Here is my Thursday March 24 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times story on Chicago Opera Theater's 2012 season announcement. (Their 2011 season starts on April 2 -- See if you can keep it all straight!)
Chicago Opera Theater will present a new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in September 2012.
Chicago Opera Theater announces 2012 season
Dickie's last here will offer typical COT atypicality:
Shostakovitch musical, rare Handel, restyled Mozart
BY ANDREW PATNER
Chicago Opera Theater has announced a typically eclectic and intriguing season for 2012, its last under general director Brian Dickie.
Since his appointment in 1999, Dickie, 69, who earlier this year announced he would be returning to England with his family after next season, has joined the ranks of the late Carol Fox, Ardis Krainik, and Alan Stone in transforming the face and place of opera in Chicago.
Not resting on his laurels, Dickie will offer two more Chicago premières on top of almost two dozen he already had added to COT’s adventurous and varied repertoire.
The season will open April 14, 2012, with the previously twice-delayed 1958 Shostakovich musical theater piece/operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki (Moscow, Bird-Cherry Tree District), which also will mark the return to the Harris Theater orchestra pit of COT resident conductor Alexander Platt. The piece is a comedic take on mid-20th century life in a Soviet housing project. (Can you say Good Times in Russian?)
The Dickie line of rarities continues in April and May 2012 with the final entry in a three-year sequence of works based on the Medea legend, Handel’s 1713 Teseo (Theseus) in its Chicago première; young Scotsman Christian Curnyn again will lead Chicago’s Baroque Band.
The season will wrap up in September 2012 with COT’s first fall presentation in 11 years: a new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, by Dickie favorites Diane Paulus and conductor Jane Glover. Both the Shostakovich and the Mozart will be presented in English, returning to the opera-in-translation tradition of COT founder Alan Stone. The Handel, though originally written and produced in London, is in Italian. All three works will have English supertitles.
Moscow, Cheryomushki is being adapted and prepared for chamber orchestra by Gerard McBurney, artistic director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s popular Beyond the Score series. Paulus colleague Michael Donahue directs.
(McBurney, a Soviet music specialist, has also orchestrated a recently discovered prologue for a never-completed Shostakovich science fiction opera, Organon, which will have its world première by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in December 2011.)
Teseo follows last year’s brilliant Giasone (Jason) by Cavalli and this season’s Medée by Charpentier, which opens this April 23. Another young American, James Darrah, will stage both Teseo and Medée.
The new Magic Flute was conceived by Paulus (who is also staging this season’s opening production next month, Tod Machover’s new work, Death and the Powers, The Robots’ Opera). The family-oriented Mozart production opened in January at Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company; COT’s version will mark the eighth collaboration of Paulus and Glover, whom Dickie first paired in his opening season here.
Season subscriptions for 2012 range from $90 to $345 for new subscribers and $84 to $330 for renewals. Half-price student subscriptions are also available. Single tickets go on sale in Febuary 2012. Call (312) 704-8414 or visit chicagooperatheater.org.
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