![]() The Company seeks to mount productions that enrich the community it serves, as well as reflect the highest artistic standards of the profession. Repertoire choices encompass original language performances of standard repertory as well as contemporary and American operas. ![]() Today, the Lyric Opera brings high quality live operatic performances to the people of the Kansas City area and five-state region. Also at that time, Ward Holmquist assumed the post of artistic director of the Company and instituted the practice of performing in original language with English subtitles. Upon Maestro Patterson’s retirement at the end of June 1998, Evan Luskin became general director, after twelve years as managing director. For the final season in his forty-year career as head of the Company, Russell Patterson presented the second World Premiere for the Lyric, the 1998 production of Coyote Tales, by Henry Mollicone, with libretto by Sheldon Harnick. The program is a collaboration between the Lyric Opera of Kansas City and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that prepares exceptional young singers for a professional operatic career. In 1989, the Middle-America Opera Apprentice Program was born. In 1991, the Lyric Opera purchased the theatre. By 1974 the company had come into exclusive possession of the Capri under a long-term lease, consolidated offices there, and changed the name of the theater to the Lyric and the Company name from the Lyric to Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Here, during the succeeding years, the Lyric presented such contemporary works as The Saint of Bleecker Street, Of Mice and Men, Die Kluge and a world premiere of Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines along with such established masterpieces as Aida and The Magic Flute. In 1970, after a second season at the Uptown, the Capri Theatre at 11th and Central became available with a larger auditorium and traditional theatre and backstage facilities. Time magazine had pronounced the company as “a valid and important part of the American operatic explosion.” In the process, Kansas City had become one of the very few American communities where it was possible – even if only during a brief period every year – to see four different operas on as many successive nights of the week. Over the previous decade the company had mounted more than 200 performances of 30 different works. The destruction of the Rockhill ended an era for the Lyric. By 1965, the Company began touring to nearby towns, first in Missouri and later in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas and South Dakota touring ceased in fall 1992.Īfter the close of the 10th season, a fire gutted the Rockhill and the company was offered use of the Uptown Theatre on Broadway. In the early 1960’s, such auxiliary groups as the Women’s Committee (formerly known as the Lyric Opera League and now merged with the Guild) and Lyric Theater Guild (now Lyric Opera Guild) had formed. There, on the night of September 29, 1958, the Company presented La bohème, as the first performance of a four-week repertory season. ![]() The Rockhill, a 40-year-old motion picture theater was selected. The initial hurdle proved to be locating an available venue for rent. The company has been proving the friends wrong ever since. A number of local opera buffs welcomed the idea, but there were many qualms including: Would Kansas City accept opera so unorthodox by the prevailing national standards without stars or spectacular stage investitures? Friends told them it could not be done. In the fall of 1957 Russell Patterson, a young conductor, proposed to transplant the European opera-theater pattern to a more or less typical American setting.
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