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Nominated “Best Opera Orchestra” by the International Opera Awards 2018, the Lyric Opera Orchestra has been a vital and integral part of Lyric Opera of Chicago since the company’s founding and first performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in February of 1954. 2022-2023 marks the Lyric Opera Orchestra's 68th season, performing works by Verdi, Rossini, Humperdinck, Bizet, Bernstein, Bock, Liverman & Rico, Roumain, Shaw, and Adams with an impressive array of international opera stars and conductors.

But we are so much more.


During the past 68 years, the Lyric Opera Orchestra has performed under many of the world’s leading conductors including Artur Rodziński, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Georg Solti, Christoph von Dohnányi, Ferdinand Leitner, and Zubin Mehta. Under its former music director Sir Andrew Davis, the Lyric Opera Orchestra has performed Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen as well as operas of Strauss, Mozart, Tippett, Janacek, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Massenet, and many others. The Lyric Orchestra is thrilled to be working with recently appointed music director Enrique Mazzola as he takes the entire company to new heights with his unbounded enthusiasm for and deep knowledge of the operatic canon.


Featured and televised nationally on PBS Great Performances series, the Lyric Opera Orchestra takes its place among an international roster of renowned artists and performing arts companies with broadcasts of “Concerts for Peace” (2012), Jimmy Lopez’s Bel Canto (2016), and Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (2017).

But our musical accomplishments provide only a small snapshot of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra.

We are simply much more.

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We serve others

We deliver donated musical items to students in Cuba

We help Syrian and Iraqi refugee families settle into their new Chicago homes

We spend time with senior citizens creating flower arrangements

We pack food at the Chicago Food Depository for the hungry

We perform concerts for children in Panamanian orphanages

We comfort people in need with our therapy dog

We annually perform A Christmas Carol benefiting a variety of local charities

We serve on a preservation board overseeing a national historic site

We volunteer with the Peace Corps

We perform benefit concerts for the homeless

We teach meditation

We care for aging parents


We believe in the arts as a vital part of education

We direct rehearsals at the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra and Elgin Youth Symphony

We teach at Northwestern, DePaul, Roosevelt, and Loyola Universities

We direct the Chicago Symphony Percussion Scholarship Group

We homeschool

We coach youth baseball

We serve on school boards

We tutor students at after-school programs

We are parents and grandparents


We have many varied interests and passions

We ski the American Berkebeiner

We bike Route 66 and across the French countryside

We play ice hockey and golf

We run marathons and participate in Olympic distance triathlons

We commute to work by bike

We play snooker

We make jewelry and practice blacksmithing

We knit, quilt, garden, and paint watercolors

We are much more than an orchestra.

We are humans who bring our individual experiences together

to create a unique and stunning product

for Chicago and the world.

The musicians of the 
Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra
make beautiful music.
Together.

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