Backstage at Lyric

A new series called "Backstage at Lyric" from the Lyric Opera of Chicago features in-depth interviews with the singers, conductors, and creative minds behind the productions of the 2007/08 season.

The series launches with an engaging and informative interview with soprano Elizabeth Futral and tenor Joseph Calleja, who are currently rehearsing
La traviata.

Lyric Opera dramaturg Roger Pines hosts this first episode. Download and enjoy!

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935-2007

The world has lost one of the most famous opera singers of our time. Luciano Pavarotti died at his home in Italy after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 71 years old.

To hear excerpts of the famous tenor's singing and read a remembrance from NPR, click HERE

To read the BBC's news release, click HERE. And to watch a performance from a 1979 production of La Bohème with soprano Ileana Cotrubas at La Scala, click HERE

“Alice in Wonderland” in Munich

"The labyrinthine fantasy of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” begins in deceptively lulling tones, with the idyllic phrase “All in the golden afternoon.” Unsuk Chin’s opera “Alice in Wonderland,” which recently had its première at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich, opens in distinctly more ominous fashion...
Chin, who was born in Seoul in 1961, and has been living in Berlin since 1988, has a knack for binding together seemingly irreconcilable extremes. A youthful enthusiast of the late-twentieth-century European avant-garde, she studied in the eighties with György Ligeti, a pioneer of alien soundscapes."

To read Alex Ross's complete article from The New Yorker, click HERE

Beverly Sills, 1929-2007

Beverly Sills, the acclaimed Brooklyn-born coloratura soprano who was more popular with the American public than any opera singer since Enrico Caruso, even among people who never set foot in an opera house, died on Monday, July 2nd, at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

To read the entire New York Times obituary, click HERE