Voigt, a universally acclaimed singer of Strauss, sang Salome at a concert performance at Tanglewood in 2001, but a staged performance has been slow in coming, in part because of the singer's size. She has lost a large amount of weight since undergoing gastric-bypass surgery in June 2004.
Iphig_nie en Tauride, a co-production with San Francisco Opera, will be seen in Chicago in September and October before moving to SFO in June 2007. Susan Graham will sing the title role in both cities; Robert Carsen is the director. Louis Langr_e, the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival, will conduct in his Lyric debut.
Il trovatore will star Dolora Zajick as Azucena; Bruno Bartoletti, the Lyric's artistic director emeritus, will conduct. The production, directed by David McVicar, is "Goya-inspired," according to a press release, and set in Spain.
The season will open with Puccini's Turandot, in a David Hockney production directed by Garnett Bruce, and will also include Gounod's Rom_o et Juliette, with Dina Kuznetsova as Juliette and Matthew Polenzani and Massimo Giordano sharing the tole of Rom_o; a holiday production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus; Mozart's CosÐ fan tutte with Thomas Allen and Nathan Gunn; and Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, with Isabel Bayrakdarian, Patricia Racette, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, making her Lyric debut.
The company will also present a "Subscriber Appreciation Concert" featuring soprano Ren_e Fleming on October 6. Davis will conduct.
The Lyric also announced that its subscription prices would remain unchanged in 2006-07. Subscriptions go on sale in February.