Tag: opera

Lyric Opera

Second day back to Chicago, and it’s a really long day! Escorting before work, work, nail salon, meeting with a friend for a quick bite before the opera, and finally – a Lyric Opera performance: Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci – two operas in one evening. Now that it’s already way past 11 PM, I realized I made a mistake – I should have taken Uber back home. But it’s still warm outside, and I hopped on a bus just after I got out of Lyric, and I thought that I would be home before eleven. But then, I waited for a train at Lake for 15 minutes, and now we are stopped due to the police activity on Howard – do not ask why we are sitting at Thorndale!

OK, we started moving!

Anyway, it was awesome that my friend Elina could come with me, because she does not go to Lyric as often as I, and it is always great to share the joy of music, conversation and an intermission dessert at Florian 🙂

Medea

One of the best shows I have ever attended at the Lyric Opera!

It often happens that when you listen to an opera, you don’t get engaged with the plot and mainly focus on the voices, but that wasn’t the case this time. The show was really dramatic, and it felt almost inappropriate to applaud between musical numbers because a tragedy had been unfolding on stage.

Also, I loved this gigantic mirror on stage, which allowed to see everything what was going on from another angle:

The video and the rest of the photos are from the Lyric Opera website.

It was my first time listening to Sondra Radvanovsky live, and I so-so loved her! Most times, I am not super-excited about sopranos, but she is so versatile, and so artistic; definitely my favorite soprano from now on:).

Oh, and one more thing: the guards were wearing ICE masks! And I am sure it was not a part of the original design!

Haymarket Opera

When you live in Chicago, you never stop discovering new cultural institutions and new activities. I don’t remember where I learned about the Haymarket Opera Company, but when I read about them, I knew immediately that I wanted to see their performance at least once.

Today it finally happened – I attended the last performance of Artaserse – an opera written by Leonardo Vinci (no, the other one!) In today’s performance, all roles except for one (Mandane) were cast by male singers. The opera was four hours long! (Good thing it started at 6 PM!)

The venue is very close to where I live (on the Fullerton Campus of DePaul), so it’s just over 30 minutes door-to-door.

The concert hall is small and extremely convenient, with a perfect view of the stage from any seat.

The production was very true to history in terms of acting, set, and costumes – everything was like the operas were produced in the 18th century, and that’s what Haymarket Opera is famous for.

Another thing I noticed was that the audience felt like a very close community, with “their usual seats” and such, and people were greeting each other before taking their places. Still, I was not miserable about being an outsider (and I survived a four-hour opera – some patrons left during the second intermission!)

Two Operas

This week, I attended two operas in Lyric, and that’s it for this season. The first one was La Boheme. It was the first time that I listened to it live, and I loved every moment of it! Everything was perfect, the acting, the set and the costumes, and all the voices were out of this world! I am reposting the photos from the Lyric Opera website, because I know they will be gone soon!

Two days later, I went to the Listeners. My neighbor read the reviews and said she did not want to go, but I was intrigued and went alone. I have nothing against modern operas, and was open to hearing something new. When I read that this opera is about “a cult,” I became unsure but decided to give it a try.

In the end, it was not my thing. Or rather, I do not think that the story was opera material. The promotional video looks tons better than the opera itself. But maybe it’s just me!

Continue reading “Two Operas” →

“Blue” at Lyric

I thought that “Blue” was a very recent opera – it sounded like it emerged from the Black Lives matter movement, but when I looked it up, it turned out that it was written almost ten years ago. That means that nothing changed in these last ten years – nothing!

What you hear from the stage is extremely painful and way closer to reality than any opera should be. The Father focused on keeping his black son alive, not knowing how to protect him:

run/do not run/look at their faces/do not look straight at their faces/keep your hands out of your pockets/take off this hoody/pull up your pants…

Each word is a pain. Each word strikes home.

And it’s just opera. People will clap and go home. And will look suspiciously at the black teen on the train.

The Marriage of Figaro in Lyric

That’s a very long opera!!! Even though we took an Uber back home, it was 11-30 PM when I entered my apartment, and I went to bed after midnight. This morning, I thought I wouldn’t survive the workday and a meetup afterward, but somehow I am alive :).

The performance was perfect!!! Totally worth some sleep deprivation :).

Beautiful voices, great acting, and each performer was a perfect fit for their role. The whole production was put together exactly how Mozart should be performed: joyful, a little bit silly, funny, a little bit naughty, but just a little bit, without being vulgar.

Rigoletto

On Tuesday, my neighbor and I went to our second opera of that season: Verdi’s Rigoletto. In contrast to Fidelio, it was a very traditional production, and it was astonishing.

I saw Rigoletto multiple times back in Russia, but like with many operas that I thought I knew, it turned out that we had a severely reduced version of it. My first eye-opener was Carmen, and Boris told me that he had a similar revelation with Faust, and now Rigoletto.

Beautiful. More tragic than I ever thought.

Fidelio

I never heard anything except for the overture to “Fidelio.” I do not think it was ever on stage in the Soviet Union (likely because the theme of the opera is the imprisonment of a political rival), and it was rarely performed in the US as well.

My friend and I were wondering how far the opera “modernization” would go; we both had a couple of traumatic experiences of that kind recently. However, the production was amazing! Everything fit really well in the context of the modern prison, and an amazing woman whose courage saves the world prompted somebody behind us to start chanting Ka-ma-la! 😀

And the voices were extraordinary!

Aida At Lyric

That was one of the most anticipated operas of the season for me, and I didn’t like it. My neighbor with whom we share this subscription just returned from a two-week trip to Egypt, and even before we went, she told me that she read “horrible reviews” about this production.

I do not mind the modernization of the classic (I enjoyed Penelopiad at Goodman!), but in this production, everything except for the music and voices, was indeed horrible.

I copied several images from the Lyric website to illustrate. I do not understand why they had to invent their own hieroglyphs instead of Egyptian, and why they had to cover the whole stage set with these images. I do not understand why they had to dress the male cast in these turn-of-the-previous-century uniforms.

The voices were beautiful. The music was great. But by the middle of it I chose to enjoy it with my eyes closed 🙂 .

Cinderella

February is coming packed with cultural activities, to compensate for a very “dry” January, indeed! I saw two operas in one week: the first was The Champion, and the second was Rossini’s Cinderella, which I saw on Saturday. I never saw this opera performance, and never heard the music, and it was so different from the story of the glass slippers – and I loved it! Both the prince and Cinderella are real characters, with the sense of self-wort and determined to be in control of their lives; you know that it’s not the magic that brought them together, but their actions. The opera is very long, more than three hours, but I didn’t even notice it! When the intermission started and I looked at my watch, I was so surprised to see that almost two hours had passed! Beautiful in all possible ways :).