Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 4 Dead Man Walking

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 13 The Lyric premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic during the 2007/08 season featured (left to right) Gerald Finley, Eric Owens, and Richard Paul Fink. Toward the 21st Century, Lyric’s initiative focused on contemporary opera, was launched during 1990/91 with Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe . The 2012/13 season featured Renée Fleming as Blanche DuBois in André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire , which she had previously sung with the rest of the Lyric cast at Carnegie Hall (pictured here). make those connections in their comments.” Harris adds that “the musical language of many contemporary operas is tonal, highly melodic,” and is more welcoming than some may assume. Families have enjoyed delightfully engaging new operas each fall in recent years. This month youngsters and their grownups will explore inner and outer space with Earth to Kenzie . Previous opera adventures for young audiences include Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt , Scorpion’s Sting , and Jason and the Argonauts – relatable stories set to lively, exciting music that gets little heads bobbing and feet swinging, and provokes astonished gasps and giggles. With mainstage world premieres, the excitement really amps up. “Electric! That was the feeling on the opening night of Bel Canto – people were walking into an opera that no one had ever seen or heard,” recalls Mary Burke-Peterson, who observed audience reactions firsthand as a Lyric usher for the past several years. “When we had Q&As after Bel Canto , particularly when composer Jimmy López was there, people were just in awe – how had he done it? What was the creative process like? Renée Fleming [Lyric’s creative consultant] got lots of props for curating the project and creative team. Book groups talked about the book vs. what they saw and heard onstage.” Based on Ann Patchett’s best-selling novel (inspired by the Peruvian hostage crisis of 1996/97), Bel Canto exemplifies the energy a brand-new work generates. Fleming searched for the right composer for a year before choosing Peruvian-born composer Jimmy López, who’d been immersed firsthand in the hostage-crisis news as a teen, and whose musical style incorporates indigenous instruments not often found in the orchestra pit. He and Cuban-American playwright-librettist Nilo Cruz worked closely with Fleming and Lyric’s music director Sir Andrew Davis to develop the score. The resulting production packed the Lyric Opera House, captivated audiences and critics, and was later televised nationally on PBS’s Great Performances . Lyric’s presentation of An American Dream by Jack Perla and Jessica Murphy Moo at the Harris Theater stirred similar engagement. Audience members for whom the story of wartime displacement was personally resonant found it intensely gratifying to witness a variation of their family histories onstage. Many eyes filled with tears, triggered by a profound connection to the onstage drama and poignant music. Audiences were similarly moved by the recent Chicago premieres of Daniel Schnyder’s Charlie Parker’s Yardbird and Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers . For anyone hesitating to check out a new opera, remember that pushing the envelope of human emotion and experience through drama and music goes back to ancient times. Operas we now consider classic were often shocking or unsettling in the time of their creation. This season’s 21st-century offerings engage audiences with dynamic, relatable stories that reflect contemporary life and concerns, and with melodic, tonal music that propels the stories. Compelling contemporary operas sung in English have always been central to Lyric’s repertoire since the very beginning. Granted, Lyric’s old nickname was “La Scala West,” referring to the founders’ fondness for Italian operas and singers, but in 1954, the company’s debut season, Lyric premiered the first full-scale staging of The Taming of the Shrew by American composer Vittorio Giannini to great public and critical acclaim – right Richard Termine/Carnegie Hall Dan Rest Dan Rest