| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 5-May-2013 Civic Opera House | Lyric Opera of Chicago goes proto-American with Oklahoma! |
 The Lyric Opera ends their 2013–14 season with a run of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, in all its frothy, proto-American, miked glory. Pluck is in evidence throughout. No audience anywhere, let us presume, need ever fear that the scourges of European “director’s opera” will ever touch this story of proto-nationhood, nor even some light corporate facelift involving suits and uniformly gray sets.Read full review... | |
| 28-Apr-2013 Chicago Symphony Center | Kissin, the Viennese, at Symphony Hall in Chicago |
 Let me first describe the sound of the applause: taut, front-heavy, explosive. This was before Evgeny Kissin played his first note at Symphony Hall this past Sunday. It was a packed house, with an audience that spilled out of the choir loft and onto several rows of chairs wrapped around the piano. And as he finished – during his fourth encore, a prelude by Chopin – a middle-aged couple stood by the door on stage, holding hands, listening intently, needing to leave, not wanting to go.
Read full review... | |
| 28-Feb-2013 Chicago Symphony Center | Yo-Yo Ma and Esa-Pekka Salonen bring Lutosławski to the CSO |
 This past Thursday and Friday, Yo-Yo Ma (the CSO’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant), Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra tackled the immensely challenging Lutosławski Cello Concerto. New music geeks hardly need be informed of what a rare opportunity it is to hear a musician of Mr Ma’s caliber in the performance of a difficult modernist work, and the hope I held out for the show was amply ratified.Read full review... | |
| 25-Feb-2013 Civic Opera House | Verdi's Rigoletto at Lyric Opera of Chicago |
 Of all the mischievous dramatic reversals that line Rigoletto’s plot – the hunchbacked jester tricked into abducting his own daughter, the daughter tricked into loving the brainless Duke (posing as a penniless student), and the terrifying reunion of father and daughter in a scene of murder – is not the most breathtaking, after all, the fact that the opera begins with a convincing display of the debauched status of romance but then confronts us, for the remainder of Act I, with all the innocence and conviction of Gilda’s first love?Read full review... | |
| 8-Feb-2013 Civic Opera House | Die Meistersinger fills the stage at Chicago's Lyric Opera |
 On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge. But its style is heterogeneous where the tragedies are homogeneous, shifting rapidly through a Wagner-index of tropes and melodic figures.Read full review... | |
| 21-Jan-2013 Civic Opera House | La Bohème at Lyric Opera of Chicago |
 On Monday night – and, one might guess from the way the opera crowd gripped their collars as they swept into the Civic Opera House, the coldest night in Chicago this winter – a new La Bohème opened at the Lyric (it’s on loan from the San Francisco opera). It’s a straight production, meaning that those who need period costumes and a helping of gently falling snow with their Bohème will go home satisfied.Read full review... | |
| 20-Nov-2012 Civic Opera House | Screens, dreams in Negrin's Werther at the Lyric Opera of Chicago |
 In Francisco Negrin’s production of Massenet’s Werther, currently at the Lyric Opera, the opera’s first scene appears through a semi-transparent screen upon which an image of a row of houses is projected. Then the screen rises, and we enter fully into the dream.
Read full review... | |
| 14-Oct-2012 Art Institute of Chicago | Debussy and Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago |
 Those who find that the words “complete works” hold a special allure will surely already know about the Debussy Chamber Music Festival taking place in Chicago this month, performed and organized by the Chicago Chamber Musicians, which offers the rare opportunity to hear the composer’s complete chamber works.
Read full review... | |
| 13-Oct-2012 Civic Opera House | Elektra opens Lyric Opera of Chicago's new season with a shriek |
 Between acts, and between shows, the stage at Chicago’s Civic Opera House is usually blocked from view by a solid mural painted with baroque figures in gold – perhaps the gaudiest feature of an already fussily ornate hall. The gilt-painted screen was up, however, for Elektra, the first show of the Lyric Opera’s new season (along with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, which runs concurrently).Read full review... | |
