Lyric Opera 2021-2022 Issue 7 Fire Shut Up My Bones

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 13 Lyric has also announced several other contemporary works in the production pipeline. Omar tells the story of Omar ibn Said, a real-life Islamic scholar fromWest Africa who was captured and enslaved in the United States in the early 19th century. The opera’s creative forces include Michael Abels, the film composer behind Get Out and Us , and the versatile musician and performer Rhiannon Giddens, founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. And two works by Missy Mazzoli, a former Chicago Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence, await their Lyric productions. Proving Up , a supernatural examination of the American dream (turned nightmare) among homesteaders in 19th-century Nebraska, would have premiered this past January but was postponed. Lyric plans to return to it in a future season. The other, The Listeners , concerns a community of people who can hear a hum in their hometown and are swept up by a charismatic, cult-like leader. Both works feature a libretto by Mazzoli’s frequent collaborator Royce Vavrek. All of which adds up to a lot of art that Chicago hasn’t seen before—except, of course, in the parts of the new operas that mirror our modern lives. The new works may not have the no-need-to-read-the-synopsis familiarity of the old guard, but the odds are that some of them will populate the next generation of that canon. GIT HERE Composer: Daniel Bernard Roumain Libretto by: Anna Deavere Smith NIGHT Composer: John Luther Adams Libretto by: John Haines FOUR PORTRAITS Composer: Caroline Shaw Libretto by: Caroline Shaw & Jocelyn Clarke Photo: James Matthew Daniel Proving Up Proximity