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 »

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)

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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 »

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 »