Frederica von Stade/Photo: Robert Miller

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Here are the details from a Lyric Opera press release issued earlier today:

William “Bill” Mason, Lyric Opera of Chicago’s general director since 1997, announced today that he will retire when his contract expires at the conclusion of the company’s 2011-12 season.

Mason, 68, has led the world-renowned Chicago-based opera company since 1997 and has been with Lyric Opera for more than four decades.

“I think two years from now will be the right time to turn the reins over to a new general director,” says Mason, “and I look forward to working with the Board on finding a successor to lead this great company. 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 »

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 »

RECOMMENDED

Imagine a small Chicago theater company choosing to do something that even a major opera company such as Lyric Opera wouldn’t dare think of doing in such uncertain economic times: put on a complete Wagner “Ring” cycle.

The “Ring” is the short name for Richard Wagner’s four-part epic “The Ring of the Nibelungs” cycle of music dramas which consists of the individual works “The Rhine Gold,” “The Valkyrie,” “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods.” The “Ring” has no parallel, and is the most ambitious stage work ever written, occupying the mind of its creator for more than twenty-five years.

Logging in at some nineteen hours of performance time performed across four separate evenings, the theatrical demands of the “Ring” were such that Wagner designed and built his own theater outside of the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth that could properly meet its unique demands, a city whose principal industry remains its Wagner performances and its ongoing reputation as a Wagnerian shrine.  (The waiting list for tickets there is some eight years ahead.)   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 »

Here’s the press release from the Lyric:

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 56th season
begins Friday, October 1, 2010, at 7:00 p.m.
Giuseppe Verdi’s MACBETH in a new production
by renowned Shakespearean Barbara Gaines
starring Thomas Hampson and Nadja Michael

Also next season: Carmen, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Masked Ball,
The Mikado, The Girl of the Golden West, Lohengrin, & Hercules Read the rest of this entry »

Lucio Gallo,Violeta Urmana/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

The second time is the charm, as it turns out, with Puccini’s “Tosca.” The Italian warhorse, the most-often performed opera in Lyric Opera history, opened the season last September full of stars thoroughly miscast in Puccini’s melodrama. Happily, this time around, ironically with a “B” cast, things are much better in virtually every respect.

Making her long-overdue Lyric Opera debut, Lithuanian soprano Violeta Urmana is everything you could want in a Tosca: jealous at the drop of a hat with a fiery temper, conniving and manipulative enough to secure passage for herself and her lover and still commit murder, and yet at the same time, she is a tender lover and sensitive artist. I suspect her darker vocal color will not be to everyone’s taste—she was originally a mezzo-soprano but switched to upward roles in recent years—but if viewed as an extension of the character and as a refreshing take on an overdone role, her approach works wonderfully well.

Likewise, Italian tenor Marco Berti, also making his Lyric Opera debut, embodies the fiery yet sensitive spirit of Cavaradossi, who can be concerned about making Tosca jealous one moment by the choice of models in his paintings, and be defiant in the face of torture and execution (this Cavaradossi clearly never buys that this is to be a “mock” execution) the next. Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth Futral/Photo: Dan Rest

“I will wear the orchestra out with my dance card,” says the Merry Widow herself (Elizabeth Futral) at the Act I party where her countrymen are trying to make sure that her fortune stays within their country. The irony is that the old gal almost didn’t have an orchestra at all, as the Lyric Opera Orchestra, which had been playing without a contract since the season began nearly three months ago, had threatened a strike by curtain time of Saturday’s opening. A tentative agreement had been reached early Friday morning, averting a work stoppage.

Lyric Opera has always had a snobby attitude about “The Merry Widow.” Lyric founder Carol Fox wouldn’t touch it since it was an operetta and not an opera, but Ardis Krainik found herself presenting it twice during the 1980s: the first with Evelyn Lear in the company’s first-ever production, and again in 1986 as a vehicle for Kiri Te Kanawa, although Te Kanawa pulled out and Maria Ewing took her place. This third-ever company production sees the pendulum swing to the opposite direction, given that it was conceived around veteran Chicago director Gary Griffin and the vast majority of those involved with it come from the theater world rather than the opera world. That’s great in that it means that those long sections of spoken dialogue are performed by genuine actors, but when the singing begins, we’re often hearing “show” voices rather than operatic voices, which means that the music often loses its sparkle and luster. Read the rest of this entry »