I am headed to Indianola this week for Des Moines Metro Opera’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger, a piece I recently previewed for Seen and Heard alongside the rest of the company’s festival season. There is a small irony in this trip. I spent seven years in central Iowa, four at Iowa State and three at Drake, and it was there, somewhat by accident, that I first fell for classical music and opera. Yet I never managed to see a DMMO production. Each June, as the company’s publicity machine hummed to life, I was already packing up my dorm room, headed elsewhere for the summer. The festival and I kept missing each other by weeks. This will be my first time, nearly two decades late.

Closer to home, Chicago’s summer opera scene is stirring in its usual scattered, resourceful way. Chicago Summer Opera opens its season next week. Haymarket Opera just closed a run of Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, a work rare enough that most Chicagoans will not encounter it again soon, and the company returns in the fall with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Later this summer, Chicago City Opera stages a double bill pairing Mozart’s The Impresario with Bastien und Bastienne, an appealing bit of programming that sets the composer’s satire of operatic vanity against his teenage foray into comedy. And Opera Festival of Chicago is closing out its season, having offered both La Bohème and Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, a verismo rarity.