Danielle de Niese, Kyle Ketelsen/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

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

RECOMMENDED

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 »

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 »

Jason Collins, Liora Grodnikaite, Judith Forst, Karita Mattila/Photo: Dan Rest

RECOMMENDED

The operas of Leoš Janácek came rather late into the Lyric Opera canon, but the first opera from his so-called mature period, 1921’s “Káta Kabanová,” is making its first return visit since it was first heard here back in 1986. At that time, Lyric’s then-general director Ardis Krainik pushed the piece’s connections to Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” in the hopes that Lyric’s conservative Italian-repertoire-centered audiences would accept the piece.  Twenty-three years later, “Katya,” as it is often referred to in English, is still a tough-enough sell for Lyric audiences that those loose connections are once again being brought out of moth balls.  Yes, it is true that Janácek loosely claimed such an inspiration, but aside from the virtually opposite music worlds that these two early twentieth-century operas occupy—Puccini looking back to a previous century, Janácek a composer of his time who sought to innovate and look ahead—the heroine of “Butterfly” remains faithful to her husband whereas “Katya” is the one who cheats on her husband. Despite the considerable sympathy that is built up for Janácek’s heroine, that remains a crucial dramatic difference. Read the rest of this entry »

James Morris, Deborah Voigt/Photo: Dan Rest

In these trying economic times, Lyric Opera management is taking no chances: not only is the company presenting one of its most conservative seasons in the company’s fifty-five year history, but it broke off contract negotiations last Friday night with the Lyric Opera Orchestra, which had rejected a shorter season and wage freezes, i.e., a significant reduction in pay.  That management appears to have the upper hand was indicated by the fact that the Orchestra went ahead and performed at Saturday’s gala season opener without a contract. In better times, the Orchestra would have been on strike and the performance cancelled, but at least orchestra members were passing out pamphlets to the black-tie and gown set that walked down the red carpet leading to the doors of the Civic Opera House explaining their plight. Inside, too, there were indications that the recession was having an impact: the usual opening-night complimentary champagne became $9 a glass after Act I; the party favors handed out at evening’s end—a company poster—were “one per couple,” ushers literally grabbing them out of patrons’ hands who hadn’t heard.

Inside, the company was presenting its most-oft-performed tried-and-true Italian warhorse, Puccini’s “Tosca,” an opera by an Italian about Italians and written for Italians, and in most past seasons of the company long known as La Scala West, sung by Italians, or at least an Italian somewhere in the cast or in the orchestra pit. Not this time around. Soprano Deborah Voigt, a stellar Wagner and Strauss interpreter (neither are being heard in this budget-crunching season) and best known outside of the opera world for her celebrated weight-loss surgery after being fired by Covent Garden because her ample size made her unable to wear a kinky designer’s costume, sang the title role, a strange bit of miscasting. Read the rest of this entry »

Deborah Voigt

RECOMMENDED

This is the ninth year that Lyric Opera has presented a free concert prior to its regular season, a tradition that began when Sir Andrew Davis became music director.  The original idea was to offer a season preview to tantalize the public for the upcoming season by presenting highlights performed by the same stars who would actually be in those productions.  Over the years, 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 (actually six operas, one operetta and one oratorio), only three will be represented at this concert.  Of greatest interest is that all three of the principal stars of the season-opening production of Puccini’s “Tosca”—which opens September 26—are scheduled to perform: Tosca herself (soprano Deborah Voigt), Cavaradossi (tenor Vladimir Galouzine) and Baron Scarpia (bass James Morris).  Also scheduled to appear from Gounod’s “Faust,” the second production of the season which opens October 5, are Marguerette (soprano Ana María Martínez), Valentin (baritone Lucas Meachem), the second Faust (tenor Joseph Kaiser) and the second Mephistopholes (bass Kyle Ketelsen).  Although there will also be excerpts from Verdi’s rarely heard “Ernani,” the third opera of the season which opens October 27, no major cast members from those performances are scheduled to appear.  Also appearing will be Ryan Center members who will perform various roles across the 2009-10 season, including Katherine Lerner, Amanda Majeski, Amber Wagner and René Barbera.  (Dennis Polkow)

7:30pm, September 11, Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion, (312)332-2244. Free.

Matthew Polenzani and Erin Wall/Photo: Dan Rest

Once upon a time, the principal responsibility of the director of an operatic production was to make sure that the singers didn’t bump into one another or the scenery on stage.  Then, came the idea of the “concept” director where a novel idea—whether inspired or not, whether logical or not—ruled the day.  It became increasingly commonplace for stage directors to add operas to their resumes, even if said director was not particularly musical and even if the staging had nothing whatsoever to do with the music.  Oh well, at least the drama of the piece would be served, or so it was reasoned.  Very, very rarely, you end up with operatic direction that somehow misses the point of both the music and the drama, no small feat, given the odds of some aspect of one or the other working out even with a clueless director.  Such is the case with Lyric Opera’s new production of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Lyric Opera:

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s 55th season
begins Saturday, September 26, 2009, at 6:00 p.m.
with Sir Andrew Davis conducting Giacomo Puccini’s immortal
TOSCA
starring Deborah Voigt, Vladimir Galouzine, and James Morris

Faust, Ernani, Katya Kabanova, The Merry Widow, The Elixir of Love,
The Damnation of Faust, and The Marriage of Figaro
also to be presented this season, including three new Lyric productions
– one a Lyric Opera premiere – and one new-to-Chicago production Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Dan Rest/Lyric Opera of Chicago

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.