My Tuesday March 22 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of performances on Sunday March 20, 2011 by artists from Lyric Opera of Chicago's Hercules.
Bass-baritone Eric Owens gave a morning recital Sunday. Lucy Crowe sang Handel in three programs.
Herculean efforts from opera team
Crowe, Owens, Bicket work overtime in Chicago
BY ANDREW PATNER
It’s hard to think of a cast and team that has been as generous with its time in Chicago as that of Lyric Opera’s Hercules, which had a remarkable run through Monday at the Civic Opera House.
Director Peter Sellars gave moving and eloquent pre-curtain talks before each performance, works of art in themselves. The spiky-haired multiculturalist also dropped in at concerts and other events around town, his curiosity trumping the demands of his international schedule.
For their parts, British conductor Harry Bicket and soprano Lucy Crowe set aside time to rehearse and give a remarkable three concerts with Baroque Band in Hyde Park, Evanston, and the Grainger Ballroom at Orchestra Hall, where I heard them Sunday evening.
Sunday got a kick start, too, when bass-baritone Eric Owens, who has the title role in Lyric’s production of the Handel work, gave a morning recital at Mayne Stage in Rogers Park, which was broadcast live over WFMT-FM (98.7). (Although I am critic-at-large for WFMT, I have no connection with the series WFMT Presents: Live From Mayne Stage. In fact, this was my first time attending one of these popular weekly programs.)
Owens, an American marvel, has been hitting on all cylinders lately with triumphs around the world in the Sellars-John Adams Doctor Atomic (as Gen. Leslie Groves) and as a show-stealing Alberich in the Metropolitan Opera’s new Das Rheingold. Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti handpicked the Philadelphia native to sing Lodovico in Verdi’s Otello next month in Chicago and at Carnegie Hall. His intense and telling morning-time offerings of Hugo Wolf’s 1897 Michelangelo songs and Schumann’s towering Dichterliebe of 1840 at the Mayne Stage event marked his Chicago recital debut.
A post-broadcast encore of Leporello’s Catalogue Aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (complete with hilarious and never overdone stage movement) made one eager to see him in a full recital and back at Lyric in more roles. Accompanist Julia Siciliano was a sensitive partner but had to fight an oddly tuned piano.
Bicket is a known and increasingly appreciated entity in Chicago, while Crowe made her acclaimed debut here as the captive Iole in Hercules. Her presentation with Baroque Band of three of Cleopatra’s arias from Handel’s earlier Giulio Cesare was a sort of miniopera of its own, embracing her character’s changing moods and circumstances, as well as the variety of the composer’s methods and challenges.
Crowe has a technique that enables her to navigate anything; her rich voice filled the room and then some, and had the audience shouting for more, which they got with an encore of another Handel number, “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Rinaldo, on Lyric’s lineup next season. Though a soprano, if Crowe keeps going in this direction, with her intelligence, ability, characterful voice and deep presence, she could be a successor to the much-missed mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
With these three concerts, Bicket raised the level of Baroque Band’s playing by several notches. Still, as its Bach, Corelli, and Handel sans Crowe reminded us, if the group wants to move beyond its own devoted fan base, it will have to consider engaging a conductor at a high level and perhaps re-auditioning some positions.
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