March 12, 2008
BY ANDREW PATNER
Though its 2008 season has yet to begin, Chicago Opera Theater is already announcing its 2009 three-opera season.
The timing is a significant affirmation for a company that produces first-rate productions on a shoestring budget at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance downtown. It also heralds a tightened schedule that for the first time will allow visiting opera lovers to see two works in one weekend.
True to form, COT general and artistic director Brian Dickie has chosen two works new to Chicago and another rarely seen here for 2009.
The season will open with COT's first production of Mozart's last opera, "La clemenza di Tito" (April 18-May 1), to be led by the "dream team" duo first paired by Dickie eight years ago, conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus.
It will be followed by the first Chicago staging of theater legend Peter Brook's streamlining of Bizet's masterpiece "Le tragedie de Carmen." COT resident conductor Alexander Platt, unfortunately absent from the 2008 season, conducts, and longtime COT associate stage director Andrew Eggert makes his lead directorial debut with the company. COT favorite young American mezzo Sandra Piques Eddy takes the title role.
The season will close with the only Britten opera yet unseen in Chicago, "Owen Wingrave" (May 16-26), the 1971 adaptation of a Henry James short story about a would-be pacifist. Britten's close collaborator Steuart Bedford, who led the first live staging of the opera in 1973, conducts, with Ken Cazan directing. British tenor Robin Leggate, so brilliant the lead role of Britten's "Death in Venice" four years ago at COT, stars, along with Canadian soprano Rebecca Caine, who created the role of Cosette in the original "Les Miserables" and also has a rich opera pedigree.
COT's 2008 season begins April 30 with Mozart's "Don Giovanni" (through May 11), followed by John Adams' "A Flowering Tree" (May 14-25) and Handel's "Orlando" (May 28-June 8). "Don Giovanni" will be staged in a new Glover/Paulus production. The Indian-inspired "A Flowering Tree" will receive its Midwest premiere, with Adams conducting the first two performances. "Orlando" has been conceived as a Hollywood film noir by Australian director Justin Way.
Tickets for both seasons are available at (312) 704-8414 or online at www.ChicagoOperaTheater.org.
Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).