Lyric Opera audiences have the luxury of expecting great performances from everyone on the Opera House stage. It’s par for the course; we’re spoiled that way. But once in a while, someone comes along who knocks our socks off. Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in a stunning Lyric Opera debut as the title character in Jenůfa, […]
Category: Performing Arts Review
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Lyric’s victorious Daughter of the Regiment
Opera seasons are usually planned far in advance, so there was no way for the folks in charge of scheduling at Lyric to predict that not one but two actual wars would be raging when the curtain went up on their second production of the season, Gaetano Donizetti’s 1840 comic work, The Daughter of the […]
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Little orphan Annie meets Dracula
Director Christopher Alden is back at Lyric Opera for the first time since his racy production of Rigoletto created an uproar there back in 2000. The Alden project onstage now—his take on Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman—is of the same approximate vintage, debuting at Canadian National Opera in 1996. And yes, on opening night last […]
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Lyric Opera’s Proximity
Spectacle? It’s long been the grand opera’s calling card. But never quite like this. Lyric Opera’s world premiere production of Proximity—closer to Immersive Van Gogh or Art on the Mart than to Aida—opened at the opera house last week. Directed and “mixed” by Yuval Sharon (creator of the parking garage Wagner, Twilight: Gods, which he […]
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A timely Turing
After a promising Chicago workshop performance four years ago, Chicago Opera Theater’s The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing returned for a two-performance world premiere at the Harris Theater last week, conducted by COT music director Lidiya Yankovskaya. It’s a gut-wrenching piece in a well-crafted production, with two major themes that couldn’t be more contemporary: […]
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Bad girls, brigadiers, and bullfights
The Lyric Opera was packed to the rafters with patrons twinkling with sequins for opening night of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, with libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Premiered in Paris to moral scandal in 1875, the tragic opera, based on an 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée, about a bohémienne and her fatal seduction of […]
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A dance of contrasts
Scene: A blustery, freezing February night in Chicago. As we approach the Civic Opera House, a cluster of protestors come into focus. They’re holding aloft bloodied ballerina soft sculptures, signs that sport slogans like “supporting ‘great Russian culture’ is supporting the war,” and large-scale images of Oleksandr Shapoval, a Ukrainian ballet dancer and teacher who […]
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Soul opera
It’s been said that the soul of opera is its music, so in the case of The Factotum—Will Liverman and DJ King Rico’s original piece that is a loose take on Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville—hip-hop is at its beautiful core. The MTV generation, or hip-hop fans of a certain age, can recall the […]
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Grimm and surreal
This surrealistic production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale—seen twice before at Lyric—should probably be a Christmas show. But since Joffrey became Lyric’s roommate, we’re getting it now. Visually it’s nightmarish, claustrophobic, and monochromatic as a gray January day—but also striking: think fish-headed dream-scene maitre d’ overseeing a troop […]
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The Don and the Count
Deeply committed Verdi fans ought to get themselves to Lyric Opera’s first ever production of Don Carlos, the four-hour, five-act, 1867 French language version of the shorter Verdi opera they already know as the Italian language Don Carlo. This love vs. duty tale of historical fiction, loosely drawn from the life of a 16th-century Spanish […]
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When melodrama meets breaking news
Thanks to CNN, this weekend I went right from Lyric Opera’s season-opening production of Ernani—featuring Charles V of Spain—to the pomp and circumstance surrounding the launch of Charles III of England. Castles, crowns, cannons—it was all of a piece. And that did something I hadn’t anticipated: it brought an evening of seldom-seen Verdi to life. […]
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In search of freedom
This commission by Chicago Opera Theater brings to town a new opera by the prolific and celebrated Belize-born British composer, singer, pianist, and performer Errollyn Wallen, with librettist Deborah Brevoort. Loosely based on S.I. Martin’s novel Incomparable World, the story is grounded in the little-known historical fact that the Brits recruited enslaved people in the […]
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Holocaust, the opera
It was a little disturbing that in the final moments of Chicago Fringe Opera’s stirring production of the Holocaust opera Two Remain (Out of Darkness), what should pop into my head but “Springtime for Hitler.” I was thinking I could blame Mel Brooks. If I’d never seen The Producers, maybe a rousing full-cast anthem titled […]
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Riverboat romance
With the first Chicago snow of the season also came the opening of Florencia en el Amazonas, and the late Daniel Catán’s opera kept the audience warm with hot romance on a riverboat making its way to Manaus, Brazil. We are greeted with lush jungle greens that flank the stage and the El Dorado sitting […]
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What a concept!
Barrie Kosky’s magic take on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which has been circling the globe for nearly a decade and seen by 700,000 people, landed on the Lyric Opera Stage this week. Concocted by original codirectors Kosky and Suzanne Andrade for Komische Oper Berlin, it’s magic in the most literal sense—a visual sleight of hand […]