Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Sunday January 8, 2012 9:28PM CST
As superstars sing snippets, Lyric Opera honoree sings praises
Fleming, Hvorostovsky, peers, and colleagues salute Mason
Soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky greet the audience after singing at Saturday’s concert at the Civic Opera House. | Dan Rest~Lyric Opera
BY ANDREW PATNER
Gala concerts at opera houses can be many things.
As Lyric Opera of Chicago continues its season of transition from the generations of managers and musicians who created and built the 58-year-old company to leaders from elsewhere -- some not even born at the time of Lyric’s founding -- Saturday night’s "Subscriber Appreciation Concert" was mostly a look back at both storied and recent pasts with few clues about the organization’s future.
Honoring recently retired general director William (Bill) Mason’s literal lifetime of service to Lyric were two superstar singers closely associated with his years in the top two posts at the Opera House: soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, neither of whom has taken a stage role at Lyric in several seasons. And while Fleming has begun managerial, advisory, and board positions at Lyric in the last two seasons, her future participation as a performer in full-run, fully staged productions in Chicago remains unclear.
Lyric artistic director emeritus Bruno Bartoletti, board of directors co-chairman emeritus Allan B. Muchin, William Mason, and music director Sir Andrew Davis. | Dan Rest~Lyric Opera
Modest and always grateful throughout his career, Mason displayed the best parts of his character in accepting the honors of having the main Lyric rehearsal space, "Room 200," named for him and the Carol Fox award, the company’s highest honor. “It occurred to me,” Mason told the sold-out house, “that I will likely be the last recipient of this award who actually knew Carol Fox,” Lyric’s chief founder as a 28-year-old Chicagoan in 1954 and its undisputed leader until her ouster in 1980, a year before her death.
The gracious Mason then delivered an overdue tribute to Fox, her vision, determination, gumption, and taste -- with no prior experience or major connections she landed the U.S. début of Maria Callas and signed a roster of Italian legends who made Lyric rightly known in the 1950s as La Scala West -- as well as her mercurial temperament and the lavish and unchecked spending that led to the end of her tenure, even recounting his own two banishments by the imperious Fox in the 1970s.
“But she was also a nurturing mother,” Mason said. “And Lyric would have been and would be a very different company if it had not been founded by a woman and led by women [Fox and her assistant-turned-successor Ardis Krainik] for its first” 45 years, referring to the “family feel” that has so long characterized the theatre on Wacker Drive. To drive this communal sense home, emeritus artistic director Bruno Bartoletti, 85, came in from Italy to salute Mason, and New York’s contemporary impresario Joseph Volpe, former head of the Metropolitan Opera, was in the second row and penned a full-page, candid tribute to Mason in the program book.
Fleming, turning 53 next month, and Hvorostovsky, 49, lit few musical fireworks but offered mostly quality work for singers now in middle age. Despite excess attention by both artists to their outfits, staggeringly high heels, cleavage displays, and coiffures, they were at their best vocally and dramatically in their most serious and subtle offerings. For Fleming this included the Act 3 scene from Massenet’s Thaïs and a wonderful “Give me some music” from Samuel Barber’s ill-fated Antony and Cleopatra, reminders of her strengths in French and American repertoire. Hvorostovsky gave a well-measured “Ode to the Evening Star” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, albeit with a Russian sensibility, and the two were a near-perfect match in the Act 3 confrontation scene between Tatiana and Onegin in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, all in the evening’s second half.
First-half tries at Verdi by both singers and conductor and Lyric music director Andrew Davis were wider of the mark and often unidiomatic. The Lyric Orchestra however was responsive, eloquent, and supportive in all repertoire.
