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Sondra Radvanovsky’s Turn Chicago
Lyric Opera
10/11/2025 - & October 14*, 17, 20, 23, 26, 2025
Luigi Cherubini: Medea
Sondra Radvanovsky (Medea), Matthew Polenzani (Giasone), Elena Villalón (Glauce), Alfred Walker (Creonte), Zoie Reams (Neris), Christopher Humbert, Jr. (Captain of the Guard), Camille Robles, Emily Richter (Handmaidens)
Chorus of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Michael Black (Chorus Director), Orchestra of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Enrique Mazzola (Conductor)
Sir David McVicar (Director & Set Designer), Doey Lüthi (Costume Designer), Paule Constable (Original Lighting Designer), Clare O’Donoghue, Chris Maravich (Revival Lighting Designers), S. Katy Tucker (Projection Designer)
S. Radvanovsky (© Cory Weaver)
Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842), championed by Beethoven and Napoleon I (whose director of music he became), registers unfairly for today’s music enthusiast as little more than the briefest of historical footnotes.
A prolific composer of string quartets, church motets, masses, and in excess of 20 operas, it is in this last arena that Cherubini is now remembered~ and of these, it is his 1797 Médée, usually heard in Italian as Medea, which is best‑known.
One wonders how it is that this man, a former child prodigy who performed for the crowned heads of Europe and was twice elected to membership in France’s Légion d’honneur, fell from favor?
After years of revolution, the taste of the Parisian public turned from gods and goddesses to works of a lighter, and at times patriotic, nature, a change to which Cherubini was slow to adapt. His output bridges Gluck’s 18th century classicism while simultaneously forward-looking enough to have enchanted Rossini. As a result, his style doesn’t always seem to find where to best fit in.
Based on Euripides’ 431 BC tragedy and composed as an opera comique with spoken dialogue between musical numbers, Cherubini’s opera as we know it today is actually a hybrid, with fully‑accompanied recitatives composed by Franz Lachner (1803‑1890) taking the place of dialogue, decades after Cherubini’s death. It was in this full vocal edition that the opera resurfaced, returning to the rotating opera circuit after years of neglect, as Medea, in Italy in the early 1950s, as a star vehicle for a famous soprano.
It is impossible to discuss Cherubini’s most celebrated score without invoking Maria Callas, whose total immersion in the title role influenced its ascent to repertory staple through a series of famous revivals of the work between 1953‑1961 in Florence, Milan, Dallas, London, and in Epidaurus.
Callas made a studio recording of the opera for an Italian company in 1957, the larger label heads unable to see value in Cherubini and his music, even with Callas as star. Meanwhile, a plethora of dramatic stage photos from the La Scala performances bear silent witness to the soprano’s unchallenged sovereignty in the role.
It is Callas, then, against whom all future Medeas will be forever judged.
Post-Callas–the opera by now no longer seen as a ‘fringe’ curiosity–the remaining years of the 20th century saw Eileen Farrell, Magda Olivero, Gwyneth Jones and Leyla Gencer, among others, all seeking to don Medea’s robes.
And now, in the 2020s, it is Sondra Radvanovsky’s turn.
Euripides’ famous tragedy–later set for the French stage by dramatist Pierre Corneille in the mid‑1600s–is the thematic material upon which Cherubini composed. All three follow a set dramatic pattern, recapped briefly:
Medea, a princess of Greece, daughter of the King of Colchis, is endowed by the gods with the gifts of prophecy and sorcery. As a means to help consolidate Jason’s royal power, Medea aids him and his Argonauts in stealing the Golden Fleece. Jason and Medea marry, and she bears him sons. After ten years, Jason takes the children, leaving Medea to marry Glauce, daughter of King Creonte of Corinth, who exiles Medea. In retribution, Medea sends Glauce poisoned wedding garments, which kill her as well as the King, as he comforts his dying daughter. Medea then kills her sons by Jason and escapes with their bodies in a chariot provided by the gods.
Sir David McVicar’s production, making the rounds with Miss Radvanovsky as the titular heroine, employs some interesting conceits. A shared production, a cost‑saving measure between the companies of Chicago, New York, Toronto, along with the Greek National Opera, follows a practice established in the 1970s as a means of exhuming long‑dormant scores for an interested prima donna, which for various reasons are unlikely to be staged again.
In today’s era of minimalist and revisionist stage pictures, McVicar has been credited, generally, with embracing a traditionalist’s playbook as he shies away from gratuitous ‘shock value’ theatrics prevalent on today’s opera stages. Or has he?
As seen October 14 at Chicago’s Civic Opera House, the second of six performances and a Chicago Lyric premiere [as it was when the production played the Metropolitan Opera in 2022], this Medea proves that the Scottish director has a few other tricks up his sleeve, enough to keep his critics forever second‑guessing.
His ancient Corinth, for one, bereft of columns, plinths, and similar detail, appears to drift between several spheres of 18th and 19th century European influence, much as Cherubini did over the course of his career. Art imitating life, perhaps?
The director’s ‘concept’ redirects the familiar mythological tale to one of generalized social exclusion–with the outlier Medea at its center–but McVicar takes this a step further, offering a cause-and-effect scenario, fashioning her as a frightening harridan whose every appearance registers fear.
Gone is Callas’ regal bearing, and in its place the startled assemblage sees a disheveled woman with black eyes, dirty hair and gown, looking every inch a derelict. One believes immediately this Medea capable of the most horrible of her eventual sins, filicide.
And in this, McVicar stumbles.
Because his Medea is unhinged from the very start, her crimes come as no surprise, rather than as the end point of her rapid progression into madness. The opera’s carefully-crafted dénouement is therefore altered, in the process. The director’s decision to delve, as he does here, into fearsome sensationalism, not his normal stock in trade, works against the original source material while depriving the audience of any sympathies it might otherwise have for Medea’s plight.
What it does accomplish–and this may be McVicar’s overriding raison d’être–is to afford Radvanovsky an even greater star vehicle than that fashioned by Cherubini. Medea is a personality-driven role for an accomplished singing-actress, as it is, and this soprano–slithering snake‑like down steps on her belly, singing prostrate on the floor, and being pulled to and fro by her black fright wig, among other athletic feats expected of her–rises superbly to the seemingly insurmountable and unexpected challenges her director has set before her. And she manages all of this while emoting powerfully at full throttle for several hours.
Vocally, her rather opaque sound has matured into what one now hears: a gleaming shower of brilliant high notes, a full middle and equally strong lower register, all knit into a most impressive whole. At 56, and after many years in the profession, she is at the very top of her game, her histrionic and dramatic abilities impressively on display. Whether pleading in the opera’s hit tune “Dei’ tuoi figli,” or scheming, raging, running an emotional gamut~ through it all, one could not take eyes off of her.
And it may well be that people will one day talk about “the Radvanovsky Medea” with similar reverence usually reserved for Callas’ sorceress. Time will tell.
As the lynchpin for Medea’s murderous escapades, tenor Matthew Polenzani–in common with Radvanovsky, a Chicago-area native–portrayed the mariner Giasone with an instrument that doesn’t immediately suggest a hero of Greek Antiquity, though he more than held his own alongside his soprano partner. They both know their home theater’s acoustics, along with McVicar’s production, as they sparred vocally up and down the scale, decibel by decibel, the tenor turning in a compelling portrait of the unfaithful Giasone, his voice ringing out strongly and confidently.
In her company debut, soprano Elena Villalón sang Glauce’s lovely first act aria “O Amore, vieni a me” with plangent tones, her acting sincere throughout the evening. Bass Alfred Walker’s commanding voice and presence were exactly right for Creonte, as was Neris’ lovely plea to her mistress Medea as sung with heartwarming sincerity by mezzo‑soprano Zoie Reams.
Supporting roles were capably sung by Chrisopher Humbert, Jr., Emily Richter, and Camille Robles, all members of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, its training program for young artists, of which the evening’s Giasone, Mr. Polenzani, is a proud graduate.
Lyric Opera’s Music Director Enrique Mazzola led a slightly trimmed performance of the score with drive and energy, never allowing tension to lag. The company’s orchestra played the well‑known overture with precision and clarity, continuing in like vein throughout the evening, their cohesive ensemble in this unfamiliar score a testament to their conductor’s excellent preparation. The chorus, too, propelled great waves of sound into the 3,200‑seat auditorium, firmly anchoring the proceedings.
Debuting designer Doey Lüthi’s costumes, emphasized the martial aspect of Greek social structure, the men in mostly 19th century military garb, the chorus women largely in pseudo-Empire ball gowns.
McVicar’s unit set of gold‑paneled accordion doors sprinkled with dark jewel tones, opened and closed to allow for scene changes behind. Background colors of red (signifying Medea’s bloodthirsty revenge) along with flames at the end as Medea self-immolates [a significant break with Euripides] were nonetheless eye‑catching and lit atmospherically.
A mirrored ceiling provided a bird’s-eye view, a fascinating perspective on the proceedings below. This effect of human microscopic observation, imagining the characters as though in a laboratory setting, worked, given the complexities of the varying onstage personalities. This ‘experiment’ is what art is truly all about, carefully magnifying and studying human beings while scrutinizing their individual strengths and frailties.
In the final analysis, all other elements aside, Cherubini’s contribution to the operatic canon is significant for one important reason. Operatic literature is replete with stories of women mistreated by the men in their lives, but Cherubini’s Medea is among the very first to present a strong, powerful woman taking the lead in a cautionary tale. Composers of the later verismo movement would pick up and continue this influential example, and all of it that we would now, with 20th century sensibilities, refer to as a “female empowerment” drama.
And this is Cherubini’s lasting legacy to the opera stage.
Carl J. Halperin
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