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 »

Here’s the press release from Chicago Opera Theater:

CHICAGO OPERA THEATER ANNOUNCES
THE 2012 SEASON
BRIAN DICKIE’S LAST SEASON AT CHICAGO OPERA THEATER!

Featuring the People’s Opera Winner, Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cheryomushki,
The last opera in COT’s “Medea” trilogy, Handel’s Teseo,
And a new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in the fall of 2012.    Read the rest of this entry »

As the economy slowly lifts us back to our feet and we look around, we see a remarkable sight: a performance industry in Chicago that survived the worst recession since the Great Depression wholly intact. Sure, we had a few brushes with death, and no doubt a few very small, very new theater companies threw in the towel, as they do even in good years, but unlike many other cities across the country, we’re in pretty good shape. How good? The League of Chicago Theatres issued a press release last week proclaiming our town as America’s theater leader, with more than 250 professional theaters, including four Regional Tony Award winners, and a combined annual budget of $250 million serving five million audience members. Add in our thriving dance community, a comedy scene that’s the envy of the nation and two world-class opera companies and you’d have to say we’re doing pretty damn good. But neither the economy nor any cultural organization is fully out of the water yet, and the dramatic uncertainty injected into the political sea by Mayor Daley’s decision to call it a day means Chicago’s performance community will need some steady hands at the wheel these next few years. Accordingly, for this edition of The Players, we’ve broadened our horizon and taken a closer-than-ever look at the individuals in charge of the financial fitness of our local institutions. 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 »

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 »

Frederica von Stade/Photo: Liz Lauren

With all of the hullabaloo concerning mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade’s “farewell” performances in Chicago, it would be wonderful to report that Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Jake Heggie’s “Three Decembers” is a work worthy of the occasion. Alas, such is not the case.

The ninety-minute one-act “opera”—and the term is loosely used—originally written for von Stade and presented as two acts in its 2008 premiere, feels like it goes on forever, traversing as it does three Christmases, each a decade apart. The libretto is excessively chatty and much too respectful of insignificant details of Terrence McNally’s “Some Christmas Letters (and a Couple of Phone Calls)” while providing little in the way of overall development and motivation that would allow us to know and thus care for its three characters: a Broadway diva (von Stade) and her gay son (baritone Matthew Worth) who is losing a partner that we never meet to AIDS as the work opens, and a daughter (soprano Sara Jakubiak), both of whom have been raised with an absentee mother and the well-stoked idealized memory of a dead father.

Is it an opera?  Yes, in the sense that it is through-composed (that is to say, every line is set to music and there is no spoken dialogue apart from music) and that operatically trained voices are employed, though in this case, to considerable disadvantage given that the lead character is a Broadway musical actress, not an opera singer, and therefore it would make much more sense for her to sound something akin to the sound world that her character represents. That also means that voices are more concerned with making beautiful sounds than being clearly understood, which means that short of constantly looking at rapidly fired surtitles instead of the action, such as it is, you will not have a clue as to what is going on here, even though everyone is singing in English. 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 »