Romeo et Juliette

This has been a very good season for  Chicago Lyric Opera as far as casting. Last night David and I heard another splendid cast perform Gounod's Romeo et Juliette. 

The gorgeous score was conducted by Emmanuel Villaume and the Chicago Opera Chorus again stole the show in their various scenes.




Romeo was sung by tenor Eric Cutter. What a great voice! His singing was simply stunning, tossing off high notes like it was nothing at all. A tenor to be reckoned with!



Susanna Phillips sang the part of Juliette.  She has a very beautiful voice with one small flaw. On her highest notes she does not allow the voice to follow through. The highest notes tend to lose energy and vibration and straighten out. If any of my readers have this same problem, here is my solution: first, be sure you take a proper breath leading up to the note, second, when you get there, allow the air to move through the note, and third, as you leave the note, allow a puff of soundless air to escape. Your high note will have focus, energy, and beauty. When you do not follow these three rules, the high note may straighten out, the vocal cords will close as you leave the note, and the note will sound a little tight and uncomfortable. I treat this problem in one of my books on singing. I call it 'Now that I'm up here, how do I get off???' Free voice lesson!  



Christian Van Horn was the excellent Friar Lawrence, singing with a rich basso voice that covered the entire range beautifully.

The rest of the cast sang very well and the one set production worked.

This was my last opera of the season at Lyric and it has been a fine season. Almost all of the singers we heard were top level, the hall itself works beautifully, and the orchestra never drowns out the singers.

Met Opera take notice!

I confess.

I must confess right at the start that I approach any production of Mozart's Clemenza di Tito  with prejudice. Sesto was one of the roles for which Lorraine was most famous. I first met Lorraine Hunt (as she was then) Lieberson when she drove out from Boston to Rood Hill Farm many years ago for a first voice lesson. After chatting for a bit, she launched into 'Parto, parto' with all that glorious voice. I kept thinking, "What can I say to this woman. She is already in a busy career in Europe, she has this fabulous instrument,...."

When she had finished the aria, and I had told her how wonderful she sounded, I said "Do you realise that you are putting a large space between the consonant and the vowel in the first word? It's coming out as 'Puh-arto'. Try singing 'Parto', just like that.

She did, and we worked together for the next twenty years until her sad and much too early death in 2006. It was an amazing time for me.

So you see that I begin my listening of anything from a very high standard of beauty and excellence.

In tonight's performance of 'Tito', all of the singing was fairly good. No one sang flat or did anything strange. A couple of the sopranos had very fast vibrati but otherwise sang quite well.

The Sesto of Joyce di Donato was well sung but in a voice lighter and higher than Lorraine's. At the opening of Act one, the three women all sounded much the same. Two mezzos and a soprano. No definition of voice or character. Ms. Donato also pulled back vocally for the very difficult runs. I mentioned this problem in the review I did of 'Barber' a while back. You don't need to pull the voice back to sing runs. You must move into the voice with energy and the runs will sing themselves. That's the way Lorraine did it and that is how I teach all of my students to sing.

I very much liked the Annio of Cecilia Hall and the Servilia of Emily Birsan.

I also liked the Publio of Christian van Horn and the Tito of Matthew Polenzani. 

Poor Tito has a kind of dumb role to deal with. In fact, the entire libretto is fairly silly.Thank God for Mozart's magnificent music. I wonder what possessed him to set this to music?

The set by Sir David McVicar was stolid. An all-purpose back wall with windows and doors, an enormous clunky staircase that took up half the stage, and a few oddments that slid on and off stage.

The stage direction, like the set, was deathly heavy. It needed someone like Steve Wadsworth to get the   people doing something besides standing still, facing out, and singing their piece. He directed Lorraine in Ashoka's Dream, and Xerxes,  among other operas to tremendous effect.

As I said, the rest of the cast sang all right if you excuse the tremoli in some of the sopranos (soprani?). It was kind of a dull evening.

David and I amused ourselves by renaming two of the leading characters 'Vidalia and Pesto'. It works!