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HOTTEST TICKET the city. 78 VERY WAGNER Parsing the Lyric Opera's latest reveals a masterpiece. For the willing soul, the spirit ready to be soothed, there may be no better tonic than the journey that is Parsifal. Richard Wagner's last and arguably most introspective work (in which an enervated brotherhood of the Holy Grail finds redemption through the intervention of a holy fool) arrives at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in a new production directed by John Caird. "Wagner created music of FROM TOP: A scene from Parsifal; lead heart-stopping beauty that mingles an Thomas Hampson. almost unearthly intimacy with a staggering grandeur," avers Lyric General Director Anthony Freud. "I don't hesitate to place it among the supreme masterpieces in the history of opera." To Caird, whose success-studded career includes such landmark productions as Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables, "Parsifal is not just an opera, it's a sort of contemplative, religious experience. Wagner was writing something that came from deep inside him, a sort of philosophical statement, the idea that you can never become a proper person unless you've learned compassion. It's a very beautiful message." November 9–29, Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Upper Wacker Dr., 312-332-2244; lyricopera.org PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SARAH MORRIS (FILM STILL); JOHAN ENGELS (PARSIFAL); KEN HOWARD (HAMPSON) continued from page 76 "one wordless, visual vignette after another, set to a quite immersive soundtrack composed by Liam Gillick. I first came to Chicago in 2011 to meet artist Kerry James Marshall, and a week after I returned home to Berlin, I saw Chicago. I was struck by the fact that she really managed to capture that sense of being an outsider here." Morris aims her lens in various directions, from Lincoln Park's boundary-bending restaurant Alinea to Manny's Cafeteria & Delicatessen in the South Loop, from Fermilab to the former headquarters of Playboy. "What's really peculiar about the film," relates Roelstraete, "is that she makes abundant use of a telescopic lens, so there's a real sense of her spying." Morris, who acknowledges an early enthusiasm for The Jungle (the Chicago-set novel by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair), had previously shot Mies van der Rohe's iconic Farnsworth House in Plano for Points on a Line, her examination of architectural modernism. Even then, her brief exposure to the city led her to perceive it as "much more complicated than the sum of its surfaces." Although Roelstraete describes her work as "extremely cinematic, visually spectacular," the film—which includes less-than-appetizing scenes from a Vienna Beef plant—is no travelogue. Neither is it, strictly speaking, a documentary. "It is not about truth in that way," asserts Morris. "My films create an experience of place that is many-layered and has many narratives. I try to create fictional scenarios within the films by using reality as a readymade. Chicago is very progressive and at the same time, part of the American mainstream consciousness. The contradiction is fascinating." November Sarah Morris's 29 through April 13, 2014, Museum of Chicago Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., explores the structures of 312-280-2660; mcachicago.org MA MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM 076-078_MA_SC_HT_Nov13.indd 78 10/21/13 10:49 AM