Haymarket Opera
Haymarket Opera Company contributes to the diverse and culturally vibrant artistic community of Chicago and the Midwest through the presentation of historically informed opera and oratorio from the 17th and 18th centuries, including many Chicago and U.S. premieres.
Since its founding in 2010, Haymarket has offered more than 30 productions using period instruments and historically informed staging conventions, shining a spotlight on many lesser known but quality pieces by a wide diversity of composers, sung and played by a combination of international stars and top regional talent. The company has received glowing reviews including in the Chicago Tribune, Italy’s L’Opera, Opera News, and Early Music America. The New York Times praised Haymarket’s “finely played, carefully sung, lovingly detailed period performance.”
Haymarket attracted national attention by offering a season of filmed Handel operas that reached more than 800,000 households during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since 2020, Haymarket has partnered with WFMT to broadcast on the historic Saturday Matinee Broadcast series, alongside the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, and Paris Opera, reaching over one million listeners worldwide through free broadcasts.
Following an acclaimed 2022 stage production of biracial composer Joseph Bologne’s only extant opera, L’Amant anonyme, Haymarket released the world-premiere recording of the opera in collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning label Cedille Records. The recording is the inaugural project supported by the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Fund for Vocal Recordings.
In 2020, Haymarket was included in the “Ten Best of the Decade” by the Chicago Sun Times and in 2021 was praised as offering “Chicago’s finest operatic event” by the Chicago Classical Review. In 2021 and 2022, Haymarket was listed alongside the Chicago Symphony and Lyric Opera in the Chicago Tribune’s “Top 10 Classical and Opera performances.” In 2022 Musical America lauded Haymarket as “among the most impressive period-performance ensembles around today.”
Haymarket takes its name from both Chicago’s Haymarket Affair of 1886 which gave focus to the world-wide labor movement, and from the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket District of London where Handel produced his Italian operas.
