REVIEW: 'Capriccio' by Lyric Opera of Chicago

Here's the review. 

Renee Fleming has taken her time bringing one of her most celebrated operatic roles, Countess Madeleine in Richard Strauss' "Capriccio," to the company for which she serves as creative consultant.
But the wait has been worth it.
Strauss' 15th and final opera returned to the Lyric Opera repertory after a 20-year absence Monday night at the Civic Opera House, with Fleming, who had not appeared in a fully staged production at Lyric since 2008, heading a superb ensemble, well, superbly.

Klonghoffer "lackluster" in Premiere

This story was covered yesterday. According to the Times of Israel, the premiere was "lackluster.

But let’s back things up a bit. I was at the Metropolitan Opera’s Monday premiere of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” a work dating from 1991 about the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro. The ship was taken by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front who subsequently murdered a wheelchair-bound New York Jewish passenger named Leon Klinghoffer.

Prior to the performance I attended a two-hour rally, a peaceful scrum in a tiny traffic triangle where Broadway meets Columbus Avenue at West 64th Street. A few hundred people were there, many carrying signs declaring that the opera was anti-Semitic propaganda. Most felt the show should be shut down. No one I spoke to had actually seen it, though as New York City-based protester Noah Cohen put it, “I have no need to go look in a mirror and see a distorted version of my own face.”
The problem with the work, whose detractors included former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, former governor David Patterson and US Congressional representatives Carolyn Maloney and Peter King (a nice combination of Democrats and Republicans), seemed to stem from the fact that the opera does not portray the hijackers as mindless bloodthirsty monsters, but dares to give the men and their cause a degree of backstory.

Carmen

Here's the Wikipedia page for the Opera. 

Carmen is an opera in four acts by the French composer Georges Bizet. The libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on a novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée. The opera was first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, on 3 March 1875, and at first was not particularly successful. Its initial run extended to 36 performances, before the conclusion of which Bizet died suddenly, and thus knew nothing of the opera's later celebrity.

Check out this page for more information. 

It recently was featured in Chicago, check out some of the reviews here.



The opera was also featured in the Scottish classic Trainspotting.

Lindsey Stirling - Phantom of the Opera Live @ Vic Chicago 3/9/13

Orpheus & Euridice at the Chicago Opera Theater

Superb Opera Behind the Scenes

Chamber Opera Theater of Chicago Touring London

Check out their feature of Jane Austin's Persuasion.

Don Giovanni at the Chicago Lyric Opera

It's coming up this week, check out the schedule here. Here's a plug for another version.

Moonlight Sonata

by Beethoven

Andrea Bocelli

Verdi opera Aida - Price, Vickers, Solti

Paul Potts sings Nessun Dorma

Opera Training Institute of Chicago

Want to get training in opera, check out the Opera Training Institute of Chicago. 

Clip from Phantom of the Opera

Chicago Lyric Opera Opening Night Gala

Check out Opera News for all the details and photos.

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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Review of As One

Here's the review from Opera News.

Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera, As One, had its world premiere at BAM’s Fisher Space on September 4. The draw of As One, which has a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed, lies in its very human depiction of the internal and external issues faced by transgender individuals in the twenty-first century. Commissioned by American Opera Projects, As One is one of the first operas, if not the first, to address this topic; however, it is not just the “transgender opera” but a piece that haunts and challenges its audience with questions about identity, authenticity, compassion and the human desire for self-love and peace.

Best Opera Arias: Turandot, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Cavalleria Rusticana, La Boheme, Aida,

New Head Named at Chicago Symphony Orchestra

The CSO will have a new President, Jeffrey Alexander. Check out the morning drive from WBEZ for details on the story. 

1. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association has picked a new president. Jeff Alexander will start in mid-January. He’s currently president and CEO of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. He’s credited with helping start new programs like a community music school, increasing revenue and ticket sales and re-establishing the orchestra’s domestic and international touring programs. The CSO Association's former president, Deborah F. Rutter, left to lead the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Jeff Alexander joins us to talk about his new job, and what might be in store for the CSO

Check out MacBeth at the Chicago Opera Theater

Here's the details. 

From the moment the curtain rises, this 110-minute non-stop thriller captures the dark and bloody world where ambition and revenge run rampant.  Nmon Ford as Macbeth is “compelling, weak, nervous, delusional in his courageousness. His voice crisp and burnished.” (Opera News).
The 26-year-old Swiss-American composer Bloch wrote this highly dramatic version in 1906. He invests Shakespeare’s original text with an emotional, hair-raising score of tremendous power, “teeming with Richard Strauss flourishes and echoes of Wagner…. a gripping, close-up case for a rare piece that deserves to be heard.” (Los Angeles Times). Experience this long overdue Chicago Premiere.

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Chicago Lyric Opera Hosts Costume Sale

Check out the story from WBEZ. 

Already on the lookout for a Halloween costume? Or possibly your next Comic Con or Renaissance Faire outfit? The Lyric Opera of Chicago has got your back.
This Saturday marks only the second time in Lyric history that the company will be selling some 3,000 pieces of their handmade costume collection to the public. Costume Director Maureen Reilly said the Lyric doesn’t have enough room in their storage for all of the costumes - some dating back almost 100 years.
Some costumes, she said, have even become a bit repetitive.

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