Including titles by Kurt Weill and Antonio Salieri.

Guest artists making their festival debuts with the CSO will include pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, musical theater royalty Sutton Foster, violinist Himari, and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason.

Open to early-career Chicago-based and Chicago-born classical musicians, the grand prize is a contract for a debut solo album worth almost $75k.

The season is the first programmed by 2023-appointed general director Lawrence Edelson and the first following the departure of Lidiya Yankovskaya as music director.

As one of the very few women music directors of a major US opera company, Yankovskaya is respected for her leadership, artistic vision, as well as her inventive programming.

Three mainstage operas, three additional special events, and all six titles are Chicago premieres.

COT Music Director Lidiya Yankovskaya joins Oliver to preview Karol Szymanowski’s benchmark opera receiving it’s Chicago premiere this month.

“It feels like I’ve been carrying this world with me for a long time.”

In this celebratory season, audiences will hear two twentieth-century operas and three world premieres across COT’s full slate of mainstage and special programming.

Though there is a long way still to go, today’s stages are richer because these pioneering conductors are on them.

Music director Riccardo Muti will conduct music by Beethoven, Price, Glass, and Montgomery while welcoming guest artists like Anne-Sophie Mutter, Leif Ove Andsnes, and Mitsuko Uchida.

From Carmen to Claus, learn what is in store for the next season of Chicago Opera Theater.

“The reach is exponentially larger.”

A collaborative performance with Chicago Opera Theater, the Refugee Orchestra Project, and conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya seeks to express the importance of refugee populations in American music and around the world.

General director Ashley Magnus maintains that even in troubled times, the company is “moving forward with the belief that opera truly is a living, resilient art form.”

Two operatic opus ones will have their Chicago premieres this weekend, and they both command a chorus of well over 100. Chicago Opera Theater opens its 2019-20 season with a double bill: Joby Talbot’s Everest and Rachmaninoff’s Aleko.

Moby-Dick is a Great American Novel, no doubt. But that fact doesn’t make Herman Melville’s 600+ page opus any less intimidating.

General director Ashley Magnus exclaims that “to ensure that opera stays relevant as a living art form, we must bring contemporary voices, as well as works of international prominence never before seen in Chicago to the stage.”

“Right now, we’re in a golden era of American opera”

Chicago Opera Theater today announced its 2018/19 season composed of three new-to-Chicago works, continuing the company’s commitment to presenting new and rarely performed operas.

When conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya was recently named the new music director of Chicago Opera Theater, she became the only woman to hold that title with a major American opera company. Get to know Yankovskaya in this video interview.