This month, Harry Bicket makes his debut at Lyric Opera of Chicago conducting Handel's Partenope. (On The Beat).

This month, HARRY BICKET makes his debut at Lyric Opera of Chicago conducting Handel's Partenope. This production originally was performed at Glimmerglass Opera, and making it work on the expansive stage of the Lyric's theater may prove something of a challenge. As Bicket points out, "It's an intimate production, and the subject matter is more intimate, too. This is not one of the epic Handel operas. It's more like a drawing-room sex comedy."

Bicket grew up in Liverpool in the 1960s, when it was in the full grip of Beatlemania and all the other experimental pop-music influences cropping up at that time. Professionally, however, he left all that behind long ago. In the past decade, he has earned glowing notices as a conductor of Baroque music ever since his first Handel opera, Ariodante, at English National Opera in 1993. That he has been able to forge a career as a conductor of early music continues to take him by surprise. "I remember being at Oxford twenty years ...