Music Reviews 
Aida – An Opera(2)
Besides Verdi brilliant score, the voices sing with passionate emotions. Tenor Marcello Giordani commands the stage and soars to the heavens while Sondra Radvanovsky – a Chicago native- raises to the demanding role of Aida. She triumphs in her first time as Aida at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The audience cheered her performance! Jill Grove’s mezzo effectively demonstrated Amneris’ heartache and Gordon Hwkins strong baritone rules his scenes.
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The Magic Flute
For those of us either unfamiliar or who hold only cursory knowledge of the opera, it’s sort of Mozart’s musical comedy. Overall it’s quite light and the morality of it is somewhat ham-handed, if classic: typical Sun vs. Moon, Light vs. Dark, Wisdom vs. Ignorance sort of stuff. Maybe (though not necessarily) some references to Free Masonry in there.
Spring Awakening
My feelings about this play are fairly well-documented. To put it succinctly: I’m not a huge fan of the material. That said, this production was far more endearing – and overall successful – than the previous Broadway in Chicago venture. They made the material work better for them than their touring counterparts. And to a surprising degree. This troupe really found the comic moments between the words; they had great timing and used space very well.
Ariadne auf Naxos
The story of Ariadne mirrors the theme of the overall play: namely, that when comedy is set side-by-side with tragedy, it will win; if Mozart were to face Wagner, Mozart would triumph simply by default; and Dionysus will prevail. Strauss surely had the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy in mind when he wrote this piece – after all, he is the composer of Also Sprach Zarathustra – and it shows. There is such interplay between comedy and tragedy – two sides of the same Dionysian coin – and between Apollonian form and structure and Dionysian chaos.