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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