Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 2 - Gala

Gary Payne Photography 15 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Oh Kay! and thinking, “There’s a really good leading man! Tall and good-looking and with a tremendous voice.” And Laura — I mean, she is gorgeous , all the time, and she has this beautiful voice that’s happy being a soprano or happy singing folk music. He was born to be a leading man, she was born to be a leading lady. We’re just super excited to get together and make music — because as well as being tremendous communicators, they’re really good musicians. YOU HELPED FOUND THE HIT ENCORES! SERIES AT CITY CENTER. HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT? That’s my other big super-proud thing. When Judith Dakin, who’d been at Brooklyn Academy of Music, came over to run City Center, she really wanted to find a way to bring music theater back there. She and I had done a giant Gershwin festival at BAM, so as soon as she got to City Center she called: “How can we do this?” We both love the older shows with the great orchestrations and great songs that have terrible books. So the original concept was, “These are things that aren’t going to get revived, but their scores must be heard!” We were trying to make it sound exactly the way it would have sounded. That first season, we didn’t know if we were going to be able to manage it, and by the fifth or sixth season, people were willing their seats to their grandchildren. It became such a thing! HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH GARRISON KEILLOR’S “AMERICAN RADIO COMPANY”? Keillor married a Danish girl back in the late ’80s, and he took a break and went to Denmark. Then he missed performing on the radio, but was anxious about going back to the Twin Cities, and so settled in New York. He wanted to start a new radio show that had a much bigger diversity of music. So he interviewed two or three people, and I got the job. We started the Coffee Club Orchestra, which could play anything . We had the widest possible variety of singers and performers, and we accompanied all the scripts. I love working out underscores for dialogue, whether it’s a radio show or it’s onstage. It was a thrilling time to be performing live. YOU HAVE AN EXTENSIVE DISCOGRAPHY. IS IT IMPORTANT TO YOU TO HAVE YOUR WORK PRESERVED FOR POSTERITY? Some of those Encores shows never had a proper cast album, and now they do, with original orchestrations. So that’s a source of pride. I’ve had the privilege to work with really great engineers and editors, and I love the process soup to nuts — how the microphones are set up, where everybody is placed, and then listening to the take, deciding can it be improved or do we move it on, and then going in and splicing things together and making everything perfect — I love all that. WHAT FULFILLS YOU IN YOUR OFFSTAGE LIFE? It’s all nature. That’s one of the reasons I moved to New Mexico. I’m not a city person. I pretended for decades. Now I just love the place where I am. It full-on recharges me day and night. I’m very attuned to the cycles of the sun and the moon. It’s beautiful there everyday. The views from my house are stunning . The light on the mountains changes all day long, and you can see storms moving around all over the place. I miss it when I’m not there. Louise T. Guinther, longtime senior editor at Opera News , is an arts writer based in New York.