On Friday night my wife and I attended a performance of Cherubini’s opera, Medea, at Lyric Opera, the first of our 2025-2026 season.
Medea premiered in 1797. Technically, it is an opéra comique meaning that as written it combines spoken dialogue with sung portions although the work is sometimes performed with recitatives composed later rather than spoken dialogue. There is nothing comic about it; it’s about as seria as you can get. In the final act Medea emerges from the temple covered in the blood of her children whom she has just murdered (pictured above). Take that, Jason.
It is a very difficult opera especially for the title character, Medea, who is onstage singing for all but the first 20 minutes. Because of that difficulty, the grim story, and the lack of recognizable melodies it is rarely performed. To the best of my ability to discover it has not been performed at all in Italy this year (operas by Italian composers are, reasonably enough, performed more frequently there) although it will be performed at La Scala later this year. It has been performed by a couple of companies in France this year in the original French language version.
To the extent that you can say the opera is “popular” it was popularized in the last century by Maria Callas who performed it many times. It has become sort of a Great White Whale for soprani.
This production is the first time the opera has been staged by Lyric Opera ever. I have never seen it before despite having been an opera buff for more than 50 years. Our soprano was the veteran Berwyn-native Radvanovsky who gave a bravura performance. The opera throughout was outstanding in singing and acting.
Sadly, Chicago is a Verdi-Puccini potboiler town so it did not have the audiences that such an excellent production deserved.
The staging and sets were particularly notable. The most significant feature was a large reflective surface upstage that reflected everything that happened downstage. Clouds, fire, etc. were also projected on the surface at times. I’m still trying to figure out how they accomplished that. I presume there were some downstage projectors.
This level of technical excellence and virtuosity bodes well for this year’s Lyric season.
It has received excellent reviews all-around.
Chicago Tribune
Chris Jones at the Tribune:
In the Euripides play that bears her name, Medea shows up at the start, wailing that her life has no purpose in the face of her mistreatment by Jason, after making one sacrifice after another, and she comes with a chorus of nervous sycophants. But the 1797 opera by Luigi Cherubini, which has a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman and is also derived from the Pierre Corneille dramatic adaptation, events begin with Glauce, the younger, naturally, and better-connected woman whom Jason has chosen in his freeze-out of his first partner.
In director David McVicar’s unnerving production, now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Elena Villalón is seen at a bouffant, rococo nuptial, her guests in celebrity Franco-Italinate attire but with ominous, glowing red eyes. She sings with fragility of her joy with Giasone (Matthew Polenzani), a happiness she worries will be short-lived. Soon, the doors of a vault-like apparatus close, Glauce and her crew are entombed and Sondra Radvanovsky’s Medea crawls
into view, as if from the gutter.But Radvanovsky’s Medea is no snipe. She is a roaring force from the underworld, existing vocally, as Medea must, at the intersection of pain, pleading and panic at the strength and thus the potential consequences of her own emotions. For one who feels such agony at betrayal must feel the dangerous power of love herself.
What a performance from Radvanovsky!
Chicago Sun-Times
Kyle MacMillan at the Sun-Times:
Riveting, all-out, all-encompassing.
That’s the kind of towering performance Sondra Radvanovsky delivers in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s first-ever production of “Medea,” adding a memorable chapter to an already distinguished career and opening the company’s 2025-26 with a thunderclap.
Chicago Classical Review
Lawrence A. Johnson at Chicago Classical Review:
Lyric Opera has so often been content to coast on mediocrity (and worse) in recent years, that it felt almost foreign Saturday night to have two genuine stars in the opera’s major roles for this important company premiere.
Sondra Radvanovsky has sung the role of Medea to acclaim at the Met and elsewhere. The celebrated soprano brought the requisite vocal power as well as scary dramatic intensity to the role of the title sorceress who is abandoned by her husband Jason (Giasone) and vows to wreak havoc on all.
With her bedraggled hair, Radvanovsky’s Medea was often a pitiable figure in the first two acts, crawling on the ground in pleading supplication for Giasone to return to her. She sang with tenderness in her Act I duet with Jason and retrospective moments recalling their past happy times. Yet when Medea goes full sorceress, the soprano brought jarring intensity to her vows of vengeance.
The role of Medea is one of the great voice-shredders, yet Radvanovsky rose to the daunting challenge of the final act, which is essentially an unbroken 35-minute mad scene. The soprano tackled all the formidable challenges, flinging out the leaping top notes, handling the bursts of rapid vocalism and making Medea’s frenzied indecision about whether to not to murder her children to get revenge on Giasone nerve-wracking and harrowing. A memorable, genuinely great performance by a singer at the peak of her career.
It is an excellent review overall, one with which I concur. I recommend Mr. Johnson’s analysis of the issues in the work.
