Players 50 2025: Introduction
Players 50 2025: Comedy
Players 50 2025: Dance
Players 50 2025: Theater
Here are Chicago’s Opera Players.
Will Liverman
Grammy Award-winning baritone Will Liverman made a splash on the opera scene with “The Factotum” (2023) at Lyric Opera of Chicago, with concept, music and lyrics by Liverman in a production that was called “mic-drop fabulous good” by Opera News. In 2024, Liverman performed in the BBC Proms classical music festival in Britten’s “War Requiem” and Sibelius’ “The Origin of Fire,” and reprised the role of Papageno in the Metropolitan Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” with plans to return to Lyric as Marcello in “La Bohème” in 2025. Liverman’s album, “Show Me The Way,” has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album at the 2025 Grammys. (Tristan Bruns)
Whitney Morrison/Photo: Joe Mazza | brave lux
Whitney Morrison
From rising star to prominent artist, Whitney Morrison has taken the opera world by storm, becoming the first artist-in-residence at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2023. One element of the residency is “Growing Room,” a mobile greenhouse used as a public voice studio where Morrison practices her vocals, a peek into the artist’s process rarely seen by outsiders. Morrison’s work with Lyric includes “Champion” (2024), “Proximity” (2023), “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” (2022) and “Dead Man Walking” (2019). In 2024, Morrison starred in “The Comet/Poppea” at American Modern Opera Company, and will revisit the work at Boston Lyric Opera in 2025. (Tristan Bruns)
Matthew Ozawa/Photo: Joe Mazza | brave lux
Matthew Ozawa
As chief artistic administration officer at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Matthew Ozawa oversees all the artistic departments that connect to the shepherding of the artists, the artistic process and activities inside and outside the opera house. As a freelance director, Ozawa began 2024 by directing “Angel Island” at Brooklyn Academy of Music, about the infamous twentieth-century immigrant detention center in San Francisco Bay—Ozawa’s great-grandmother was one of those detainees—and directed Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at Lyric last fall. “Opera is the synthesis of all art forms,” says Ozawa, “life is ever evolving; the art is living and breathing; I make the invisible visible.” (Tristan Bruns)
Opera
Hall of Fame
Renée Fleming
