- Deanna Isaacs
- Lyric Opera’s Anthony Freud, Renee Fleming take a question
It was a coincidence that word came out last Thursday about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s $32 million gift bonanza—$15 million of it earmarked for education and outreach—while Lyric Opera was introducing its upcoming plan for its own outreach effort, Lyric Unlimited.
—The Property, a klezmer opera by 28-year-old Polish composer Wlad Marhulets with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann and based on the graphic novel of the same name by Rutu Modan. It’ll be directed by Eric Einhorn, will include members of the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, and will be presented at the Logan Center for the Arts and the North Shore Center for the Arts in February and March, in conjunction with the run of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Holocaust opera, The Passenger, in the Civic Opera House.
Freud: “I’ve tried to find a way of defining opera to make it distinctive from musical theater, and I can’t.”
These commissions, and Lyric’s forays into musical theater are “ends in themselves,” Freud maintains, but also a way to get acquainted with potential new operagoers. He noted that “50 percent of the Oklahoma! audience [last year], and 50 percent of the mariachi audience had never been to the opera house before.”
