Opera Festival of Chicago launched its 2026 season with a one-night verismo-themed concert on June 13. The company specializes in Italian-language operas that aren’t performed frequently, and while one of their productions at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts later this month will be Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, the other will be Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. If you didn’t know Opera Festival of Chicago before the Very Verismo! concert, as I didn’t, you would likely come away with a good first impression. The production venue, the Jarvis Opera Hall at DePaul University, is a relatively intimate space where a piano and one or two singers per song can captivate an entire room.True to the company’s mission, most of the concert’s nine selections were from operas that are seldom fully staged in the United States, and even the two from Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci were not the ones that you might expect to be excerpted. Only people who are very familiar with opera (or who speak Italian) would likely know the dramatic context of what they were seeing. And yet, the emotional power of each performance rang true. Partly that’s because of the expressive flare of the piano accompanist, Chris Maldonado, who instantly set the mood at the top of the show with the somber eeriness of Arrigo Boito’s Faust adaptation Mefistofele. But it’s also because of the stage presence of the twelve singing actors, each of whom were excellent matches for their roles.
Immediately after Catherine Antonia Samartin’s rendition of Margareta’s grim, mournful aria from Mefistofele, (verismo seems to be defined broadly,) we switched tones to the Cherry Duet from Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz. Alexandra Razskazoff and Nathan Granner were an adorable couple in a scene that depicts the beginning of two people falling in love. Granner would return later in the night for the powerful and dramatic “È la solita storia del pastore” from Cilea’s L’Arlesiana, which greatly excited the crowd, while Razskazoff reappeared as Nedda with Kenneth Stavert playing Silvio in “E allor perché” from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. In that performance, we saw a more steely side to her, with Stavert playing the very adoring, but frustrated lover who tried to convince her to leave her controlling older husband. Eric Wassenaar and Angela DeVenuto played another pair of famous forbidden lovers in a selection from Riccardo Zandonai’s Giulietta e Romeo, which, having been published in 1922, was the most recent piece of music in the concert.
Jeremy Brauner’s rendition of “O Lola ch’ai di latti la cammisa” from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana was a fun moment from a boisterous character who is usually offstage while singing it in full productions. Brauner sauntered off midway through his aria, finishing his love-declaration from the wings, much to the audience’s amusement. Earlier in the night, Zhanna Alkhazova performed “Suicidio!” the dramatic climax of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, which is at the opposite end from Cavalleria Rusticana in terms of romanticism versus naturalism. Another moment of high drama came from Jonathan Wilson and Katy Lindhart’s performance from a scene in the more canonically verismo Andrea Chenier by Umberto Giordano in which the heroine describes how her mother was killed and her house burned down in the French Revolution. Puccini, the most performed verismo composer today, was represented by Victoria Vizin’s performance of “Tu il cuor mi strazi” from Edgar, an exciting piece from his early-career opera Edgar, which may be the least-known work from one of the most famous composers. Overall, Very Verismo! was an impressive showing from an organization that plays an important role by giving professional revivals to lesser-known music that a company with more overhead might not want to take a chance on. Although the concert was for one night only, it wasn’t the end of Opera Festival of Chicago’s season, which will continue later this month in Skokie with more on the verismo theme.
Opera Festival of Chicago will continue its 2026 season at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts at 9501 Skokie Blvd, Skokie, IL.
For more information and tickets, visit www.operafestivalchicago.org.
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