Sept. 12--One cannot imagine two more different concerts of vocal music than the ones that opened the seasons of Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago over the weekend in downtown Chicago. Differences in scale were part of it, certainly, but differences in artistic intent also were crucial in defining each event.
"Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park," Friday night at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, was the company's annual free concert of operatic excerpts, part gift to the community, part plug for the upcoming mainstage season. Taking part were principal singers from the fall roster, members of the Ryan Opera Center and Lyric's stalwart orchestra and chorus under music director Andrew Davis.
The Lyric Unlimited event was opera as populist music theater without the theater: easily digestible sound-bites of opera perfectly suited for a short-attention-span culture. You could even call up the supertitles on your mobile devices.
The institute's Collaborative Works Festival, a recital of American art songs given the previous evening at the Poetry Foundation, was something more serious: vocal music for individual singers communicating intimate and deeply personal emotions through music in a small, enclosed space. Both were enjoyable events, and both were occasions for some fine singing, but going from one to the other required a major adjustment in perception.
Friday's Lyric Unlimited event took place under chilly skies that reduced attendance to roughly 8,000, according to a Lyric spokeswoman. The program referenced the first two operas of the season, including the entire Act II of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" and selections from Rossini's "La Cenerentola" ("Cinderella"), along with choral scenes from Mozart, Gounod and Verdi that gave director Michael Black's fine chorus a brief chance to shine. And it's always a pleasure to hear Davis' orchestra aboveground, where its many strengths can be appreciated up close.
Some operas fare better than others when their music is wrenched out of dramatic context. "Figaro" demands a full staging to be optimally appreciated, and I pitied operatic newbies trying to make sense of an already confused plot on Friday.
That said, the international cast of singers, including several Lyric debuts, made an attractive, vocally pleasing, well-balanced ensemble. Taking the leading roles were Amanda Majeski and Luca Pisaroni as Countess and Count Almaviva, Christiane Karg as Susanna, Adam Plachetka as Figaro and Rachel Frenkel as Cherubino. I will have more to say about them after Lyric's new "Nozze di Figaro" production opens at the end of the month. Davis presided with sparky Mozartean grace, while William C. Billingham provided the crisp recitative accompaniments.
The Rossini bits and pieces served as an appetizer to the full "Cenerentola" meal to come in October. One could appreciate how well mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong has developed artistically since her apprenticeship at the Ryan Center. She had the vocal beauty, range and agility for Cinderella's coloratura showpiece, "Non piu mesta." That left the splendid tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who's to make his Lyric debut as Don Ramiro in "Cenerentola," to knock the princely hero's aria out of the park with liquid phrasing and thrilling high notes. One is eager to hear him in the full production.
Collaborative Works Festival
The worthy efforts of the Collaborative Arts Institute to create a serious performance and listening environment for art song and vocal chamber music in the city come together in the annual Collaborative Works festivals cofounders and directors Nicholas Phan, tenor, and Shannon McGinnis, pianist, present with colleagues each year at this time.
Last week's fourth annual festival focused on settings of American poetry by American composers, each song an expression of what is loosely termed the "American spirit." The disparate ways in which the crusty New England experimentalist, Charles Ives, and the next generation of American song composers, reflected that spirit were shown in the first of two salon concerts on Thursday, a recital given at the Poetry Foundation.
The sinewy songs Ives wrote in thrall to the Transcendentalist philosophers Thoreau and Emerson still sound new to today's ears, their atonal vocal lines ringed by hazy piano dissonances like mists rising off the composer's beloved Housatonic River. Phan presented seven of them, in smart, caring performances over Michael Brown's superbly giving piano accompaniments.
McGinnis joined Phan for four Ned Rorem songs to Walt Whitman texts. The composer's acute response to the poems' homoerotic sensuality came across in his unobtrusive, elegantly wrought settings, stylishly rendered here.
Thursday's recital also brought two contrasting cycles of Emily Dickinson-inspired songs: Lee Hoiby's "The Shining Place" and Aaron Copland's "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson."
Hoiby's Dickinson settings pale alongside Copland's wonderfully evocative distillations of poetic mood and atmosphere, which drew an altogether superb performance from singer Nicole Heaston, with Brown again working wonders at the keyboard. The dozen songs are not easy to sustain as a musico-poetic unity, but the Chicago-born soprano did so beautifully and insightfully: singer and song became one.
In the Hoiby songs, soprano Laquita Mitchell's sincerity and warmth, with McGinnis supplying the splashy piano parts, weren't quite enough to offset moments of unsteady tonal emission and uncertain pitch.
jvonrhein@tribpub.com
