Saturday, February 15, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Lysistrata, or The Nude Goddess
By Mark Adamo
In 2005, composer-librettist Mark Adamo—fresh off his first opera, Little Women—freely adapted, for his second, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the comedy about the women of Athens and Sparta who, disgusted by a pointless war, barricade themselves in the Athenian treasury and swear a sanction on sex until their men make peace. “Freely” is the key word here: the composer “…cut all but three scenes of the play, created new male characters, changed the war, and invented a wrangling romance between Lysistrata and the Athenian leader Nico. The opera imagines a woman who, at first, fakes political convictions so as to wreak on her lover an emotional revenge: only later must she ask herself, to whom does she belong, herself or her people? And its score sends its melodies searching through a labyrinth of mirrors; no sooner is a theme sung by one character, given one meaning, than it is assumed by someone else and inflected with quite another. The libretto suggests, ‘Each of you will tell the truth; neither will agree.’ The score aims to make that suggestion an audible process.”
Of its celebrated 2005 premiere, Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, wrote “It’s shocking how deep this seemingly lighthearted opera goes.” Twenty years after that debut, Gil Rose conducts and the composer directs an internationally accomplished cast in Boston’s first-ever staging of Lysistrata, to be recorded for release on CD by Pentatone.
Cast & Creative
Anya Matanovič
Lysia/Lysistrata
Lucy Schaufer
Kleonike
Katherine Beck
Myrrhine
Dominic Armstrong
Nico/Nikias
Kevin Deas
Leonidas
John Moore
Kinesias
Neal Ferreira
Alpheus/Ares
Maggie Finnegan
Xanthe/Aphrodite
Alexis Peart
Lampito
Felicia Gavilanes
Sappho
Jamie-Rose Guarrine
Charito/Tisiphone
Kristen Watson
Dika/Alecto
Christina English
Arete/Megaera
Fred VanNess
Meleagros
Nathan Halbur
Bion/First Geezer
Fausto Miro
Maron
Nicholas Fahrenkrug
Philo/Second Geezer
Mark Adamo
Composer, Librettist & Director
