Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 6 - Carmina Burana

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 10 at the supertitles and find out exactly what’s being said, because a lot of these poems are written by various people in the 12th and 13th century, and they cover such a wide variety of human emotion. It’s kind of nice to match the emotion to what’s actually happening on stage. If it’s a really driving, loud section of music, you wonder “Hey, why is that so loud?” And the two loudest sections, of course, are at the beginning and end where it talks about fortune and how we’re all at the mercy of fortune in life. The piece is incredibly serious, but there are moments of great levity. When the swan is being burned and the singing is incredibly high because he’s in agony, it’s kind of this black humor — bizarre and funny and weird and beautiful all at the same time. The texts are all about life, and lust, and gluttony. So it’s a piece imbued with great depth and then other moments of great levity as well. How does this compare to recent choral offerings at Lyric? For the past few years, Lyric has been trying to present a choral piece every season. So we’ve done Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Mozart Requiem , and A Wondrous Sound — a real showcase of operatic choruses. And yet? Carmina Burana is the biggest and most ambitious choral project that we’ve undertaken in Lyric’s history. We’ve never had a choral concert with 100 singers. So, if you came to the Requiem , think of something twice as big, twice as impressive. We have the chorus raised a lot higher so that the sound will come out over the orchestra much more, because the orchestra is so big. We have 40 children from Uniting Voices Chicago walking out on stage to sing their parts. So it’s a bit of a visual spectacular as well as a choral spectacular. Because this was created as a scenic cantata, do you think it gives the chorus more to grab on to when finding the meaning and emotions? Symphonic choruses are amazing, but giving this task to an opera chorus is something else; the opera chorus is accustomed to creating characters. It’s used to coloring words innately, finding the raw emotion in the text, and then relaying it to the audience through amazing voices. For many people in the audience, hearing an opera chorus do this piece will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There’s a lot of new music this season.What else are you looking forward to? It’s an interesting season! We’re performing Madama Butterfly , and while the opera has been performed here many times, we’re doing a different version of it with music that’s never been sung at Lyric. Composers often tinkered with their compositions before and after opening night, and Puccini was no different. We’re doing the 1904 Brescia version of Butterfly , so the chorus has new music to learn that no one has ever sung before. I’ve never taught it before! So that’s exciting. We’ve also never performed El último sueño de Frida y Diego and Mellon Collie . So even though there are familiar pieces in the repertoire there are a lot of firsts. A lot of new stuff that Lyric audiences have never seen, that we’re enjoying putting together. Chorus Director and Head of Music Michael Black joined the assembled student choir onstage at Lyric for the inaugural Choral Fest. Kyle Flubacker