Cycles: Lyric Opera Orchestra musicians see the Smashing Pumpkins come back around 30 years later

By Melissa Trier Kirk and Eleanor Bartsch

1995 was a great year for music of all kinds in Chicago. If you played in the Lyric Opera Orchestra, you were performing Wagner’s Ring Cycle (the first in Lyric’s history) under the baton of Maestro Zubin Mehta. You might also have been recording a song for another significant musical cycle: the sprawling, three-disk alternative rock opus, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, by the Smashing Pumpkins. 

Chicago in the 1990s was a hub for commercial recording. Lyric Opera bassist Collins Trier explained he would play from 4-10 recording sessions per week. These were often commercial jingles for companies like McDonald’s and United Airlines. “You never knew ahead of time what it would be for. You had 10 minutes to learn it and it had to be perfect quickly. High pressure!” 

One day in 1995, Trier was called for a session involving a large group of string players from the Chicago Lyric Opera, Chicago Symphony and the freelance world. “This is not a jingle,” Trier remembers being told. The musicians donned their headphones and played along to pre-recorded guitar, bass, and drum lines. “I remember thinking how cool the guitar part was,” said Trier. The resulting song would become the Smashing Pumpkins’ international hit, "Tonight, Tonight". 

Fast-forward 30 years to 2025: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is returning to Chicago in the form of an innovative new alt-rock and opera mash-up production at the Lyric. The project was created in collaboration with Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins’ founder, frontman, and enduring creative force. Corgan composed the original album in Chicago, his hometown and where the band was formed in 1988. He is rumored to have been partly inspired to pursue the collaboration by the Lyric orchestra and chorus’s 2024 performance of Mozart’s Requiem, which he attended. 

Tickets are almost sold out for Mellon Collie’s seven-performance run. Two current Lyric Opera spouses are excited. Jeff Forman, husband of Lyric Opera principal flautist Mimi Tachouet, got his tickets right away. He thinks the album’s wide range will be well-served by this new operatic treatment. “It ranged from heavy rock to pop to psychedelic sounds to general acoustic songs that were just great. [The album] lives to this day because of the variety and sounds that they created.” Kyle Tikovitsch, husband of Lyric violinist Eleanor Bartsch, was in high school when the album was released. “It’ll be really nostalgic. School dances, flannel shirts, chain wallets, the whole thing.”

We love cycles in opera, and there’s something truly cyclical about the Lyric Opera Orchestra once again intersecting with Mellon Collie three decades later. For the record, Trier will again be rocking out on the bass!

…Next cycle we are hoping to return to? Ring Cycle!