Top Ten Opera Performances of 2013

This comes from Chicago Classical Review.

Riccardo Muti’s year with the CSO began on a low note with the conductor’s flu and hernia surgery causing him to cancel his January dates and a long-planned CSO Asian tour.
Yet after that dismaying start, the partnership of the orchestra and their beloved Italian maestro went from strength to strength in 2013, culminating in the magnificent September concert performances of Verdi’s Macbeth. The highlight of the CSO concerts marking Verdi’ s 200th birthday, this riveting concert offered Chicago’s finest opera performance of the year as well, with Tatiana Serjan’s vividly characterized and beautifully sung Lady Macbeth leading a faultless cast. The gleaming power and hair-trigger responsiveness of the CSO was jaw-dropping under Muti’s inspired direction, his lifetime of Verdi experience and scholarship shining through every bar.

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Hannibal

Christmas Opera

Phantom of the Opera with Lyrics

Review of Traviata at the Lyric Opera of Chicago

Check out this review of the opera which is still playing at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Great Female Opera Performances

Check out the Lake View Orchestra

A flier for the performance in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago is below.

Below is a photo of all 77 neighborhoods of Chicago.

Swimming Pool Opera: Chicago Opera Theater Puts on Show in Welles Park Pool

DNA Info has all the details.

(Photo courtesy of the Chicago Opera Theater)

Think opera is a bunch of horned Viking women standing in place for hours on end, hitting ear-splitting notes sung in a foreign language?
You haven't seen Chicago Opera Theater's free production of "Orpheus & Euridice," coming to Welles Park Dec. 19, 20 and 22.

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Great Opera Performances Video

Opera Company Commissions Rufus Wainwright to Compose Opera About Roman Emperor Hadrian

Here's the story from Opera News.

Entitled Hadrian, the work, which is currently in development, will be inspired by the Roman emperor's tragic love for the Greek youth Antinous during the the dawn of monotheism. It has been slated to open Canadian Opera Company's 2018-19 mainstage season.
"We began the process of creating a new opera for the Canadian Opera Company several years ago, and I'm very proud to say that we are now at the stage where we can make the news public," Neef said in a press release issued today by the company. "Bringing a world premiere to the COC's mainstage is a significant undertaking for the company and we're proud to say that all the elements are now in place to make a strong project. Rufus and I have been talking about what Hadrian would look like for at least three years now and I'm very excited about the musical and dramatic direction that this piece will take."
Hadrian will mark Wainwright's second foray into opera, following the 2009 world premiere of Prima Donnaat the Manchester International Festival and its subsequent performances in London, Toronto and New York. Playwright Daniel MacIvor, whose award-winning pieces for theatre including See Bob Run, The Soldier Dreams, You Are Here, Arigato, Tokyo and The Best Brothers, will write his first opera libretto.

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Great Opera Video

Chicago Sun Times Unimpressed with Latest at Chicago Lyric Opera

Here's the story.

While some may think of a night at the opera as an abstract means of escape, the artform and its presentation exist very much in time and space.
An audience brings memories of other casts and productions, often in the same opera house. The ability now to access recordings from almost any period or place throws on more layers of experience. Other symphony orchestras and chamber ensembles can make a city or festival a bazaar of comparisons and contrasts.

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Vivaldi Performance

Phantom of the Opera Performance

Rossini - La Cenerentola (1981) - Complete opera

Check Out Mozart's The Magic of Figaro

Check out Hansel and Gretel at the Chicago Opera Playhouse

The details are here. 

Hansel & Gretel, Engelbert Humperdink’s original opera based on the Grimm’s Fairy Tale, is a fun-filled show that will have your entire school giggling about the evil witch and entranced by the magical music. At only 45 minutes long, Hansel and Gretel’s adventure will bring your students to the edge of their seats, fascinated by the world of opera and musical theater. Our in-school performance is suited for K-8 and is an accessible and affordable way to engage children in the imaginative and educational world of music

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Famous Opera Scene from Shawshank Redemption

Famous Opera Scene in Shawshank Redemption

Beethoven

Opera duo Charlotte & Jonathan

Check out the new photo album for Ted Margaris. 

Opening Night Dispatch: Lyric Opera of Chicago,

Here's the full story. 

In a hurry-up, rush-rush, cell-phone-to-the-ear world, Lyric Opera of Chicago's Opening Night Gala Performance and Ball is a charmed interlude when time slows to an early-twentieth-century pace, pomp and formality reign and the core of the city's Establishment gathers to support and celebrate a beloved institution with a magnificent event produced by Lyric's Women's Board. The annual ritual began last Saturday afternoon before 5:00 with limousines lining up in front of the Civic Opera House on Wacker Drive, where elegantly dressed couples stepped out onto a red carpet before a performance of Carmen.Once again, it was the Chicago of Mary Garden, Samuel Insull and Edith Rockefeller McCormick - well, maybe not quite. At last year's Lyric Opening, ultra-chic Women's Board member Katherine Harvey arrived on the red carpet wearing a superb black strapless John Galliano gown, impeccable in every detail - except that around its waist was not Edith McCormick's diamond stomacher but a denim jeans jacket. "It was a Dior jeans jacket," insists Mrs. Harvey, whose composer husband, Julian, descends from the Fred Harvey who smartened up railway depot dining along the "Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe," as sung by Judy Garland in the 1946 Hollywood film "The Harvey Girls." 

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Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier - The Royal Opera, Covent Garden

Luciano Pavarotti's Greatest Hits

Opera Duo Performs

Upcoming Events in Opera

Check out this site for upcoming events in the world of opera including upcoming shows in Chicago.

GOERKE RETURNS TO MET OPERA IN GLORY

The Associated Press has the story. 

Here's what Christine Goerke did when she finished her first performance at the Metropolitan Opera in nearly five years: She came out for her solo bow — and promptly burst into tears.
The opera was Richard Strauss' monumental fable "Die Frau ohne Schatten," ("The Woman Without a Shadow") and Goerke was cast in a notoriously difficult dramatic soprano role, the discontented Dyer's Wife.
When she emerged for her curtain call, the audience erupted into a sustained frenzy of cheering and foot-stomping the likes of which has rarely been heard at the Met in recent years. Goerke stood as if in disbelief, then put her hands up to cover her face.

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Reunion: Jean Fenn

Here's the article. 

Three hours into my lunch interview with Jean Fenn, at her home in Bainbridge Island, Washington, the rapid patter of her voice stops, and she looks at me levelly. "You know me well enough now to give a fair account of my career." Before I can reply, she continues, "This business about me going into 'limbo,' that just irks me!"
Now eighty-five, Fenn is referring to a quote from Lanfranco Rasponi'sLast Prima Donnas, listing American sopranos "who showed so much promise … only to go into limbo." That judgment, mindlessly parroted in online references to Fenn, has somehow gradually acquired currency. Her Met career, which spanned much of Rudolf Bing's tenure, may be the locus of this vague critical disappointment. Fenn herself is candid, if not a little glib, about her time there: "I had an early break at the Met, but I blew it. When the same thing happened ten years later, I was ready." But one doesn't assess a ballplayer's performance from a highlights reel of flubs and clutch plays. As our conversation unfolds, the puzzle pieces of Fenn's career outside the Met begin to fill in a much larger and far more fascinating picture.

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Lyric Opera's Parsifal: A pure fool Q&A

Check out the story at the Chicago Reader. 

On the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht you were at Parsifal?It was a coincidence.
You know that Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer?I think the opera he really liked was Meistersinger. This one is a five-hour sit without (as Mark Twain noted) any good tunes for the vocalists.
What about all that mystical leader/pure brotherhood stuff?Wagner's inspiration was a medieval Grail poem, which he expanded in his own libretto. It's a mess, but this much comes across: (1) Women are dangerous; (2) If you just say "no" to sex with them, you could be king; (3) But not if you castrate yourself to avoid temptation.
Nap time?The first and third acts are a bit of a snore, though there's a lot of movie soundtrack potential in the orchestral music, handily played by the Lyric Opera Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis. Bass Kwangchul Youn, as an old knight, is stuck with relating a bunch of backstory but has a very nice voice. And there are a couple of arresting visuals: airborne, single-winged swans and a giant golden hand that looks like it's in the wrong opera.

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History of the Civic Opera in Chicago

Their site gives a detailed history of the Opera House on Wacker in Downtown Chicago. 

Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of the world’s great opera companies. It is renowned internationally for its artistic excellence and financial strength. Founded in 1954, since its earliest years Lyric has distinguished itself by presenting the finest international singers, directors, and designers in classic and less-familiar operatic repertoire and in world-premiere productions. Lyric Opera has operated in the black for 24 of the past 25 years, a record among the country’s major not-for-profit music and performing-arts companies. For more than two decades the company has achieved unparalleled success in its ticket sales, averaging 100% attendance from 1988 through 2002. In 2011/12 the company sold a grand total of 233,113 tickets for the season, which comprised 72 performances of eight operas. - See more at: http://www.lyricopera.org/about/lyric-history.aspx#sthash.M1E7wAZJ.dpuf

Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of the world’s great opera companies. It is renowned internationally for its artistic excellence and financial strength. Founded in 1954, since its earliest years Lyric has distinguished itself by presenting the finest international singers, directors, and designers in classic and less-familiar operatic repertoire and in world-premiere productions. Lyric Opera has operated in the black for 24 of the past 25 years, a record among the country’s major not-for-profit music and performing-arts companies. For more than two decades the company has achieved unparalleled success in its ticket sales, averaging 100% attendance from 1988 through 2002. In 2011/12 the company sold a grand total of 233,113 tickets for the season, which comprised 72 performances of eight operas. - See more at: http://www.lyricopera.org/about/lyric-history.aspx#sthash.M1E7wAZJ.dpuf

Great Opera Quotes

Check out this site for some great quotes about opera.  Here's a few of the best.

one of us can choose where we shall love...”
― Susan Kay, Phantom

tags: empathy, love, opera, passion, phantom, sympathy, understanding

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“Floating, falling, sweet intoxication. Touch me, trust me, savor each sensation. Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in to the power of the music of the night.”
― Charles Hart, The Phantom of the Opera: Piano/Vocal

tags: andrew-lloyd-webber, music, opera, phantom-of-the-opera

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“They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

Richard Wagner's dark knight returns to Lyric Opera in Chicago

Here's the review from the Chicago Tribune. 

It's been said that more has been written about Richard Wagner than anybody who's ever lived, except for Jesus Christ. Wagner no doubt would have been flattered by the comparison.
Despite the manifold glories of the German Romantic composer's music, his operas can be a tough slog, with their convoluted librettos, logjams of German consonants and expansive running times that make the operas of Giuseppe Verdi – that other 19th century musical titan whose bicentennial the world is celebrating this year – seem to whisk by like MTV videos.

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COT shines shimmering modern light on ancient myth

Here's the story from the Chicago Tribune.

Chicago audiences have dipped their toes in various realms of aquatic theater before.
Think of director Mary Zimmerman's widely successful, Tony Award-winning stage adaptation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," which originated in 1998 at Lookingglass Theatre where a pond was the playing area. Pegasus Players made a similar splash a decade earlier with its production of Stephen Sondheim's musical "The Frogs" at the swimming pool of Truman College.

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Metropolitan Opera Adds Three Composers to New-Works Program, Commissions Operas by Thomas Adès and Osvaldo Golijov

Here's the story. 

The Metropolitan Opera announced today the addition of three young composers to its collaborative workshopping program with Lincoln Center Theater, Met/LCT New Works Program, as well as two opera commissions and new productions of several modern operas that have been scheduled to play at the company in future seasons. 
Composers Matthew Aucoin, David T. Little and Joshua Schmidt have been selected to take part in the Met/LCT New Works Program, which utilizes the resources of the Met and Lincoln Center Theater to develop new opera and musical theater pieces. (Nico Muhly's Two Boys, which this month receives its Met premiere, was developed through the program.) Aucoin, the youngest assistant conductor in the history of the Met, is currently composing his third opera, which has been commissioned by the American Repertory Theater. Little's operas include Dog Days — which received its world premiere in 2012 — as well as a Fort Worth Opera commission that is currently titled JFK. Joshua Schmidt is the composer of the admired musical Adding Machine, which played off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2008. Schmidt's adaptation of Shaw's Candida, titled A Minister's Wife, was produced by Lincoln Center Theater in 2011. For the Met/LCT program, Schmit will work with Tony-nominated librettist Dick Scanlan, who penned the book and lyrics for Broadway's Tony Award-winning Thoroughly Modern Millie. 

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An Operatic Monster Mash

The NY Times has this feature. 

A mild-mannered bachelor tried to kiss a zombie on Saturday evening on the Lower East Side. He succumbed to her bite soon after. A group of medical students made earnest attempts to reanimate a corpse. Religious objects were desecrated. There was blood.
Halloween reveling continued into the weekend at the Abrons Arts Center, where Experiments in Opera, a composer-driven initiative, opened its season with “Chorus of All Souls,” a program of short choral operas bathed in a ghoulish light. In partnership with Vision Into Art, it brought to the stage two one-act operas, Jason Cady’s “Nostalgia Kills You” and Matthew Welch’s “ReAnimator Requiem,” as well as John Zorn’s a cappella mystery play, “The Holy Visions,” based on the writings of the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen with evocative video projections by S. Katy Tucker.

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Lyric Opera in Baltimore Opens

Here's the recap from the Baltimore Sun. 

It’s deja vu all over the place in the Modell Performing Arts Center at the Lyric.
To open its third season, Lyric Opera Baltimore is offering a production of Puccini’s passionate “Tosca” featuring the set used in that same venue by the Baltimore Opera Company, which went bankrupt five years ago.
That set was sold off with all the company’s other assets during the liquidation process, but was rented back from its new owners (Fort Worth Opera) for this occasion.

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An Evening with Ricky Ian Gordon

Check him out at the Chicago campus at DePaul University. 

Chicago Opera Theater’s latest creative turn: ‘Orpheus’ at park pool

Check out the Chicago Sun Times review of this classic opera. 

For Chicago music lovers who have been feeling a Verdi overload from the many productions and concert performances of the great Italian during this, his bicentennial year, Chicago Opera Theater has an answer. And it’s one into which even total opera novices can literally take the plunge.
Almost.

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Review of A Harlot’s Progress

Check out the review here. 

Attending the world premiere of an opera is always a special occasion, and even more so if it is the first opera by its composer. If one adds to all this the fact that the venue is the Theater an der Wien, whose history is filled with premieres of musical masterpieces, the cup of interest cannot be more full of curiosity and expectations.

First of all I must say that the premiere of A Harlot’s Progress was a success, something that is much needed in the world of opera in the times in which we live. It was really a remarkable musical performance with a convincing stage production and an excellent cast, headed by the superlative Diana Damrau.

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Star Withdraws From Lyric Opera’s ‘Otello’

Here's the latest from the NY Times. 

The South African tenor Johan Botha has withdrawn from the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of Verdi’s “Otello” because of what the company described as “severe back pain caused by a previous injury.” He has gone to Vienna for treatment.

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Lyric Opera nails a Butterfly while Theo Ubique channels Callas

Check out the review in the Chicago Reader. 

This week saw the opening of both Theo Ubique's Master Class—the Terrence McNally play about Maria Callas—and Lyric Opera's Madama Butterfly.I saw them a day apart, which made for some interesting reverberations.
Master Class, at No Exit Cafe, is such an intimate production that you might want to avoid the front-row seats. Callas, played by the admirable Kelli Harrington, leaves the singing to her three ostensible students, each of whom delivers a high-volume vocal in pretty close proximity to your eardrums.

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Chicago Opera Theater’s latest creative turn: ‘Orpheus’ at park pool

Check out the review from the Chicago Sun Times. 

For Chicago music lovers who have been feeling a Verdi overload from the many productions and concert performances of the great Italian during this, his bicentennial year, Chicago Opera Theater has an answer. And it’s one into which even total opera novices can literally take the plunge.
Almost.

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Review of the Lyric Opera House in Chicago

Check out the review here. 

Sweet Sound of Success

Check out this profile of Sandra Radvanovsky. 

How does a diva define the word "diva"? American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, whose calendar this season includes prima donna roles by Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, sits quietly in the offices of OPERA NEWSand takes a short pause before answering, her hands folded in her lap and her tone matter-of-fact. "Right. Nowadays, everybody gets called a diva. Or calls themselves a diva. Beyoncé is a diva, right? The term used to have negative connotations — a diva was someone who threw fits, stomped out of rehearsals, had all these demands. But that's not acceptable in this day and age.
"People who throw hissy fits get replaced. That's understood. I choose to take the positive route — I believe that the ladies who sing these big roles are women who have worked hard to get where we are, we are accomplished at what we do, and we are at the top of our game. We earned the right to be called 'diva' because of all the work we've done. I'm honored to be called a diva. I am. I work hard for that. I work very hard, I love what I do, and I am intensely passionate about it. If that's being a diva, I am fine with it. But I refuse to be something that I'm not, or behave in such a way that creates an aura of me being untouchable. That's not me.

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Interview with Richard Bonynge

Check it out here.

ON: This is your first public master class in New York. Why the long delay?
RB: Simple. Nobody asked me!
ON: What's the first master class you ever conducted?
RB: I'm not sure. Early on, I did some in Aldeburgh, and I've done them in London and in Australia, but I haven't done that many, to be quite honest.
ON: In such a short time, what do you hope to achieve?

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New Book On Opera Legends

The book is called, They Changed Opera, and here's part of a review from the New York Times Book Review. 

The collapse of the New York City Opera last month was many things, but it could hardly be called unexpected. Indeed, that the company had kept going for seventy years was more than a little amazing. Certainly the board of trustees made some terrible choices over the past decade—the most severe of them likely the decision to cancel a full season of performances at Lincoln Center in 2009 as its theater was renovated (New York City Ballet, which shared the space, made no such mistake) and then to leave the Center altogether in 2011.
But it had been a star-crossed organization for years, beset by strikes, warehouse fires, financial woes and the devastation of the early years of AIDS. Beverly Sills—the company’s biggest star, its long-time general manager and most effective fundraiser—estimated that the troupe lost more than 100 people to AIDS in the space of a decade: directors, conductors, singers, and others at the peak of their youth and sexual urgency, cut down by a mysterious new malady. The brilliant and venturesome Christopher Keene succeeded Sills as general director in 1989 and brought to the stage a number of daring modern operas, including Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. But he spent much of his tenure fighting the virus, sometimes all but incapacitated, before his early death in 1995.

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Vienna State Opera goes live stream with pay as you view offerings

Check out the article here. 

For all those who can't come to the Vienna State Opera — it can now come to you.
Starting Sunday, the company is offering what it describes as state-of-the art live streaming, with viewers able to switch between a view of the stage and close-ups with moving cameras. Innovations promised by the year's end will include apps providing subtitles in English, German and Korean and a synchronized score of the work being shown.
The project starts off with Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier" ("Knight of the Rose.")

The Vienna State Opera is one of the most respected around. 

Great Opera Performances

Check out Natalie Dessay singing "Pale et blonde"

Longtime Chicago Lyric Opera Artistic Director Passes Away

This was first reported over the summer but his accomplishments should be duly noted. 

A brilliant, idiomatic interpreter of the Italian repertoire and the longtime artistic director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Bartoletti was a beloved figure in the cultural life of his adopted city for more than a half-century. Educated in Italy, Bartoletti made his professional debut in Florence, leading Rigoletto at the Teatro Communale in 1953. He made his Lyric debut in 1956, stepping in for Tullio Serafin to conduct Il Trovatore with Jussi Björling, Ettore Bastianini, Herva Nelli and Claramae Turner. In his first Lyric season, Bartoletti also paced Renata Tebaldi as Tosca and Mimì and Eleanor Steber as Violetta.

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Check Out the Latest Opera in Chicago

Hey it's Ted Margaris, and check back for the latest in opera news in Chicago.

First up, check out the Chicago Opera Playhouse where Hansel and Greta is currently playing. Here's Luciano Pavarotti