch-all concert, only a fraction of which has anything to do with what will be presented during the season itself; of this year’s eight operas, only two will be represented at this concert. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »