Lyric Opera 2018-2019 Issue 3 Idomeneo

L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O October 13 - November 2, 2018 | 15 The Joy of Collaboration (Top) Early-career Davis, pictured during a China tour with one of Canada’s greatest singers, contralto Maureen Forrester. (Bottom) One of Davis’s all-time favorite colleagues, Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström, pictured as the Countess in Capriccio , which she sang in the Glyndebourne performance that marked Davis’s operatic debut in 1973. COURTESY OF TORONTO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Lyric’s music director, Sir Andrew Davis, relishes working with responsive artists Singers adore working with Sir Andrew Davis. He understands their voices, their thinking, and everything they have to contribute in rehearsal and performance. For more than four decades, collaborating with singers has provided one of the greatest pleasures of Davis’s life as a musician. In his undergraduate days, Davis was a keyboard player, performing chamber music but no opera. His first venture leading singers with orchestra came when studying in Italy (he conducted a Rossini aria at a public concert). Back in London, he was taking on keyboard jobs as a freelancer when Glyndebourne, England’s renowned opera festival, invited him to visit in 1972. Sir John Pritchard, who was to conduct a new production of Capriccio , took him to lunch and said, “I’d like you to come to be my assistant.” Davis initiated a long association with Glyndebourne the following summer when a performance of Capriccio marked his operatic debut. Davis had a terrific cast – true singing actors – and it was revelatory to him that “the singers didn’t just come in and sing the parts. Capriccio is about detail and bringing the text to life, the subtleties of the conversations, and the developing relationships between characters.” Singing the Countess was the incomparable Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström, who Davis describes as “such a great singer, actress, By Roger Pines