Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 8 - Requiem

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 14 sacred organizations. Also an avid performer of contemporary and chamber opera, Jonathan has sung roles for many regional premieres in the Chicago area. Recent favorite chamber opera roles include Manfred in Two Remain (Heggie, Scheer), Hannah- before in As One (Kaminsky, Campbell, Reed), and the titular character in a Tom Waits adaptation of Woyzeck , each with Chicago Fringe Opera. His appearances as The Poet in When Adonis Calls (Borzoni, de los Santos, Dillard) and as Robert Dzieka ´nski in I will fly like a bird (Plant, Wainwright) with Chicago- based Thompson Street Opera Company received critical acclaim. Other notable roles include Dottore Malatesta in Don Pasquale , Pelléas in Pelléas et Mélisande , and John Brooke in Adamo’s Little Women . ENRIQUE MAZZOLA CONDUCTOR Lyric’s Music Director—only the third in the company’s history—is renowned as an expert interpreter and champion of bel canto opera and Verdi repertoire, and as a specialist in French repertoire. Lyric audiences first experienced the Italian conductor’s artistry in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in 2016/17, and subsequently in Bellini’s I puritani in 2017/18. During 2019/20, he led Verdi’s Luisa Miller to launch the company’s Early Verdi Series. Mazzola’s first opera as Lyric’s music director, Sir David McVicar’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth , opened the 2021/22 season, followed by Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love as well as Verdi Voices and Rising Stars in Concert . Mazzola is Principal Guest Conductor at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and, since 2022, the first ever Conductor-in-Residence at the Bregenz Festival. He served as Artistic and Music Director of the Orchestre National d’Île de France from 2012 to 2019. Symphonic guest work has included the London Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Orchestre National de France, and Oslo Philharmonic. He has conducted at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the major houses of Florence, Berlin, Zurich, Moscow, and Tokyo, in addition to a historic Meyerbeer cycle for Deutsche Oper Berlin. Past major European festivals have included Glyndebourne (including DVD releases of Il barbiere di Siviglia, Poliuto, and Don Pasquale ), new productions in 2019 for Bregenz ( Rigoletto and Madama Butterfly ) and Salzburg ( Orphée aux Enfers ), Pesaro (Rossini Opera Festival), Venice, and Aix-en-Provence. Mazzola was born in Barcelona, Spain, into a musical family, and grew up in Milan, where he studied violin and piano, earning diplomas in composition and orchestral conducting at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan. Enrique Mazzola is supported by the John D.and Alexandra C.Nichols Endowed Chair. MICHAEL BLACK CHORUS DIRECTOR The Australian Chorus Director is in his 11th season at Lyric, having held this position at Opera Australia in Sydney from 2001 to 2013. Black has served in this capacity for such distinguished organizations as the Edinburgh International Festival, Opera Holland Park (London), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and, in Australia, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Choir, Motet Choir, the Cantillation chamber choir, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Other activities include preparing The Damnation of Faust chorus and Haydn’s Creation at the Grant Park Music Festival, where he has worked for five seasons. He has served as chorus director for close to 140 different operas on four continents, and his work has been recorded and/ or aired on ABC, BBC, PBS, for many HD productions in movie theaters, and on television. Michael Black is supported by the Howard A. Stotler Chorus Director Endowed Chair.