UPSTATE OPERA
Glimmerglass Festival brings a wide range of offerings to Cooperstown, N.Y.,
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.—“We are the only company doing opera in Attica Prison and Versailles in the same season.”
As television’s Jack Parr used to say, “I kid you not.”
Those words came straight from the mouth of Francesca Zambello the other day, as the artistic and general director of upstate New York’s Glimmerglass Festival introduced yet another performance at the Alice Busch Opera Theater.
Zambello is a champion schmoozer. When she is not trolling the aisles, shaking hands and handing out calendars for next season, she can sometimes be seen driving a golf card to transport older patrons from the parking lot.
There is plenty of parking, since the theatre happens to sit improbably across from a small pond in the middle of the countryside outside Cooperstown.
As the comedienne Anna Russell used to say, partway through her famous analysis of the plot of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, “I’m not making this up, you know.”
Glimmerglass might just be North America’s most unlikely opera festival, a six-hour drive from Toronto and a magnet during July and August for operagoers in southern Ontario as well as northern New York.
Under Zambello, the festival has changed its pattern of four operas running in repertory to three operas plus a classic musical, and augmented it with a variety of workshops and talks (including one this summer by octogenarian U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) designed to broaden and deepen our experience of the most extravagant of art forms.
Extravagance probably reached a new high this summer with a production of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, an opera I witnessed at its Metropolitan Opera premiere 32 years ago and because of its sheer opulence thought I would never see again.
As it happens, Zambello was truly not kidding in her reference to Versailles and Attica. Each year her company performs operatic scenes at the state prison and, this year, it is also taking Corigliano’s opera to the Royal Theatre, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette deigned to be entertained.
As it further happens, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are characters in the opera, along with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, whose plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro shocked pre-Revolutionary France.
In William M. Hoffman’s libretto, the ghost of Beaumarchais falls in love with the ghost of the queen, and writes a new opera designed to change history and rescue her from decapitation
As improbability follows improbability, no fewer than 32 characters fill the stage with enough activity to animate a three-ring circus. Even by operatic standards, The Ghosts of Versailles is nutty.
But Glimmerglass pulled it off, in a production directed by Jay Lesenger, designed by James Noone (sets) and Nancy Leary (costumes), and conducted by music director Joseph Colaneri. Less opulent than its Metropolitan Opera predecessor, it still captured the madcap spirit of the piece, sending audiences away confused but smiling.
It is doubtful they left the world premiere of Blue in a similar state. A Glimmerglass commission — with music by Jeanine Tesori and libretto by Tazewell Thompson, who also directed — this is an opera of and for today, portraying a middle-class African-American family in Harlem whose police officer father loses his protester son to the gunshots of a fellow man in blue.
A direct product of Zambello’s professed desire to have opera confront contemporary issues, Blue is full of righteous anger and pathos, with singable, text-supporting music performed by a convincing, all-Black cast. And yet, as well meaning and rational as it is, Blue lacks the quality of memorability that invites a second hearing. And adding an uplifting epilogue looking back on a moment of family reconciliation seems both gratuitous and dramatically anticlimactic.
It is nevertheless works like Blue that reflect the urgency felt by some opera companies in the United States and Canada to get with it, to take opera out of the museum and into the street, and as such represents a healthy developing trend.
So which opera this season drew the biggest audience response? La Traviata, of course. Dating all the way back to 1853, Verdi’s tale of the tragic love affair between a courtesan and a young man of good family retains a secure place in the repertory because it is so profoundly memorable.
Zambello’s new co-production (with Washington National Opera, the Atlanta Opera, Seattle Opera and Indiana University) reflected the traditional look a multi-partnered production often adopts, with the requisite period details and fidelity to the text’s meaning.
In much of Europe nowadays, this would have been characterized as a highly conservative if not downright reactionary approach and certainly not one that Zambello herself always adopts. Her approach to staging the much more recent Show Boat (1927) turned out to be pretty traditional as well, compromised in its effectiveness by a less than scintillating cast and conductor.
All in all, then, a mixed season.