Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 4 Dead Man Walking

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 20 Artist profiles JAKE HEGGIE | COMPOSER Lyric debut Jake Heggie is the composer of the operas Dead Man Walking , Moby-Dick , It’s a Wonderful Life , If I Were You , Great Scott , Three Decembers , and Two Remain , among others. He has also composed nearly 300 songs, as well as chamber, choral, and orchestral works. His operas – most created with Terrence McNally or Gene Scheer – have been produced on five continents. Dead Man Walking has been recorded twice and, with 70 productions internationally, is one of the most performed operas of our time. Moby-Dick was telecast throughout the United States as part of PBS’s Great Performances’ 40 th season and subsequently released on DVD. Great Scott was a 2019 Grammy Award nominee for Best New Composition, Classical. A Guggenheim fellow, Heggie has served as a mentor for the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative and is a frequent guest artist at universities, conservatories, and festivals through the U. S. and Canada. TERRENCE McNALLY | LIBRETTIST Lyric debut The American playwright has had a new work on Broadway in each of the last six decades. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Theater Hall of Fame, he received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019. He has also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award, four Tony Awards ( Love! Valour! Compassion! , Master Class , Kiss of the Spider Woman , Ragtime ). Among many other honors are an Emmy Award, four Drama Desk Awards, and two Obie Awards. In addition to Dead Man Walking , he wrote the libretto for Jake Heggie’s Great Scott . Other plays include Mothers and Sons ; Lips Together, Teeth Apart ; The Lisbon Traviata ; Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune ; A Perfect Ganesh ; The Visit ; The Full Monty ; Corpus Christi ; Bad Habits ; Next ; The Ritz ; Anastasia ; It’s Only a Play ; Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? ; and The Stendhal Syndrome . PATRICIA RACETTE | SISTER HELEN PREJEAN Previously at Lyric: Seven roles since 2000/01, most recently title role/ Madama Butterfly (2013/14, 2008/09); Mme. Lidoine/ Dialogues of the Carmelites (2006/07). The celebrated American soprano, making her role debut, has starred in the world premieres of Tobias Picker’s Dolores Claiborne (San Francisco), An American Tragedy (Metropolitan Opera), and Emmeline (Santa Fe); Paul Moravec’s The Letter (Santa Fe); and Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree (Houston). Racette has earned acclaim repeatedly with those companies, as well as with the major companies of London, Paris, Barcelona, Munich, Vienna, San Francisco, Toronto, and Dallas. Recent new roles include the heroines of Salome , Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , La voix humaine , The Consul , and The Ghosts of Versailles . This season’s highlights include La voix humaine (Dallas), which Racette also directs, and Street Scene (Monte Carlo, where she will perform her one-woman show, “Diva on Detour”). Last season included a reimagined La voix humaine (Philadelphia), Kát’a Kabanová (Barcelona), Kostelnicka/ Jenufa (Santa Fe), and Trouble in Tahiti (Ravinia). Among Racette’s honors are the Grammy, Opera News, Richard Tucker, andMarian Anderson awards. RYAN McKINNY | JOSEPH DE ROCHER Lyric debut Last season the acclaimed American bass- baritone sang his first Don Giovanni (the most recent of his many Houston Grand Opera roles) andWotan/ Das Rheingold (Opéra de Montréal). He also returned to the Bayreuth Festival (Amfortas/ Parsifal ) and Dutch National Opera (John Adams’s Girls of the GoldenWest , European premiere). McKinny has also been featured at The Metropolitan Opera ( Tannhäuser , The Magic Flute , Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , Billy Budd ); LA Opera ( The Barber of Seville , The Marriage of Figaro , A Streetcar Named Desire , Handel’s Tamerlano ); The Santa Fe Opera ( Doctor Atomic, Salome ), Washington National Opera ( Ring cycle, The Marriage of Figaro ), and The Glimmerglass Festival ( The Flying Dutchman , Carousel ). Successes abroad encompass works of Handel ( Radamisto , London), Gluck ( Alceste , Leipzig), Wagner ( The Flying Dutchman , Hamburg; Tristan und Isolde , Berlin), Strauss ( Arabella, Wiesbaden), and Bizet ( Carmen , Hamburg, Dresden). McKinny has been heard with the major orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Cleveland, among others. SUSAN GRAHAM | MRS. PATRICK DE ROCHER Previously at Lyric: Eight roles since 1989/90, most recently Dinah/ Trouble in Tahiti (“Bernstein at 100” Celebration, 2017/18); Didon/ Les Troyens (2016/17). The renowned American mezzo-soprano’s new roles in recent seasons include Mrs. De Rocher/ Dead ManWalking (Washington), the Witch/ Hansel and Gretel (Los Angeles), the title role/ Regina (St. Louis), Mrs. Anna/ The King and I (Paris), Countess Geschwitz/ Lulu (Metropolitan Opera), Orlofsky/ Die Fledermaus and Clairon/ Capriccio (both in Santa Fe). Among Graham’s triumphs in French repertoire are the heroines of Les Troyens (Paris, New York, San Francisco), Iphigénie en Tauride (Met, Salzburg, Madrid, San Francisco, London, Paris, Toronto), Béatrice et Bénédict (Santa Fe), Werther (Met, St. Louis, Amsterdam, Paris), and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (Santa Fe). Her recitals have included a program themed around Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben , debuted at London’s Wigmore Hall and heard last season in Urbana-Champaign, Orange County, and Rochester (New York). This season Graham sings her first Herodias/ Salome (Houston), presents a recital at Lincoln Center, and returns to one of her signature works, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (Vancouver Symphony). ˚ ˇ