The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra’s 2025 season spans nine weeks and entire centuries, with more than 20 performances, celebrated guest artists, and a repertoire encompassing both the orchestral canon and composers who are creating the classics of the future.
And it all starts now, as the CSO begins its 96th season — this year again under the baton of Music Director and Principal Conductor Rossen Milanov — at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater, joined by world-renowned soprano Christine Goerke.
The evening opens first with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 — a work that Chautauqua’s resident musicologist David B. Levy notes “offers further confirmation of Beethoven’s genius as the unsurpassed master of dramatic expression through purely instrumental means.”
From there, the evening segues into an evening of Wagner, with Goerke joining the CSO and Milanov to bring tonight’s selections to life. With the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, Goerke is Isolde, the Irish princess and Tristan’s star-crossed lover.
Goerke, who has sung much of the great soprano repertoire in her career, has been lauded for her portrayals — she’s taken on the role in opera houses across the world — as Brünnhilde, a key character in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Tonight, the CSO will perform several selections from the Ring cycle: first are “Forest Murmurs” and “Entry of the Gods into Valhalla” — performed in honor of John Marcellus, the CSO’s principal trombonist from 1978 to 2024, who passed on Dec. 31, 2024.
The final piece of the evening is Brünnhilde’s famed “Immolation Scene” — the end of Act III in Wagner’s final Ring opera, Götterdämmerung.
In an interview with the Metropolitan Opera’s Jay Goodwin, Goerke spoke about bringing the warrior-maiden to life, and the character’s journey through the Ring cycle.
“The thing that I love most about the Ring cycle is that, at first glance, we’re talking about gods and mythical creatures, but if you strip away that fantastical veneer, these are some of the most human characters we have in opera,” she said. “They are so flawed and so real — Brünnhilde most of all. … In Siegfried, she takes a terrifying chance to open herself up to love again, to being vulnerable. She has been stripped of her strength and power from her father, but she starts to see that she has wisdom from her mother. And then, in Götterdämmerung, we see the anger and the rage, and we see that she’s still her father’s daughter. In the end, it’s the combination of the two — the wisdom and the power — that defines her.”
Tonight isn’t the only chance Chautauquans will have to experience Goerke’s talents for themselves this season; on July 11, she’ll take the stage in Norton Hall for the CSO’s workshop presentation with the Chautauqua Opera Company and Conservatory of Lincoln in the Bardo. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek have created an operatic adaptation of George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
The opera will have a two-week orchestral workshop that will bring together the CSO, 16 Young Artists from Chautauqua Opera Company and 18 singers from the Opera Conservatory, as well as Goerke. Goerke joins the cast to sing the role of The Reverend, written specifically for her; the July 11 performance in Norton will be the opera’s first-ever presentation with orchestra.
