Lyric Opera of Chicago
The season, which will open with a Broadway-tinged concert on 10 October, features six productions, the first of which, Cherubini‘s Medea, reunites the Metropolitan Opera’s 2022 opening night team of Sondra Radvanovsky, Matthew Polenzani, and David McVicar.
Enrique Mazzola, who will conduct half of these productions, seems to show a different conception of the Music Director role than some of his colleagues elsewhere in the industry. Mazzola’s other two productions include a Cavalleria Rusticana (with Yulia Matochkina and SeokJong Baek) & Pagliacci (with Gabriella Reyes and Russell Thomas) as well as a Così fan tutte (with Jacquelyn Stucker, Cecilia Molinari, Anthony León, and Ian Rucker). And he’ll conduct Orff‘s Carmina Burana in the fall.
Elena Stikhina will cozy up to Nicholas Brownlee as Salome and Jochanaan, respectively, when David McVicar‘s 2008 production of Strauss’s opens in January conducted by Tomás Netopil. The production raises questions both of what types of role lie ahead for the Met’s current Captain Ahab Brandon Jovanonovich, who will sing Herod, and whether or not the prim midwesterners will also import the production’s starkers beefcake executioner. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner and Ryan Capozzo complete the cast as Herodias and Narraboth.
Matthew Ozawa‘s production of Madama Butterfly, conducted by Domingo Hindoyan and featuring an all-female and all-Japanese design team, will feature Karah Son, who recently sang the role in Los Angeles, as well as Evan LeRoy Johnson, Nozomi Kato, and Zachary Nelson. And barely a month the opera opens at the Met, Daniela Mack will sing in El ultimo sueño de Frida y Diego opposite Alfredo Daza, rising countertenor star Key’mon W. Murrah, and Ana María Martínez (who also appears in Così).
There are also some starker diversions from the standard fare: November brings a weeklong retrospective of The Smashing Pumpkins‘ album A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness billed as an “immersively original sonic and visual experience that blurs the boundaries of opera, rock, and performance art” starring frontman Billy Corgan.
A two-performance run of a new opera featuring words and music by Chicago poet laureate avery r. young, sounds somewhat more thoughtful; the Afro-surrealist opera will focus on a Chicago family’s story during the Great Migration and casting is yet to be announced. And for those that want to sweat to the oldies, Renée Fleming does her anthropocene thing in February.
More information available here.
What are you most looking forward to in Chicago next season?
Pick a little, talk a little
Following the successful launch of the new regular feature The Talk of the Town in January, the team at the box is inviting contributions for a new quarter of operatic potpourri.
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