The Metropolitan Opera, an early champion of Don Carlo in its original five-act format, didn’t get around to performing Verdi’s glorious grand opera in the original French until last year. This year, the company has reverted to an Italian translation and junked the work’s original Act One for the first time since 1979. Meanwhile, here’s the Lyric Opera of Chicago embarking on its first five-act Don Carlos in the original French—oddly enough in a production by the ubiquitous David McVicar, but not the David McVicar production concurrently running at the Met. The tenor Joshua Guerrero, heartrending as Macduff in Lyric’s otherwise pedestrian Macbeth last season, takes the title role, which calls for his type of eloquence in spades. —Matthew Gurewitsch