Glimmerglass brings true opera rarity to stage
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.— They called it the Calais Jungle, a jumble of forcefully dismantled refugee camps that had threatened recently to turn the French port city into a disaster zone.
Seven centuries earlier, during the Hundred Years War, the city experienced a parallel tragedy when the English forces of Edward III commenced a year-long siege. That siege has been replicated in Cooperstown, N.Y this summer by the Glimmerglass Festival through a rarely performed Donizetti opera titled, appropriately enough, The Siege of Calais.
Only the Calais that materialized on the stage of the Alice Busch Opera Theatre looked more like a refugee zone of today, with soldiers in fatigues brandishing automatic rifles, than an evocation of the bows and arrows days of 1346.
The reason has to do with Francesca Zambello’s belief in the “contemporary resonance” of the 14thcentury story told in Donizetti’s opera.
In her active international career (including seven seasons as the general director of Glimmerglass) she has frequently contemporized historically set operas with, to my mind, sometimes questionable benefits.
At the same time, what passionate opera lover would be unwilling to brave the six-hour drive from Toronto to a jewel box opera house in the middle of a country field bordering Lake Otsego (Glimmerglass in James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales) for the chance to encounter an opera by a major composer being mounted in North America for the first time since its 1836 premiere?
Glimmerglass is like that. Every season offers a popular opera (this year, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess), a lesser known opera (Handel’s Xerxes), a classic musical (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!) and most valuably of all, a true operatic rarity.
Donizetti wrote an amazing 60odd operas, driving himself insane in the process, and although some are very popular, most are seldom if ever performed, Zambello herself having become a champion of The Siege of Calais through directing it more than 20 years ago at Ireland’s wonderfully eccentric Wexford Festival.
Her enthusiasm for the score is understandable. Written a year after the mega-hit, Lucia di Lammermoor, it is full of splendid ensemble writing and to Joseph Colenari, its very able Glimmerglass conductor, it represents its composer at his peak.
Although eight different foreign countries — Canada included — were represented in the season, American artists form the backbone of the Glimmerglass company, with a Young Artists program offering both training and stage experience.
In the case of Porgy and Bess, of course, the Gershwin Estate demands an all-black cast (save for a couple of minor white characters), which is why so many companies find it difficult to program. Zambello met the challenge, mounting a handsome production with an especially fine Porgy in the South African baritone Musa Ngqungwana, even going so far as to restore the sometimes cut Buzzard Song.
Her overall theme for 2017 has been “home,” with all four main stage productions (an opera for young people, Ben Moore’s Robin Hood, and Derrick Wang’s one act supreme court fantasia, Scalia/ Ginsburg, were also presented) rooted in a sense of homeland.
I’m not a fan of Zambello’s audience-expanding decision to abandon Glimmerglass’s fourth main stage opera in favor of a musical, given the limited exposure audiences in this part of the world have to Verdi, Puccini and company, but it would be unfair to deny the vitality of Molly Smith’s production of Oklahoma!
As for Xerxes, Zambello reportedly asked director Tazewell Thompson to mount a traditional production and costume designer Sara Jean Tosetti obviously visited ancient Persia in her imagination. Still, even through Xerxes is a less vocally flamboyant opera than is the Handelian norm, some of the fresh young voices in the cast found the vocal writing a challenge.
On an $8-million (U.S.) budget, Cooperstown’s festival can hardly be expected to assemble Metropolitan Opera casts (granted, singers of the stature of Deborah Voigt do appear from time to time). All the same, the Alice Busch Opera Theatre is very nearly Mecca each summer for opera lovers in this part of the world.
This year’s performances have come to an end now and most of the festival’s 400 or so seasonal employees have begun to disperse. But plans for 2018 are well underway, with main stage productions to include Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Kevin Puts’ Silent Night and Bernstein’s West Side Story.
Time to check the gas tank?
The Alice Busch Opera Theatre is very nearly Mecca each summer for opera lovers in this part of the world