Andrew Patner: The View from Here

Riccardo Muti back early in Chicago, says full speed ahead with CSO

Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, March 30, 2011 5:38 p.m. CDT

Full speed ahead for Muti

Back in Chicago, conductor prepares for April concerts

By ANDREW PATNER 

 

Riccardo Muti, seen leading the Chicago Symphony (concertmaster Robert Chen at left) last September, is preparing for April concerts. | Tom Cruze~Sun-Times

Riccardo Muti is back on the job on South Michigan Avenue.

After being injured in a fall during a rehearsal last month, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director has managed to pack more into seven weeks of recovery than most people might. That’s especially the case considering that Muti underwent facial and jaw reconstruction and had a pacemaker implanted.

“It was a kind of destiny -- that this happened in Chicago, a city with both such advanced doctors but also such caring ones, that I did not lose any teeth, that I did not feel any physical pain, that I did not injure an eye or my skull,” said a rested-looking Muti, 69, in an interview Tuesday evening in his basement dressing room suite at Orchestra Hall.

Earlier in the day, he met with his oral and facial surgeon and his cardiologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and was given a clean bill of health from them, Muti said. They endorsed the steps he has taken to speed his full recovery, including pacing himself, temporarily limiting the upward movement of his left arm, and tolerating “a soon-to-vanish existence of a very prominent ‘s’ sound when I speak that makes people in Italy think that I am from Bologna,” Muti laughed.

Four days ahead of schedule, the conductor returned Monday evening to Chicago to catch up with administrative duties and begin preparations for concert performances of Verdi’s opera Otello and other programs next month with the CSO, Chicago Symphony Chorus, and vocal soloists in Chicago and at New York’s fabled Carnegie Hall.

Earlier this month while in Italy, Muti gained international headlines by becoming only the second recipient of the $1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize, endowed by the late Swedish dramatic soprano.  (Supertenor Plácido Domingo was the first, in 2009).

Muti was in the news again when he took on the Italian political establishment, including powerful and controversial prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, to restore cultural funding to the national budget.

He linked this apparently successful campaign -- “of which,” he said, “I am but the edge of an iceberg of all of those who work in culture in Italy” -- to performances he conducted in Rome of Verdi’s early opera Nabucco, which also commemorated the 150th anniversary of Italian reunification on March 17, 1851.

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A fuller account of the interview with Muti and his recent activities and observations will appear in the “Show” section of Sunday's Sun-Times (April 3, 2011).

CSO news round-up: a gifted artist dies young, another wins a big post in Los Angeles, and Perahia steps in for an ailing Pollini

Dale Clevenger, Avis Herseth, and Alice Render Clevenger

• Alice Render Clevenger, 50, died Wednesday at her Winnetka home.

A regular supplemental player in the CSO horn section since 1984, she was a person of uncommon bravery, strength, and high spirits.

Given a four-month prognosis when diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in 2003, she fought back and hard and stretched her rich life for eight more years, continuing through treatments and pain to play and tour with the CSO, teach at Roosevelt and elsewhere, raise her family, and compete in triathlons.

She and longtime CSO principal horn Dale Clevenger were married in 1988 and have two sons, Mac, of Washington, D.C., and Jesse, a horn student at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, his mother’s alma mater. Alice is also survived by her parents, Edwin R. and Joyce Render, a brother and a sister.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Monday at Christ Church, Episcopal, 784 Sheridan Rd. in Winnetka.  Memorial donations may be made to Susan G. Komen for the Cure , 8765 West Higgins Road, Suite 401, Chicago 60631.

• Nathan Cole (above), a valued member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first violin section since 2002, has been appointed first associate concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, effective July 4.

Cole, a gifted soloist, chamber musician, teacher, and writer, will continue to lead the summer UBS Chamber Music Festival that he founded in his native Lexington, Ky.

Cole’s wife and fellow CSO section member, Akiko Tarumoto, also has won a violin audition with Los Angeles, where she had played from 2000 to 2004 before joining the CSO.  They re-met and married in Chicago and will be greatly missed here. 

• Due to illness, Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini has called off his U.S. spring tour, including his late-Beethoven April 10 recital here.

London-based American pianist Murray Perahia, who canceled his own scheduled dates earlier this season due to an injury, will substitute with a mixed program of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Chopin.  For details, (312) 294-3000 or cso.org.

CSO: Dutoit delivers with Sibelius and Stravinsky, Kissin scores on the rebound with Grieg

Here is my Saturday March 26 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday March 24 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Charles Dutoit and pianist Evgeny Kissin in music of Sibelius, Grieg, and Stravinsky.

Evgeny Kissin and CSO principal oboe, and fellow native Muscovite, Eugene Izotov backstage at Orchestra Hall in 2008.

Northern stars shine under Charles Dutoit

Kissin illuminates Grieg concerto

BY ANDREW PATNER 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.

Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit is a dedicated traveler who says he's visited and traveled in all 195 of the world’s countries.

With a reported repertoire of more than 2,000 pieces, perhaps he intentionally assembled this week’s wholly engaging Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, the second of his annual Orchestra Hall run, with works of three great composers from far northern climes along the 60th parallel, the equivalent in our hemisphere of Alaska and northern Canada.

In the Nordic lands and Russia, however, that means Sibelius, Grieg, and Stravinsky. In works spread from the 1860s to 1911, their geographic, temporal, and conceptual aspects fit naturally in concert Thursday at Orchestra Hall.

Though just 15 minutes, the 1893 suite that Sibelius made from his set of sound murals from Finnish history, Karelia, was played in full by the CSO only once before, under associate conductor Tauno Hannikainen on a "popular concert" in 1949.  Sections have been played by Frederick Stock (“Intermezzo”), Fritz Reiner (at Ravinia, well before he joined the CSO) and Sir Thomas Beecham (“Alla marcia”), but nothing recently and never all three on a subscription concert.  In anticipating the 100 more works that were to come from the composer, this is music so charming and so fascinating that it was a great treat to hear it here in full at last.  In his solo, Scott Hostetler on the English horn hit another one out of the park.

Evgeny Kissin might have seemed luxury casting for the Grieg A minor Piano Concerto.  But the Russian former prodigy -- now 39, hard as that might be to believe -- is such a fine pianist and continues to go so deeply and to show more subtlety as an adult artist, he reminded listeners that this 19th century Norwegian classic is much more than a warhorse.  Through all three movements, Kissin put his prodigious technique at the service of the work, making his speed, gentleness. and power all equally transparent.  A standing ovation earned an encore of Grieg’s piano transcription of his own 1864 song “Jeg elsker Dig” (“I Love but Thee”) from his Melodies of the Heart, Op. 5.

The greatest surprise of the evening came in Dutoit’s near-perfect presentation of Stravinsky’s ballet score Petrushka in its lushly orchestrated original 1911 version. I do not usually think of Dutoit as innately theatrical.  But this was dramatic storytelling of the kind that makes you wonder what happens next. The Shrovetide Fair and the Grand Carnival segments bustled, as they should, but you could see the sawdust puppet Petrushka, the Moor, and the Ballerina within the crowds.  And their own sections were truly poignant.

Remarkable solo playing by Chris Martin and John Hagstrom on cornets, pianist Mary Sauer (who played the work under Stravinsky in the ’60s), flutist Mathieu Dufour, oboist Eugene Izotov, clarinetist John Bruce Yeh. and bassoonist David McGill assured that this was theatre of the greatest musicality.

Chicago Opera Theater's 2012 season: typical COT atypicality (and 2011 season launches in two weeks!)

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.

Eric Owens, Lucy Crowe, Harry Bicket: generous 'Hercules' artists give extra time and programs

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.

My (radio) "guest" tonight -- Who's Afraid of Milton Babbitt? Program 1

Tonight from 10 to 11 p.m. CDT on 98.7WFMT Radio Chicago and via free streaming anywhere in the world at wfmt.com I'll present a new program and the start of a series, Who's Afraid of Milton Babbitt?, an exploration of the music and contributions of  the major American composer, theorist, and teacher who died January 29 in Princeton, New Jersey, at age 94. 

Tonight's show will feature three works -- Soli e Duettini for guitar duo from 1989, Correspondences for string orchestra and synthesized tape from 1967, and the ever-stunning, inexhaustible Philomel (with text created by John Hollander) for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized tape from 1964 -- in recordings by the Anderson/Fader (guitar) Duo, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and James Levine (Correspondences was the only piece by Babbitt to be performed -- at Ravinia, in July of 1990 -- or recorded by the CSO), and the great soprano Bethany Beardslee, who commissioned (via the Ford Foundation) and first performed Philomel. 

Subsequent programs will feature additional works by the composer, look at questions and examples of theory and technique, and offer works and thoughts of such Babbitt students and performers as Mario Davidovsky, John Eaton, Robert Taub, David Starobin, and one Stephen Sondheim, as well as a discussion of the late Robert Hilferty's documentary film Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer (1998-2010).

Our radio broadcast will then be posted at some later date at wfmt.com/criticalthinking for free podcast, download, streaming. We've been dealing with a website changeover at the station and my apologies to all podcast listening folks for the continued delay.

Happy spring, happy J.S. Bach's birthday (326, and still looking good), and see you on the radio!

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Postscript: I received a comment, with no actual name signed to it and no e-mail address or site to reply to, attacking Babbitt, his music, his influence, and the idea of my program about him.  Signed or unsigned, I certainly might have taken the comment more seriously if it hadn't been sent almost three hours *before* my program aired.

CSO: Dutoit, three cellos in Penderecki, and Elgar 'Beyond the Score'

Here is my Saturday March 19 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Thursday March 17, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert with guest conductor Charles Dutoit and cello soloists John Sharp, Kenneth Olsen, and Katinka Kleijn in music of Berlioz, Penderecki, and Elgar.

Conductor Charles Dutoit has returned to Orchestra Hall for his annual residency.

CSO makes case for Elgar in both concert and 'Beyond the Score'

Penderecki three cello concerto unoriginal but well-played

BY ANDREW PATNER 

RECOMMENDED 

Repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

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Beyond the Score: Elgar's Enigma Variations

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Repeats Sunday at 3 p.m.

Charles Dutoit is a steady and reliable force, whether holding down the fort as chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra (after the collapse of Christoph Eschenbach’s music directorship there) or in his annual two-week stints as a guest with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The Swiss veteran, 74, applies the care that many of the world’s top conductors reserve for Mahler or Bruckner, Wagner or Beethoven to the vast second shelf of composers, championing a host of Russian, French, and Nordic figures. Next week, he’ll bring Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Grieg, the latter with piano megastar Evgeny Kissin. This week it’s Berlioz and Elgar surrounding the first Chicago performance of a 2000 cello showpiece by Poland’s Krzysztof Penderecki, which Dutoit premièred in Tokyo in 2001.

In an active career of more than 50 years, Penderecki, 77, has ranged from “pure” avant-garde works in the 1960s to more recent lush romanticism.  The issue with his variety is not that more traditional music is inferior to modernism but that composing in settled styles requires much more originality than this work, the Concerto grosso for Three Cellos and Orchestra, has in structure, form, or its total lack of development over 35 minutes. Rare it is to hear a piece simultaneously unstructured and dully unchanging.

(In an odd bit of programming overlap, Penderecki himself will conduct this work with three guest soloists at the Grant Park Music Festival, along with Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, July 15 and 16 outdoors at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.)

That said, three leading members of the CSO’s much-envied cello section play the heck out of the solo parts.  Each matches the voice of his or her line: the committed elegance of principal John Sharp in the first part, the precision of Katinka Kleijn (well-known from her leading work in contemporary repertoire) in the third, and assistant principal Kenneth Olsen, assured and ferocious in the second part in a way that jazzmen would rightly dub that of a young lion.

Dutoit seems not to recognize much of the plummy English nature of Elgar’s 1899 Enigma Variations, Op. 36. But his careful attention to each of the 14 variations as well as the original theme made a convincing alternate argument for the work well beyond British nostalgia.

Solo passages from viola Charles Pikler, cello Sharp (again), and clarinet John Bruce Yeh were beautiful beyond being idiomatic.  English horn Scott Hostetler, a CSO treasure, played a similar role in the opening work, the ebullient 1843-44 Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9, of Berlioz.

Friday afternoon, the CSO’s Gerard McBurney presided over a Beyond the Score presentation of the Elgar with Dutoit, the full orchestra, pianist John Goodwin, and actors led by Larry Yando as Elgar himself. To be repeated Sunday afternoon, this was an excellent installment in the popular series of closer, multimedia looks at orchestral works. The projections of designer Hillary Leben will make you want to book a trip to Elgar’s West Midlands and McBurney offers some of his most successful and insightful musical demonstrations to date.

CSO: a rare Mendelssohn's 'Elijah' with Rilling slumbers not, nor sleeps

Here is my Monday March 14 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday March 11, 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah with guest conductor Helmuth Rilling.

In his U.S. début, German baritone Markus Eiche was the standout soloist in the choral program

CSO presents beautiful pairing of chorus, leader in ‘Elijah’

By ANDREW PATNER 

It’s a shame that the rare opportunity to hear the multiple-Grammy-winning Chicago Symphony Chorus and the major German choral specialist Helmuth Rilling present Felix Mendelssohn’s 1845-47 oratorio Elijah (on Words of the Old Testament) happened but once this weekend.  For this was another of those one-of-a-kind evenings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall.  As it’s been 30 years since the CSO’s other presentation of this landmark in both German composition and British musical life, it’s doubtful that a performance at this level will be coming around again any time soon.

A partnership with the American Choral Directors Association, which held its annual national conference in Chicago last week, meant that the two-hour-plus Elijah could happen at all.  It also meant that two of three performances were for the conference folk, who also appeared to make up a significant part of the full house at Friday’s public concert.

Just about any present or former chorister, whether child or adult, knows the high-voice angels’ trio “Lift thine eyes” and its full choir companion “He, watching over Israel,” from the second of the work’s two parts.  And the great Paul Robeson made Elijah’s Part 1 aria “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel” a worldwide hit both in solo recitals and stadium concerts in the 1940s. The Part 2 counterpart for the prophet is a terrific baritone aria in both English, “It is enough!”, and German, “Es ist genug!”  But to hear only excerpts, as beautiful as they are, is to miss the 37-year-old composer’s dramatic, structural, and operatic achievements.

In significant recordings in 1981 and 1995 as well as concerts around the world, the Stuttgart-based Rilling, 77, has played an important role in dusting off many 19th and early-20th century accretions from the work and connecting it back to the Bach and Handel masterworks that were always lodestars for the young Leipzig composer and music revivalist.

I would not want to be an instrumentalist under Rilling’s direction.  He shows no clear beat and, like many choral conductors, appears to have his own eccentric code for indicating just about anything to the performers.  But as with many a choirmaster he coaxes some pretty magical things out of his singers, prepared by CSO chorus director and new Grammy winner Duain Wolfe.  And the CSO players (reduced to 38 strings) were shrewd and determined enough to make their part of the bargain work.  Kudos to principal cello John Sharp for his beautiful solo.

Vocal soloists — including American soprano Alexandra Coku, German mezzo Birgit Remmert, and American tenor James Taylor — were committed and at times touching. But making his U.S. début German baritone Markus Eiche in the title role was the discovery here.  Never overdoing anything, he found the right theatricality in this prophet in perpetual combat with his people. Boy soprano Henry Griffin was a total pro as he watched for the rain from the choir terrace.

I mentioned the two languages.  Rilling offers the work in German (in which it should be called Elias) despite its commission and première in Birmingham, England, and its decades of prime place in Britain. There’s no “right” answer here, but for me this is a case where singing in the language of the audience really is most effective.

Lyric Opera of Chicago's 'Carmen': second cast steps up, conductor and orchestra still star

Here is my Monday March 14 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Saturday March 12, 2011 Lyric Opera of Chicago spring cast opening night performance of Bizet's Carmen with guest conductor Alain Altinoglu.

Nadia Krasteva takes over the title role, with Brandon Jovanovich as Don José, in Carmen. | Dan Rest~Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Lyric’s recast ‘Carmen’ no less fiery

But conductor, orchestra continue to star

BY ANDREW PATNER

RECOMMENDED

Through March 27

For the spring run of Bizet’s 1875 Carmen, the octane is up with several new cast members (planned that way, for a change in the opera world) and a tightening of the stage action by director Harry Silverstein.  But the stars this time around are the same as they were when Lyric Opera of Chicago’s very enjoyable revival opened in October: French-Armenian guest conductor Alain Altinoglu and the Lyric Orchestra in Bizet’s perfect score.

From the first beats of the prelude to the death knell for the love of Carmen and Don José four acts later, Altinoglu and the Lyric players get everything about this piece, which transforms melodrama into a piercing psychological study and unique musical invention.  One looks forward to his Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut in 2012 (announced since his fall engagement at Lyric) with an all-French program, including Bizet’s Symphony in C.

It would also be terrific to see him some day lead Bizet’s intended version of the opera, with spoken dialogue rather than the heavy recitatives by Bizet’s friend Ernest Guiraud (who also meddled with another French deathbed opera on Lyric’s schedule: Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann,” set to open the 2011-12 season in October with another fine younger French conductor, Emmanuel Villaume, in the pit).

The most significant cast change is Ryan Center alum and local favorite Nicole Cabell as José’s abandoned hometown girl Micaëla. Though the role often is thankless and dully sung, the California-born soprano gives it life throughout the performance, especially in her Act 3 aria and prayer.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from Brandon Jovanovich’s Don José. The Montana-native Serbian-American tenor has been on a fast -- though wholly unpretentious -- rise.  A fine Boris in Janáček ’s Katya Kabanova here last season, with a lovely voice, he has sung José around the world, yet Saturday night seemed unsure at times and more grieving than mad in the crucial last act and murder scene.

As Carmen, Bulgarian débutante soprano Nadia Krasteva offers an unusual combination, sometimes seeming removed both vocally and dramatically and at other times nailing things. Certainly her lifting her dress with her teeth to show José her leg when she is under arrest for a stabbing and has her hands bound behind her back is quite a contribution.

Returning Midwest baritone Kyle Ketelsen continues to find all the angles of the champion toreador Escamillo.  And Craig Irvin (Zuniga), Jennifer Jakob (Frasquita), Emily Fons (Mercédès), Paul Scholten (Dancaïre), René Barbera (Remendado), and Paul La Rosa (Moralès), all Ryan Center members returning to their roles, make up one of the best benches around. Departing chorus master Donald Nally and Chicago Children’s Choir director Josephine Lee have their singers shining as ever.

 

Lyric Opera of Chicago's new 'Hercules' -- Peter Sellars makes it ageless

Here is my Monday March 7 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday March 4, 2011 Lyric Opera of Chicago opening night performance of Handel's Hercules in a new production, and company première, by Peter Sellars with guest conductor Harry Bicket.

 

Hercules (Eric Owens, left) returns from war with a captive (Lucy Crowe).  At right: Marckarthur Johnson. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

 ‘Hercules’ ageless in hands of Sellars

Lyric's season-closer is a theatrical, musical, and psychological hit 

BY ANDREW PATNER

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 

Repeats Monday at 7:30 p.m. and five more performances through March 21.

Peter Sellars gained international attention at just 24 with a Boston staging of Handel’s Orlando that shifted the scene from Charlemagne’s Europe to the American Orlando -- Florida -- and the U.S. space program.  Eighteen months later, in May of 1983, the late Ardis Krainik turned the Civic Opera House over to Sellars for an astounding contemporary Mikado that marked his major opera company début. There’s been little turning back ever since for the passionate director/creator and his unique combination of being a controversialist and a deeply committed humanist.

While his subsequent Lyric Opera of Chicago projects have been spread out over time, all have been significant.  In the 1988-89 season, he repackaged Wagner’s Tann­häuser to encompass the televangelist scandals of the day. Doctor Atomic, the operatic retelling of the Manhattan Project that he developed with composer colleague John Adams, found its definitive performances here three seasons ago.

If Sellars were just outrageous, there’d be little to distinguish him from the columns of European-style “director’s theater” opera producers.  But he examines his texts and scores with X-ray eyes and builds up teams of performers who make intense emotional investments as well as offering top technical presentations.  He earns our attention and respect even when he might occasionally go astray.

His re-creation of Handel’s 1744 Hercules that opened Friday night at Lyric is another example of Sellars succeeding in some ways despite both himself and his material. If one hopes simply for another night at the opera or, instead, takes some of the director’s extensive program commentary at what might be called “psychologically correct” face value, disappointment awaits.

But Sellars’s genius here is not to try to paste a concept on top of Handel’s score and story of Hercules, home from his labors and home from war.  He finds within the classical tellings of Sophocles and Ovid and the Baroque music and lines of Handel that the Greek myths still resonate because they are about us, too. Hercules comes home physically from his battles but cannot leave them emotionally.  Ask any vet you know -- or look at any homeless former soldier you see on the street each day -- and the story is no different.

Sellars loves his characters: Hercules; his wife, Dejanira, an emotional victim of her husband’s absence and then his distance upon his return; Hyllus, trying to find a place as the son of a demi-god; the superman’s captive — and possible concubine — Iole; and aide and narrator Lichas. That includes their tragic failings, and you see that this is the way to reanimate this neglected work.

The cast is exceptional, with débutante English soprano Lucy Crowe breaking out astonishingly in a chilling Abu Ghraib costume and English mezzo Alice Coote making Dejanira dramatically complete. American tenor Richard Croft is a steadfast and dutiful Hyllus.  Countertenor David Daniels was born for this music and his Lichas -- despite some cut numbers -- grabs your heart.  And American bass-baritone Eric Owens speaks to you even in his silences -- Handel gave his title character the least amount of music -- and shakes you when he sings.

English conductor Harry Bicket knows both the material and the Sellars way intimately, and he transforms the Lyric Orchestra into a style-appropriate ensemble. Donald Nally in his last outing as Lyric chorus master makes his singers shine, especially in the out-of-its-time “Jealousy.” Regular Sellars teammates George Tsypin (set) and James F. Ingalls (lights) find a haunting simplicity here. And Dunya Ramicova may be the only person who really knows how to costume a chorus.

War follows everyone home, Sellars -- and Handel -- tell us. And Hercules will follow you home and keep you thinking as well.