RECOMMENDED

I haven’t done the math, but there have been probably more performances of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” at Lyric Opera than any other opera. Most famously, Maria Callas did her only staged performances of the role here at Lyric in the early years of the company. During the Ardis Krainik years, ticket sales of “Butterfly” were so assured that the role became a retreat for haggard divas.

Kudos to Bill Mason for having enough respect for the work to realize that if you are going to do it, at least this time around, do it right. I lost count of how many times we have sat through the Hal Prince production created here in 1982, and even Prince has long ago stopped bothering to stage it, sending Vincent Liotta instead the last three times, all with mediocre singers.

Soprano Patricia Racette has made Butterfly her own in recent years, giving us a preview of what to expect in a concert version at Ravinia two seasons ago where her co-star, tenor Frank Lopardo, was a no-show. Lopardo made it this time around, and the pair managed to bring considerable credibility to the usually far-fetched melodrama. True, Racette’s voice has its problems at this stage of her career, and Butterfly’s entrance was plowed through like a bull in a china shop; as at Ravinia, she wisely chose not to take the high note. But once over the bridge, the opera was all hers and she was able to match every note with drama to spare. And though we have heard more beautiful love duets, what lingers in this production is how much Racette and Lopardo really seem to be feeling for one another as the sliding door slowly ends Act I for their honeymoon.

Once you actually buy that such a deep connection is made between the two, then Pinkerton’s abandonment of Butterfly and her standing by him against her villagers sets up the tragedy of her suicide in a far more profound way. I cannot remember the last Butterfly where I actually shed tears at the end, but things click so well here, it would be a challenge not to do so. Some of the supporting roles are a disappointment (neither Suzuki nor Sharpless could be adequately heard in their duets and both roles were laying too low for the singers) but Sir Andrew Davis does a magnificent job of revealing Puccini’s score in all of its many colors. (Dennis Polkow)

Through January 29, 2009 at Lyric Opera, Wacker Drive at Madison, (312)332-2244.

By Dennis Polkow

Two weeks after a Hyde Park resident became elected the first-ever African-American president, another less significant but still fascinating cultural watershed occurred across town at Lyric Opera: the first-ever performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” in the company’s 54-year history.

We all know its songs, we all love them—indeed, “Summertime” is the single most recognizable operatic aria on the planet—and standards such as “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “Bess, You is My Woman” and “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’,” among others, are all known and loved around the world. Why then, did it take more than half a century—not to mention that the piece was already some 20 years old when Lyric first opened its doors—for “Porgy” to have a hearing at Lyric?

One reason is the enormous expense involved in recruiting and training an entirely new chorus for a single work since the Gershwin estate mandates African-American performers even as choristers, and there are currently only two African-Americans singing in the entire Lyric Opera Chorus. There has long been sensitivity on this issue, especially since—yikes—Al Jolson originally wanted to play Porgy and Gershwin himself seriously considered opera star Lawrence Tibbitt to play the role. Both would have tastelessly done so in blackface, still common practice in 1935. If blacks and whites attended the same theater at all at that time, which was rare, they were often still segregated. And this was a show about black life written by, well, white guys. Having African-Americans portray even the smallest roles in a show where perceived African-American culture is appropriated by persons of privilege becomes a form of affirmative-action art and an apologetic attempt to counteract the charge that “Porgy and Bess” remains a high-class, even if gloriously tune-filled, relic of the minstrel-show era.

A quick perusal of the program makes clear that with the exception of the costume designer, the only African-Americans involved in the production are onstage, not the creative team that actually calls the shots. And looking out at the audience during the first two performances makes clear the real cultural divide here: the performers and the audience are as different as night and day; with rare exceptions, black performing for white. Opera, that most Eurocentric, expensive, elitist—and yes, most white—of all art forms, is as far from Catfish Row as imaginable. Should we be similarly concerned, though, if next month’s production of “Madama Butterfly,” an opera stereotyping Japan written by an Italian, is not portrayed by an all-Japanese cast for Lyric’s mostly white audience?

Another cultural disconnect that is visible from the moment the curtain opens on Lyric’s “Porgy and Bess” is that of north vs. south, including the bizarre decisions to cut the entire introductory barrelhouse piano and chorus “Jasbo Brown Blues” scene-setting and Southern-tinged prologue, to eliminating the goat cart Porgy uses to travel around on along with the central references to it (Porgy drags himself around on a crutch that is broken at one point, but then miraculously reappears in one piece) and to censor any use whatsoever of the “n” word in a libretto drenched in it. This is a production that appears to be conceived by and executed by urban northerners who imagine South Carolina’s black south as looking like a Yankee ghetto, something so much out of “Dead End” that you expect the Bowery Boys to peer out from around a corner. If “the fish are jumpin’” and “the cotton is high,” it must be somewhere in the back alley.

Gershwin had the opportunity to premiere what he himself called a “folk opera” at the Metropolitan Opera, but was shrewd enough to realize that despite the greater legitimacy and the more vast resources of the Met over Broadway (his original full orchestration, which took nine months to complete, was greatly reduced and simplified for Broadway), his piece on “Negro life” would have more performances for a wider audience on the, well, Great White Way. He also became convinced as he began to see that there were indeed “people of color” who could actually sing and perform the roles that this would greatly add to the work’s “authenticity,” and that tradition remains mandated. It is worth noting that if this were not the case, there would be far more performances of the work and yes, profits for the Gershwin estate. Then, as now, the majority of black artists are not opera singers trained to sing in an opera house without amplification and, as such, few can be clearly heard and understood, which was certainly the case at Lyric, one of the world’s largest opera houses and more than three times the size of a typical Broadway theater. If it weren’t for Lyric’s supertitles, which have cleaned up much of Ira Gershwin’s often embarrassing use of pre-World War II Ebonics for better or worse, the audience would be lost without knowing the story.

There are two casts of the three principals for the Lyric production, and one performer, Lester Lynch, alternates between playing the role of Crown and Porgy. Gordon Hawkins, the “A”-cast Porgy, unfortunately, is badly miscast, as he neither looks nor acts the part as written nor is there enough pitch control or technique to sustain the work’s vocal demands. This becomes particularly problematic during the duets with the “A”-cast Bess, Morenike Fadayomi, who out-sings him note for note. The “B” cast, Lynch as Porgy and Lisa Daltirus as Bess, are far more convincing as a couple in terms of drama and music, and though Lynch is a high baritone rather than the bass-baritone needed to get the low and the high notes as written, he does a solid job by and large. Crown also lies low for him, but he makes such a superb brute and bully that he makes it work, as opposed to the “B” Crown, Terry Cook, who sings and plays the part far too wimpily and cannot carry off an admittedly larger Bess to be raped in the brush as Lynch does to chilling effect.

Jermaine Smith’s Sporting Life is a choreographic and devious delight, though hearing him was sometimes a struggle. No problem hearing Jonita Lattimore’s Serena, though, who stops the show cold with her rendition of “My Man’s Gone Now,” which also gives the chorus its most shining, gospel-filled moment.

When it comes to conducting “Porgy and Bess,” John DeMain, the guy who led the spectacular 1976 Houston Grand Opera production that became the complete work’s definitive recording and which went on to play Broadway and tour the world, is the conductor of choice. Though tempos were a bit tentative on opening night, already by the Sunday matinee that introduced the “B” cast, things were picking up.

One thing that becomes abundantly clear in the tardy Lyric Opera premiere of “Porgy and Bess,” which in the end, is an immensely enjoyable experience, warts and all, is that “Porgy and Bess” will continue to be performed in spite of itself, because of Gershwin’s undeniable genius and way with a tune. And with an African-American president-elect continuing to plan a new era across town, perhaps the real progress here is that “Porgy” has become irrelevant enough and safe enough to be able to be performed at Lyric Opera.

“Porgy and Bess” plays through December 19 at the Civic Opera House, Wacker Drive at Madison, (312)332-2244.

RECOMMENDED

“Lulu” is back in town, and as was true of her first unforgettable trip to Lyric Opera twenty-one years ago that ended up ushering in a golden era of regular modern opera performances at the company that lasted into the new millennium, nothing is ever quite the same during or after her visit. The second and final opera of twelve-tone composer Alban Berg, “Lulu” is an opera unlike any other and immediately polarizes audiences into those transfixed and transformed by the experience and those who find it so disturbing and demanding that they cannot make it through even a single performance. One couple up front noisily left twenty minutes in, and across opening night, about a quarter of the audience left at various points along the way. Those who remained all four hours were often in stunned silence at what they were taking in, even at evening’s end, after which frenzied applause and cheers spontaneously broke out. For those concerned about making it through such a potentially draining experience, Lyric is selling $12 sandwich box suppers between acts, sort of “Lulu lunches.”

Like a black widow spider, the femme fatale has her charms, to be sure, and as Lulu—stunningly performed by German soprano Marlis Petersen—seduces those around her, she is a step ahead of her admirers, each of whom sees her as the ultimate sex object of their fantasies, right down to each supplying a different name, style of dress and persona for her. As Lulu reminds a would-be suitor of the fact that she killed his father, and later, as copulation begins on the couch, she asks if this is the same couch where his father bled to death, you have to admire the woman’s brutal honesty (he doesn’t stop, by the way). When she is asked if she has any morals as she considers the fact that she is now rich immediately after her husband dies of a heart attack after catching her with an admirer, “I don’t know,” she soberly sings, and at least as Petersen plays it, she means it. This is a far cry from the steamy Catherine Malfitano portrayal that made her such a Lyric fixture for a time that Malfitano moved here: Petersen plays Lulu as a vacuous, amoral mirror to all the men—and one woman—who obsess over her. That Petersen does this while singing up a storm and seducing the audience right along with all of them is part of what makes her portrayal as alluring as it is unnerving.

Berg died suddenly of blood poisoning after completing only two of the work’s projected three acts, having left a sketch score of his intentions. At first, Berg’s widow tried to have the work completed, but after Zemlinksy, Schoenberg and Webern all turned her down and expressed that the work should remain an unfinished two-act torso, she steadfastly refused to allow a completion. Only after her death did a completion appear—it had been secretly commissioned by Berg’s publisher all along—premiered in 1979 by Pierre Boulez and now commonplace, although there remain detractors. When Lyric first presented “Lulu” in 1987, the third act was only 8 years old and still such a novelty that there was little question of it being performed, although it was tinkered with by a non-musical director on that occasion. Thus, these performances represent the Chicago premiere of the unaltered completed version in its entirety.

The third act does restore much-needed musical symmetry and some incredibly compelling music that would otherwise lay on the cutting-room floor, but from the opening strains of it, it is clear that we are in a jarringly different sound world than the rest of the opera. Berg used orchestration as an essential story-telling device, and the transition from Act II to III is abrupt. Only when Berg’s own innovative orchestration comes in courtesy of his completed “Lulu” Suite, do we experience his “voice” restored to its full power. Additionally, Acts I and II are magnificently telescoped and the character development complete, but Act III feels haphazard by comparison in a way unimaginable had perfectionist Berg lived to see and hear how these pieces would all “fit” together. It would be great to see alternative completion attempts appear such as are now commonplace with Mozart’s unfinished “Requiem,” for instance, especially now that we know that Schoenberg’s hesitation to complete “Lulu” was because of an anti-Semitic remark of a character—now routinely cut—in Berg’s libretto.

But none of this should scare anyone away from this rare and new production, which benefits enormously by the presence of German baritone Wolfgang Schöne in the dual role of Dr. Schön and Jack the Ripper and by the transparent conducting of Sir Andrew Davis, who knows this complex score inside and out, sometimes literally, as there are sections that are actually written to be played in reverse. Scottish director Paul Curran always allows the music to determine the action (or when appropriate, the lack of action) and designer Kevin Knight goes for a sumptuous but somewhat surreal world—though opting for all-out Expressionism complete with deep, blue shadows in the disturbing climax—always straddling imagination and reality. (Dennis Polkow)

“Lulu” plays at the Civic Opera House, Wacker Drive at Madison, through November 30, (312)332-2244.

Okay, no one is going to mistake “The Pearl Fishers” for “Carmen,” that’s for sure. “Carmen” is Bizet’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest and most beloved operas of all time. But in a short career tragically cut down in its prime where we have dozens of ideas for projected operas but only a small output of completed operas available to understand how Bizet evolved, experiencing “The Pearl Fishers,” the opera Bizet wrote before “Carmen,” can be immensely illuminating.

The music itself might be well be labeled “Faust lite,” as the influence of Gounod, Bizet’s teacher, particularly on the recitative and choral passages, is embarrassingly obvious. But like Gounod, Bizet knows how to write and milk a pretty tune, and the work’s most famous aria is a crowd-pleaser that is heard throughout the entire three acts. The love triangle that makes up the opera’s static plot could well be called “Norma lite,” as it is a watered-down reworking of that same idea from that opera. There are also touches of Verdi and even some Wagnerian leitmotivs.

What is needed to give the work its due, such as it is, are three technically precise singers who can not only sing their hearts out emotionally but who are also able to blend well together for the work’s carefully crafted duets, trios and ensembles. Unfortunately, this Lyric Opera revival of its production from a decade ago is seldom able to deliver on either count. The famous Act I “friendship” duet is a piece so popular that it was once not uncommon for audience members to duck out after the first act. Here, at least on opening night, the duet was squandered by baritone Nathan Gunn as Zurga and Eric Cutler as Nadir, as the baritone line was inaudible next to the straining, over-loud tenor line; the usual show-stopping raucous reaction was substituted for polite applause of mere recognition. Although the casting of soprano and former Ryan Center alumna Nicole Cabell as priestess Lelia is serviceable, Cabell does not have the floating coloratura that Maureen O’Flynn had the last time around, essential for revealing this role at its best.

This staging of the work, which was hopelessly confused the last time around, has been given a facelift with more colorful sets that make for more visual appeal, but unfortunately, the design team never bothered to read the libretto: the story concerns a Hindu priestess yet the scenery portrays Theravada Buddhism, which has no gods, a central plot device in the story. (Dennis Polkow)

At Civic Opera House, 20 North Wacker Drive at Madison, $39-$187, through November 4.

RECOMMENDED

More than half a century ago when composer Samuel Barber was asked to write a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera, he asked his companion and fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who always wrote the librettos for his own operas, to write the libretto. “We had trouble,” Menotti told me some years ago, “because I always ‘sing’ the words as I put them down. I wrote the libretto scene by scene, but Sam would start playing the music that he wrote for a particular scene and I would yell out, ‘No, no, that’s wrong! That’s not the music I wanted there.’ He’d shout back, ‘It’s my opera!’ ”

The end result, “Vanessa,” was a huge success and even won the Pulitzer Prize, but when fire destroyed its original sets back in 1973, the Met stopped producing it and it fell into neglect. In recent years, steam has picked up again, with several celebrated productions, including those by Kiri Te Kanawa to mark her “farewell” from opera, but amazingly, the work has never been seen professionally in Chicago in all of those years. (Hey, Lyric Opera is just getting around to “Porgy and Bess,” which was almost a quarter of a century earlier, so things take time in opera, at least in Chicago.) 

Chamber Opera Chicago is about to remedy that situation by offering the long overdue Chicago premiere as a celebration of the work’s fiftieth anniversary. Of particular interest is that the production will be directed by Francis Menotti, son of the late composer, librettist and director of the original 1958 Metropolitan Opera production, Gian Carlo Menotti. The cast will include Marcy Stonikas, Sarah Gartshore, Barbara Landis, Frederick Joseph and Philip Kraus with a 32-piece orchestra conducted by Victoria Bond in, as Menotti himself characterized it, “the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one’s ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living.” (Dennis Polkow)

At Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport (312)902-1500. October 11 & 17 at 7:30pm and October 19 at 3pm. $15-$40.

RECOMMENDED

In recent seasons, the Lyric Opera modus operandi has been to take an operatic warhorse, usually Italian, and open and close the season with it but with different and often mediocre casts to trade primarily on the marquee value of the work itself. Kudos to Lyric for setting aside that tired formula and for opening the 2008-9 season with a spectacular production of Masenet’s “Manon” that forms the basis of one of the most memorable Lyric openings in years.

Other than “Carmen” and “Faust,” French opera is rare at Lyric and when it is presented, key segments and ballets are often cut and there is little that is, well, French. How luxurious then, to bring in French soprano Natalie Dessay to sing her signature role at the vocal height of her career, giving us the “Manon” of a lifetime complete with all of the grand French trimmings. Unlike Renée Fleming, who sang a single act of this role to open the Metropolitan Opera season last week and who exudes confidence and glamour at every turn, Dessay not only has the advantage of having French as her native language and a truly French color to her voice, but she is able to make us believe in the opera’s opening act that she is indeed a naïve, 16-year old girl who is leaving home for the first time. We see the wonder of the world through her eyes, and even Dessay’s vocal colorizations match what her character is feeling. As she falls in love and becomes more world weary, Dessay is able to act and sing that difference. And the coloratura ornaments and trills are exquisite at every turn.

This could well have been Dessay’s show exclusively and no one would complain, but German tenor Jonas Kaufmann makes a tender partner for her, matching her delicacy and fragility as an actor as well as her vocal shadings. Seldom has music and drama been both so well served. How rare and wonderful to experience two performers who appear to fall in love and be able to sustain that illusion all while singing their hearts out. No less significant is the work of French conductor Emmanuel Villaume, who is able to make the Lyric Opera Orchestra play with the delicacy, feeling and timbre of a French orchestra, but with greater precision and accuracy. Miss this extraordinary production at your own peril. (Dennis Polkow)

At Lyric Opera, Wacker Drive at Madison, (312)332-2244, through October 31.

RECOMMENDED

Based on the Voltaire novella that sought to lampoon eighteenth-century optimism, Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” was written for Broadway in 1956, the show running seventy-six performances before folding, although the magnificent original cast album and the emergence of the show’s overture as a symphonic staple kept the show alive as a cult classic. Hal Prince oversaw revisions of the work in the early 1970s that replaced the original book, both a one-act Broadway version, and a two-act “opera house” version, which is the version that Lyric Opera presented under Prince’s own direction back in 1994.

Bernstein himself allowed but had nothing to do these revisions, where half of his music ended up on the cutting-room floor and the rest re-ordered. “In trying to eliminate what was admittedly a confusing book,” Bernstein told me in 1985, “the adapters also began tinkering with lyrics and where particular songs should be heard in the show, eliminating the overall musical architecture of the work, at least as I imagined it, and also tipping the work in too comedic of a direction.” The composer set out to correct this with his own “final revised version” which he completed and recorded mere months before his death in 1990, but that version has yet to be heard in Chicago.

Porchlight Musical Theatre has opted instead for the minimalist 1973 one-act revision, in many ways the least of all possible worlds of “Candide” performance possibilities. A five-piece orchestra playing this score leaves a lot to the imagination, to be sure, and reduces the fanfare opening of the familiar overture to a solo trumpet line minus the usual and much-needed supporting harmony. One staging element that Porchlight has borrowed from Prince’s own productions is the way that characters use the venue itself for their many comings and goings, which is fun, but unlike Prince’s productions, the audience members are never made part of the action. We, after all, are the real “class” for Dr. Pangloss in his various guises as he seeks to illustrate the absurdity of the optimistic philosophical dictum that the world that is, insofar as it is, is the best of all possible worlds and yet here, the characters interact only with each other and the orchestra.

At ninety minutes plus, this is a long single act and far too much of it is spent with sight gags and vaudeville-like shenanigans that at times make the music seem like a distracting, if welcome, interruption. Thankfully, those songs that are heard are mostly well sung, though needlessly and unevenly over-amplified in such a small space and in the case of the iconic “Glitter and Be Gay,” overdone. Most worthwhile about the production is Ryan Lanning’s Candide, who with his clarion tenor and boyish looks and mannerisms sterlingly pulls off what is usually a rather thankless role. And while the cast performs a rousing finale of “Make Our Garden Grow,” such seriousness and poignancy appear to arrive out of left field given the trivial tone that has largely preceded it. (Dennis Polkow)

Through November 2, Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, (773)327-5252. $37.

Tennessee Williams’ most autobiographical and breakthrough work began life as a short story (“Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” which can be read at Shattered Globe’s Web site) that was contracted to be reworked for an MGM screenplay, but which Williams shrewdly saw would have far more punch as a play as the piece evolved. Williams would retain a special affection for Chicago since “Menagerie” premiered here in 1944 and its initial success at the Civic Theatre (which Lyric Opera later shamelessly gutted to store scenery) led to its Broadway premiere the following year. It’s one of the most widely read American plays that every high schooler knows; when you bother to stage a work of such familiarity, you’d better have something either really new to say with it, or at least be able to tear up the place with the raw emotions written into the work. Unfortunately, Shattered Globe’s current production does neither. Once you get over the initial interactive shock that you’ve walked a few feet in front of the Joker’s principal thug in “The Dark Knight” sitting there onstage as you come in—veteran Chicago actor David Dastmalchian—when Dastmalchian, whose work I have hugely admired  in other plays, turns to the audience to narrate the play as son Tom, he is distant and aloof and never quite makes a connection with his audience nor his fellow cast members. When he blows up at his mother Amanda—played by Linda Reiter—in the first scene, it is so immediately over the top that there is nowhere else for him to go to achieve the needed trajectory of the play. Likewise, Allison Batty’s Laura is so overtly fragile from the outset that not even having her high-school-crush obsession flirting with her on the floor is able to snap her out of it long enough to entertain the possibility that she might dare consider herself attractive and worthwhile, for the first time and even for a moment, an emotional arc that must be achieved for the show’s climax to work. And though Reiter’s Amanda and Michael Falevits’ Jim are the most convincing characterizations, an overall lack of chemistry amongst the cast  reveals that director Kevin Hagan somehow missed the boat on this one. Most telling at play’s end is that cast members have visible tears streaming from their cheeks, which suggests method acting run amok given that audience members do not. After all, it’s not what the performers feel that counts: it what the audience feels that matters, which as Laurence Olivier used to say, is why we call it “acting.”(Dennis Polkow)

Through November 2, Victory Gardens’ Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, (773)404-7336; $30-$35.

RECOMMENDED

What began eight years ago as a pre-season attempt to offer a free preview of the upcoming Lyric Opera season with the same stars who would be singing the roles appearing has evolved into a general “greatest hits” concept where only a handful of mostly Ryan Center artists and alumni who will appear during the season actually take part. This year’s “big catch” for this free concert is French soprano Natalie Dessay, who wowed us a few seasons back in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and has been taking the world by storm since and who will open the season on September 27 in Massenet’s “Manon.” To hear Dessay offer a free preview of what she will do with “Manon” will alone make this a worthwhile experience. Oddly, though, of the nine operas being presented this season, only two will be represented on this concert: “Manon” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana.” Other featured artists include Nicole Cabell, Jonas Kaufmann, Gordon Hawkins, Raymond Aceto, Elizabeth De Shong, Amber Wagner, Dimitri Pittas and, of course, music director Sir Andrew Davis and the Lyric Opera Orchestra. If you can’t make it to the park itself, WFMT FM (98.7) will be broadcasting the concert live, as it will all of the opening nights of the upcoming Lyric Opera season. (Dennis Polkow)

7:30pm September 6, Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion, (312)332-2244. Free.

RECOMMENDED

For the first decades of its existence, Ravinia was the summer opera capital of the United States and concert opera was a significant element of the 22-year music directorship of James Levine, who was also 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, where this semi-staged version of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” originated in 2006 conceived around Michael York narrating the spoken portions with a script by Marie Therese Squerciati that streamlines much of the action as well as wryly interpolates the proceedings for a modern audience with an Anglo sensibility that perfectly suits York’s narration. But make no mistake: it is the singing and the music that are the clear stars of this production, from Morris Robinson’s velvet-smooth deep bass and terrifying yet comical portrayal of the sadistic Osmin to Hanan Alattar’s stunning ease through the soprano stratosphere as Konstanze to James Conlon’s lively tempos and brilliant shaping of a chamber ensemble made up of non-vacationing Chicago Symphony members. What a rare treat it is to hear a Mozart opera in Ravinia’s Martin Theatre, with its 800-plus seats, 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. The experience is nothing short of revelatory and long may this glorious tradition continue. But next time around, please, Ravinia, keep the standards consistent and hire a professional chorus, preferably members of the CSO’s own unparalleled ensemble rather than a volunteer chorus. For this work a chorus is only heard twice, but they are crucial and climactic moments that mar what precedes them, kind of like baking a cake from scratch and using canned frosting to top it off. (Dennis Polkow)

Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” plays through August 16 at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre, Lake-Cook at Green Bay Rds., Highland Park, (847)266-5100.