![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It is from his window that he sees Rappaccini’s beautiful and even more lonely daughter, Beatriz (soprano Megan Pachecano), who is essentially held hostage by her father, for whom she is the crucial subject of his demonic experiments. Rappaccini (baritone Levi Hernandez) framed by the staircase, and the balcony area above it serving as the dreary apartment into which Giovanni (lustrous tenor Daniel Montenegro), a medical student from sunny Naples, has just moved. (Photo: Justin Barbin)ĭeftly directed in its Chicago premiere by Crystal Manich, the opera plays out on two levels, with the lush (and poisonous) courtyard garden of Dr. Rappaccinni, in the Chicago Opera Theater production of “La hija de Rappaccini” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”). (In fact, the story is set in Padua, Italy, although it is sung in Spanish with English subtitles.) First performed in 1991, much of its subject matter - isolation, loneliness, the nature of medical experimentation - seems very much of this moment, while its feverish neo-romantic score has an almost Italianate quality. “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the work of Daniel Catan (the late Mexican composer of Sephardic Jewish descent), and librettist Juan Tovar (who drew on a play by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz that was based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 short story), is an ideal example. La hija de Rappaccini” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”)Ĭhicago Opera Theater has a well-earned reputation for uncovering exceptionally fine new or rarely produced operas and treating them to highly polished, handsomely realized productions. Here is a closer look at each production: At the same time, Lyric Opera of Chicago literally went underground - and even more “grand-scale” - transforming a vast portion of the mazelike Millennium Lakeside Parking Garage into the backdrop for “Twilight: Gods,” a highly condensed, drive-thru adaptation of “Gotterdammerung,” the fourth (and final) installment in Richard Wagner’s epic “Ring Cycle” whose title conjures up world-altering visions of chaos and destruction, and whose audience remains seated in their cars. Chicago Opera Theater chose a grand curving staircase in the Field Museum to serve as the backdrop for its livestreamed production of “La hija de Rappaccini” (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”), a haunting tale about a warped scientist, his daughter and the lover who cannot save her or himself. ![]()
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