Glimmerglass this season is still all talent, but no intermission
Things will be different in the new season of the Glimmerglass Festival, which starts on Thursday, July 16, and runs through Aug. 17, and the pandemic is the reason why. There’s a new outdoor stage, the performance times have changed (11 a.m. or 6 p.m.), and social distancing protocols remain in effect for seating. What's the same is a thoughtful and varied program of musical works for the stage performed by a live orchestra with great singers aplenty, including operatic stars bass baritone Eric Owens, soprano Isabel Leonard, tenor William Burden and mezzo Denyce Graves.
While at least two out of the three main operas of the season — Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and Offenbach’s “La Perichole”— are known and beloved, each will be presented in new ways. First, every program of the season is designed to last just 90 minutes with no intermission (so as to prevent excessive contact between patrons). Besides the operas there will be an all-wagner program, a Broadway style revue, and a new music theater piece about the National Negro Opera Company.
Besides the reduced running times, each of the operas is undergoing some conceptual shifts away from the familiar time frame or story line. The most significant changes are being made to the Offenbach, which has been renamed “Songbird.” It will be performed in a new English translation by Kelley Rourke with the action set in 1920s New Orleans during Mardi Gras. A new jazz inflected orchestration by James Rowe should add to the Southern flavor. The romantic leads will be performed by Leonard and Burden, who were slated to be the resident artists last summer.
In “Magic Flute,” there will be an expanded role for Sarastro the high priest played by Owens. A similar shift in character focus will come in “Trovatore,” with a new emphasis on the strong but long suffering character of Azucena, played by mezzo Raehann Bryce-davis. The idea didn’t come out of the blue; Verdi’s original plan was to call the opera “Azucena.”
This kind of rejiggering of the classics, though despised by purists, is a common practice in the opera world (much more so in Europe than in the U.S. actually) and it’s a long-established tradition in Cooperstown. But rest assured that the most beloved musical moments of these operas won’t be left on the cutting room floor, to use a film term. “Travatore” will still feature the Anvil Chorus, and the Queen of the Night will still have her big aria in “Magic Flute.”
“Reimaging ” is the word Rourke uses to describe the new Glimmerglass format as well as the shifting perspective of classics generally. As an all-around dramaturge, translator, and librettist, Rourke was part of the team that planned this year’s season. The process took place during a series of meetings via Zoom that were led by general and artistic director Francesca Zambello and included music director Joseph Colaneri, and choreographer Eric Sean Fogel.
“We discussed what art do we want to do and what can we do safely, given our best guess at what the future would look like. Francesca said if nothing else let’s have great singing, that’s priority number one,” says Rourke. “We always began by looking at the score and deciding what are the moments people are looking for and which arias and ensembles are essential.”
Rourke has been contributing to the work of Glimmerglass
since 1994 when she started in the titles department responsible for the English translations projected above the stage.
“My academic training was as a musician. I knew pretty quickly that I’m not a performer but I wanted to stay in music,” says Rourke. “Writing and language have always been interests and one thing led to another.”
One of her first opportunities to translate an opera for actual singing and not just reading came through Jonathan Miller, the late British stage director who worked regularly at Glimmerglass. In a production for the English National Opera, Miller made a typically cheeky but also radical transfer of Donizetti’s “Elixir of Love” to the American Southwest during the 1950s. “They hired me to translate not into English but into American,” says Rourke.
During the years when Glimmerglass was run by Paul Kellogg, who died in April at age 84, associate artistic director John Conklin gave Rourke the official title of dramaturge. “He acknowledged I was already doing the job, working closely with the artistic process,” recalls Rourke.
Every season Rourke’s facility with words and ideas comes through in a variety of channels. She’s written the titles for countless productions and regularly edited and contributed to the 100-page program book. By the way, there won’t be any keepsake volume this year because the new edition will be virtual. No paper programs means less chance of viral transmission.
At least half a dozen English translations by Rourke have been performed on Glimmerglass stages including “King for a Day,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” and “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Sometimes her contribution to what’s onstage is small but meaningful.
When the company produced its first musical, “Kiss Me Kate,” she added a few operatic verses to the crowd-pleaser “Brush up your Shakespeare” (“Brush up your opera, feast on the food of amour...”).
In the Zambello years, there’s been a new emphasis on operas for families and Rourke has been central to that effort as well, writing librettos for four new children’s operas. These include a charming environmentalist take on “Robin Hood” with music by Ben Moore, and most recently “The Jungle Book” with composer Kamala Sankaram, which is expected to debut next summer.
Though she got her start at Glimmerglass, Rourke’s work has a growing presence that reaches far beyond Otsego County. Each of her children’s operas has been taken up by other troupes and down in Manhattan in December the Metropolitan Opera’s holiday presentation for families is going to be a 90-minute version of Massenet’s “Cendrillon” in a new English translation by Rourke.
“One of my strengths is that I’m a musician and can examine and understand each composer’s language. I don’t hear melodies, but I have a sense of musical movement or textures like a march or a waltz,” says Rourke.
Before she sends a translation out the door and into the world, Rourke sits down at the piano and sings it through, start to finish. “We’ve all heard translations that don’t work and people say English is a terrible language for music. Well, tell that to Rodgers and Hammerstein.”