The musical head of Chicago Opera Theater doesn’t look like most bigtime opera conductors. For one, Lidiya Yankovskaya turned 33 in March, which is toddlerhood for maestros. For another, she’s female, unique among major U.S. companies. More important, she rides on a new wave, bringing a repertoire that ranges from grand spectacle to electric intimacy.

COT’s season opener pairs Aleko, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s first opera, and Everest, also a first, by the contemporary composer Joby Talbot. Aleko addresses core opera themes such as love, jealousy, and murder among a band of Roma; a little-known Russian opera, it plays to Yankovskaya’s expertise of heritage — she is a native of St. Petersburg. Everest adapts Jon Krakauer’s true-adventure thriller Into Thin Air. Both are Chicago premieres, as are all COT productions this season (same as last season, Yankovskaya’s debut with the company). “There’s a great deal of new opera out there,” she says, “but I think very little of it has been seen in Chicago.”

Opera experimentalism has flourished in the past decade among a gaggle of startup companies around the city. Yankovskaya is taking that energy and injecting it into a major company. To incarnate the voice of the mountain, Everest employs a big chorus (as does Aleko), which would be a deal breaker for the kind of smaller outfit that would typically perform it. Naysayers accuse opera of resuscitating a permanent past. Here is where you can see the present.

Five More Things to See

1 Beethoven Turns 250

Oct. 13–Nov. 10
Kaisers of the keyboard pay tribute to the German titan’s birth with a nine-concert series at Symphony Center of all 32 of his piano sonatas. Three take place this fall, with the first going to Kirill Gerstein (including the “Grand Sonata”) and the next two to Rudolf Buchbinder.

2 Time of the Seasons for the CSO

Oct. 17–20
The CSO calls this program “The Four Seasons,” but it’s really eight, spanning both Vivaldi’s familiar four and the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla’s tango-entangled Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. The bold violinist Julian Rachlin both solos and conducts for all the Seasonses.

3 The U. of C. Presents Smaller Mahler

Oct. 25
The Damon-Affleck of lieder, baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber rose together from student-days obscurity to recital-circuit stardom. At Mandel Hall, they pour out introspective and intimate songs by Gustav Mahler.

4 The Baritone on Death Row

Nov. 2–22
Contemporary opera has been known as a twice-a-decade thing at Lyric Opera, but starting now, it’s every year. This heavy production adapts Dead Man Walking, the memoir of a nun who ministers to death row inmates (which was also turned into the Oscar-winning movie).

5 New-Music Miracles

Nov. 15
In the larynxes of the London chamber choir Tenebrae, new music means not bleeps and bloops but a visit to an exotic country of oblique beauty. How fitting, then, that the recently minted choral classic that will serve as the centerpiece of Tenebrae’s program at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel is titled Path of Miracles. — G.M.