Mozart, Picker, and Gordon works on tap in COT’s 2015 season
Chicago Opera Theater will present three local premieres in its 2015 season including two works by American composers.
The season will open February 20 with Tobias Picker’s Thérèse Raquin, a co-production with Long Beach Opera. Based on Emile Zola’s novel of a murderous love triangle, Picker’s opera received mixed notices at its Dallas premiere in 2001.
The second production of next year, Ricky Ian Gordon’s A Coffin in Egypt will open April 25. Based on a play by Horton Foote, the opera stars the recently un-retired Frederica von Stade as an elderly woman looking back on her life. Designed as a showpiece for the celebrated mezzo-soprano, A Coffin in Egypt received a less-than-stellar TCR review last weekend in its East Coast premiere at Opera Philadelphia.
Mozart’s early Lucio Silla will close the 2015 season.
Except for von Stade no other casting or production details have been announced. chicagooperatheater.org.
Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth, which opens September 13, is the final opera of the company’s 2014 season.
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One Response to “Mozart, Picker, and Gordon works on tap in COT’s 2015 season”
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Posted Jun 12, 2014 at 7:02 am by Roland Buck
Under the previous director, Chicago Opera Theater could be counted on to provide Chicagoland with a Baroque opera each season, so that if the Lyric failed to do so, which it is now doing three seasons in a row, the deficiency was made up by COT. Mitisek, instead of continuing this tradition, is filling up the repertoire with marginal modern clunkers. Unlike the great works of Baroque composers like Handel and Monteverdi, which are still enjoyed by audiences centuries after they were first performed, these clunkers will soon be forgotten, and deservedly so. It should be clear by now that the choice of Mitisek was a big mistake.