Anna Netrebko among highlights of Lyric Opera’s 2012-13 season

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Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” will be revived for Lyric Opera’s 2012-13 season. | Marty SohL~Metropolitan Opera

Updated: February 19, 2012 8:21AM

A second season is still transitional in the long-range scheduled world of opera programming.

In fact, the first season at Lyric Opera of Chicago that will be fully planned by the company’s new general director Anthony Freud is that of 2015-16, three and a half years away.

But the 2012-13 season announced Tuesday afternoon at the Civic Opera House bears more of Freud’s fingerprints than might immediately be obvious, and its seriousness, commitment to American artists and well-balanced variety is one the manager told a press conference he happily takes “full responsibility” for.

Previous commitments by now retired general director William Mason and Lyric board chairman Richard P. Kiphart also give Freud an extra boost for next season: a ninth opera added to the eight operas that have been the norm for the last 14 years. As previously announced, Lyric creative consultant and diva soprano Renee Fleming, who joined the press event from New York via Skype, will star in spring 2013 stagings of Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” written for her (and which received its world premiere in 1998). In a canny move, tickets for “Streetcar” will be available only to subscribers.

A similar “Subscribe Now!” hook is being used with the often-awaited Lyric debut of the other superstar on the schedule, Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, slated as Mimi in the March dates of Puccini’s “La Boheme.”

Running from Oct. 6 to April 6, 2013, the six-month season is heavy on serious works, with only one comedy, Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” which itself has some major international singers in German soprano Marlis Petersen and Italian bass-baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo in the title role.

Other works are:

Richard Strauss’ scorching “Elektra” opening the season in a new David McVicar production with German soprano Christine Goerke making her Chicago debut.

The first of two Verdi works, “Simon Boccanegra,” this with Thomas Hampson, Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, whose belated Lyric debut, in the title role of “Boris Godunov,” was a hit of the current season, and Bulgarian soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, a soloist in Riccardo Muti’s critically acclaimed 2011 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert performances of Verdi’s “Otello,” makes her house debut.

A new Francisco Negrin production of Massenet’s “Werther” with area native and local favorite Matthew Polenzani making his role debut opposite French mezzo Sophie Koch, who has won acclaim as Charlotte, in her Lyric debut.

The winter holiday offering, Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” revives the dark but highly effective Richard Jones productionn, last seen in the 2001-02 season. Freud is particularly excited about this revival because he commissioned it when he was chief at Welsh National Opera (before taking the top job at Houston Grand Opera), and “it was the first opera I ever saw, as a boy at Sadler’s Wells” in his native London.

Popular soprano Ana Maria Martinez will sing the initial “Boheme” dates in a production from San Francisco that’s new to Chicago. Greek-American tenor Dimitri Pittas and Maltese sensation Joseph Calleja share Rodolfo’s role and Ryan Center alum Elizabeth Futral takes on her first Musetta.

Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg” gets a new production with James Morris, Johan Botha, rapidly rising Ryan alumna Amanda Majeski and Bo Skovhus leading the cast.

The other Verdi, “Rigoletto,” brings three awaited Lyric debuts from European singers: Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber and Serbian Zeljko Lucic sharing the title role and Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova as Gilda.

Fleming’s Blanche DuBois is joined in the aforementioned “Streetcar,” which will receive a theatrical but black-box treatment with the Lyric Orchestra onstage, by Ryan alum Susanna Phillips as Stella, New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes debuting here as Stanley Kowalski, and tenor Anthony Dean Griffey returning to the part of Mitch, which he created in the opera’s world premiere at SFO in 1998.

Lyric music director Andrew Davis conducts the season’s three first works (“Elektra,” “Boccanegra” and “Werther”) and then returns for “Meistersinger.” Stephen Lord of Opera Theater of Saint Louis returns for “Pasquale,” and two young American conductors will debut: Ward Stare for “Hansel and Gretel,” and Freud protege Evan Rogister for “Rigoletto” and “Streetcar.” Popular French conductor and regular Netrebko collaborator Emmanuel Villaume has the “Boheme.”

A complex array of raised, lowered and frozen ticket prices results in an over-all subscription price increase of only 2.5 percent, but with substantial savings available to all subscribers and lowered prices for some main floor and balcony seats. Family tickets will be offered for the first time, for “Hansel and Gretel”; a first-time college and university performance of “Streetcar” will have a $20 ticket price for the understudy cast.

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).