owning and operating

The Glimmerglass Festival (what the retro among us still call Glimmerglass Opera, but hey...) and WFMT are producing a five-part podcast series called Breaking Glass, about issues of access and social engagement vis a vis the opera house (any opera house). Episode 1, Opera, Race and Social Justice, can be found on iTunes. Librettist and host Paige Hernandez and director Tazewell Thompson thumbnail the issues in round one. It's a half hour worth the listen and we look forward to more.

shiny things enhance your nest

While we're shuffling disc space and wondering how we ended up with all this bel canto on the drives, it seems like a good time to mention that the summer's Glimmerglass production of Rossini's La Gazza Ladra can be found today on any of these station streams at 1pm ET, or on KUAT at 3pm.

'glass roundup

So here we are, stumbling across the finish line and with a short breather before Fall things begin, so I thought I'd do a post-game for things that didn't get a posting when they happened. Fortunately for you, Reader, I missed a lot of things.

The main destination this year was Glimmerglass, with three of the four productions seen. The delegation skipped Boheme, from a combination of ennui, short budget, and civic-mindedness (figuring that would be the one to sell out, so they didn't need us). So that left La Gazza Ladra (billed as The Thieving Magpie, because that's how they roll out there), Sweeney Todd, and Robert Ward's opera version of The Crucible.

I've already remarked elsewhere about Magpie -- in all fairness it's a limited opera, drama-wise, with the standard Soprano Wrongly Accused bel canto plotline. The director chose to focus on the notion

The Thieving Magpie - photo Karli Cadel

of birds, so everybody got to wear feathers and behave as birds. Cute, but that's even more limited than the plotline after the first few minutes. The armchair directors in the audience were probably thinking the whole time what you might do with the notion of property ownership and the employer/employee relationship, and went reaching for their Engels when they got home. Or maybe not. But as I said before, it was really about  Rachele Gilmore, and they'll broadcast it on WQXR in November so you can hear why.

Photo: Karli Cadel

Christopher Alden's Sweeney Todd production was interesting as an attempt to bring a contemporary opera production sensibility (i.e. what should have been done with Magpie) to a musical. If the old question What's the difference between opera and musical? has an answer, perhaps it's that operas -- and perhaps opera audiences -- better withstand directorial creativity and/or hijinks. Alden's opening church hall setting, its sudden transformation into music hall comedy duo for A Little Priest, and its limited use of stage blood (not more than a gallon or two), were a challenge for some audience members -- fans of the musical armed with very specific expectations about what should happen, when, and how. Exit commentary in the stairwell afterward particularly focused on the lack of a trap door.

I can understand their point: if it's always been done that way, a director who's not going to do it that way needs to up the ante. Alden did the opposite, opting instead for a weary charwoman routinely dousing the wall with a bucket of blood she fills from a spigot. That was cute in its way, but short on impact. If Alden's intent was to undermine and critique audience expectations, I guess he succeeded.

One thing Alden's approach did accomplish is to highlight how much Sondheim's chorus is reminiscent of the chorus in Peter Grimes. If that was his intent as well, then yay, but it will have left the musicals people, who wanted their London docks and period costumes, their trap doors and their specially designed Sweeney Todd razors, all as they're used to having them.

The cast, vocally and dramatically, was pretty much the level you would expect at Glimmerglass, though Greer Grimsley's Sweeney didn't quite convey the required boiling rage under a veneer of service-economy civility -- or at least it didn't reach the nosebleeds. Sounded good, though.

Brian Mulligan, Ariana Wehr - photo Karli Cadel

The last round was Robert Ward's adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and of the three it was the only one I would have trekked out to see again had time allowed. The draw was Jamie Barton in the role of Elizabeth Proctor, but the cast overall was terrific. Librettist Bernard Stambler winnowed the action down so the focus is on the central triangle of Elizabeth, her farmer husband John, and their dismissed and vengeful ex-serving girl Abigail Williams. But Stambler left in enough of the petty-turned-deadly community squabbles to convey the larger picture Miller was getting at in the original play. (It also means a cast big enough to serve as a Young Artist showcase, and Glimmerglass' YA program has plenty to brag about.) Brian Mulligan as John Proctor and Ariana Wehr as Abigail were both rock solid, and David Pittsinger surfed Reverend Hale's quandaries with subtle shading. The highlight, though, may have been Jay Hunter Morris' thoroughly freaky Reverend Danforth -- clearly those Ahabs he's been doing of late stood him in good stead for Danforth's all-or-nothing Wrath of God MO. Francesca Zambello's production, with sets by Neil Patel, was visually arresting without getting in the way of singers or material.

The Crucible: trial scene - photo Karli Cadel

If you never knew there was an opera version of The Crucible...welp, neither did I, so I can't speak much about the score, having only heard it once. But conductor Nicole Paiement's orchestra gave the music enough punch that I wanted to hear it again. The broadcast on WQXR is November 12th.

indian summer

Among the Yay! things from the present administration of Glimmerglass can be counted the restoration of its opera broadcasts. We may be mulling cider today, and roasting squash to heat the Republic, but we'll have July and August from the speakers.

Today's Macbeth boasts Eric Owens and Melody Moore, both in role debuts, and you can catch it at 1pm ET on WQXR or at 2pm on KUAT, plus a bunch of other places. (Check their schedules, though, I'm not sure how old this list is.)

Melody Moore, Eric Owens/photo Karli Cadel

Lost in the woods near Paradox

What’s not to like about The Magic Flute…she asked rhetorically. Yes, the alleged good guys are patriarchy-imposing slave owners. Yes, opera houses will occasionally cut lines from the spoken word segments of the libretto. Yes, opera houses will deliberately mistranslate lines in the supertitles.  “But, but…we must only judge this opera by the standards of 1791!” said the opera nerd white bros of the interwebs, once upon a time.

Well, sure, let’s do that: They were absurd standards in 1791, and they remain so to this very day. There, that’s that dealt with.

You won’t find anything resembling this, um, discussion in the program notes to the Glimmerglass production, of course, because they very cleverly decided to do it in English with their own (ie Kelley Rourke’s) translation. So they could (and did) translate Schikaneder’s issues right out of existence. Can't say this made me cry.

When the overture begins, the curtain rises on Tamino, high-powered executive, in the middle of his high-stress Financial District day, besieged by hordes of suited, Burberried Wall Street denizens. You can see he is destined for a life-change.  The same life-change, in fact, that is sort of cliché in this neck of the woods, that of fleeing New York City for a less stressful life up the valley.

For most people, this means a house in Columbia County festooned with bright flood lights (as it turns out, the City That Never Sleeps makes you afraid of the dark) and a security system sign on the mailbox in place of a name (because apparently the scary locals will come and take all the stuff you brought with you if ever they learn your true name). But Tamino ends up a little farther off the charmingly unimproved path than he intended. Actually, a lot farther. (Troy Hourie’s set, with its ash and birch, and background of swamp-bound fir trees, suggests the heart of the Adirondacks.)

Not the heart of the Adirondacks.

Director Madeleine Sayet sets up a lot without necessarily making any flat-out statements.  Resolved: the problem we face is no longer the Enlightenment’s problem of benightedness vs reason, but our divorce from the natural world. Tamino, child of the vast human superstructure that supports him, his clothes, his briefcase, and his (probably) BMW, is completely lost in these woods.

Then he meets a bird-catcher. You can tell Papageno’s a local by his fashion sense: snow camo with danger-orange button-down and rabbit fur hat. Also he has the coolest socks, which he wears with Teva sandals, which is how you can tell he’s not part of the redneck Carhartt Mafia that Sarastro employs (under pelt-bedecked trapper Monastatos) to look after company property.

Sarastro, like Tamino, is a tall man in a suit and the wrong shoes for a place with no sidewalks, but he and his minions wander their pristine forest landscape in long coats that double as both acolytes’ robes and lab coats, studying the ecosystem with tablets in hand. They’re probably one of those foundations that has hundreds or thousands of acres off some back-country two-lane, with an eye-catching but inscrutable logo on a sign at the road, and beyond that, should you make a wrong turn, security cameras and a guard-house. And Sarastro probably plays golf with Bill Clinton. In short, they are more than a little creepy, in an Xfiles, “What are they doing up there really” kinda way.

The Queen of the Night and her ladies, on the other hand, are all a bit Catskills Wiccan Collective. The Q of N has long, moon-colored hair, and her ladies probably make and dye their own clothes and sell the overage to arty boutiques up in Saratoga. They can manage the woodsprites who plague Tamino. They can manage the bird-catcher Papageno, who bonds with the Q of N’s daughter over childhood enthusiasms of watching tadpoles turn into frogs and finding those cool places in the woods nobody knows about but you…if you were fortunate enough, or left to your own devices enough, to be allowed to wander into them alone from a young age.

Use your Google Glass to spot the invasive species!

Frankly, I know which crowd I’d rather hang out with. But perhaps Sayet, who is Mohegan and hails from four rivers east of here (or five, if you're counting from Glimmerglass), is saying we need both the kind of knowledge that Sarastro represents and the kind of experience the Q of N represents in order to survive. Or perhaps she’s saying we’re going to our doom at the hands of people with the wrong shoes who can’t see the world around them any other way but through high-tech interactive plastic, who knows? The forest floor is open for discussion.

Apart from the promise of the production, soprano Jacqueline Echols was my main draw for seeing this, and she didn’t disappoint as Pamina. You all should watch out for her, she’s got voice and stage presence to burn. Sean Panikkar has been around in smaller roles but key ones (The Death of Klinghoffer, Lost in the Stars). He has a pleasant tenor that was maybe a little stretched here and there, but he conveyed Tamino's cluelessness and determination equally well. Solomon Howard (Sarastro) has one of those de profundis voices, and had all the cool gravitas required of the Man.

All the other roles were filled by Glimmerglass young artists, and they gave us a lot to look forward to. Among the standouts, So Young Park’s Queen of the Night (crazy coloratura arias? not a problem), Ben Edquist’s Papageno, and Rhys Lloyd Talbot’s Speaker.

Conductor Carolyn Huan kept the pace brisk, lyrical, and sensitive to the singers. She wrote in the program notes of coming to this from Mahler, so let's hear more and bigger things from her, O Isis und Osiris. 

YA

Young Artists, that is: Theo Lebow, Deborah Nansteel, Hunter Enoch



Deborah Nansteel was a Glimmerglass Young Artist, too, not long ago, and iirc did kind of a killer O don fatale at the Young Artists recital that year. She and Theo Lebow return to Seattle next month as part of the alternate cast for Semele, and we should probably all go.

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne @ Glimmerglass, part 3

After all the discussions about women on the podium that have cropped up in the last few years, props to Glimmerglass for putting Kathleen Kelly at the wheel. Even working a reduced score with scaled-down orchestra (this theater’s pit being only so big), it’s a monster piece of noise-making that must be tricky for that size a house. Apart from a couple of points where the balance skewed a bit, Kelly kept the orchestra’s sound in shape, surfed the score’s nuances, and let the singers be heard. More big conducting gigs for her, please. 

Finally, in keeping with director Francesca Zambello's chosen setting, and presumably also as a way of heightening the divide between "high" art and "low" as represented in the work, everything is performed in English except for the Ariadne opera seria. As with last year's King for a Day (and next year's Magic Flute), the job of translating Hofmannsthal's not uncomplicated libretto fell to Kelley Rourke, Glimmerglass's dramaturg and supertitles ninja. Rourke manages to write singable verse, adhere to the intentions of the libretto and of the score without being slavish, and make it come out both musical and funny (when it needs to be), and contemporary as the production’s premise requires. (“It is quite obvious to me / that you’ve gone off your meds,” sings the Wigmaster at the Tenor in the Prologue.) At times the German/English juxtapositions play off each other, as in “Too many nights alone can really take a toll!”/”Toll, aber weise….” Clever. 

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne @ Glimmerglass, part 2

Christine Goerke, who was a Glimmerglass Young Artist once upon a time, and who is also wicked funny, by now has the Diva moves down. (It probably helped that the audience gave her big hand just for showing up on stage.) But she also managed the nuance of an artist going from not expecting much to finding herself drawn in to the Composer’s art. (The Prima Donna seems a little stunned at the huge applause she gets for Es gibt ein Reich, and looks over at the Composer with a combination of surprise, admiration, and gratitude.) At this point, coming off a tremendous success in Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met, Goerke has a voice that can more than fill Glimmerglass’s 800 seat Alice Busch Theater. It was fairly clear that she was reining in the volume at times, but we like an Ariadne with power to spare.

Ariadne no. 5 tonight. Have to sing it with Jessye Norman in the audience. #NoBigWhoop #OhMyGOD #NoPressure
— Christine Goerke (@HeldenMommy) August 8, 2014

Seriously, if she sang it like the performance before, no problem there.

Rachele Gilmore has pretty quickly become one of the go-to sopranos for the role of Zerbinetta, and with good reason. She had one of those insane Halo jump short-notice Met debuts subbing in the role of Olympia for Kathleen Kim. So it was no surprise she tossed off Zerbinetta’s coloratura without a hitch. Zerbinetta being something of a Strauss/Hofmannsthal combo of Despina and Don Giovanni, she works her way through the guys’ applications, has a brief thing with Harlequin, but it’s the Composer who turns her head. As the opera progresses, you can see her thinking maaaaaybe she’s done with the old gods.

Catherine Martin has a lush, muscular voice, and she captured the Composer’s comic lows and poignant highs in a way that makes me hope we won’t have long to wait for her Octavian.

Likewise the three nymphs, Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, seem to be a gateway to bigger things, although most of what they do in this opera is sing cosmic harmonies. Jeni Houser, Beth Lytwynec, and Jacqueline Echols were nicely aethereal together, and we’ll look forward to hearing them again individually (in Echols’s case, next year as Pamina).

On the mundane side, what the four clowns – Carlton Ford’s Harlequin, Brian Yeakley’s Brighella, Gerard Michael D’Emilio’s Truffaldino, and Andrew Penning’s Scaramuccio -- may lack in otherworldliness they made up for with Eric Sean Fogel’s fairly intricate choreography.

Strauss’s evident hatred of tenors notwithstanding, Corey Bix, oar in hand, made it across the high seas of Bacchus intact. No mean feat.

Actor Wynn Harmon was appropriately officious and dismissive as the Major Domo (“I leave it to you to work out the specifics” is probably his mantra) and Matthew Scollin’s Farmhand looked as perplexed by it all as my Montgomery County farm-owning boss when I try to explain to him that I’m blowing off work for an opera out beyond where even he lives.

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne in Naxos @ Glimmerglass, part 1

Francesca Zambello’s new production of Ariadne at Glimmerglass draws on two key features of upstate New York: first, that at some point early in its history, the people responsible for naming municipalities in the state of New York went on a Classics binge, which is how Syracuse got associated with college basketball and Ithaca with granola progressivism, Attica with prison riots and Utica with whatever Utica is associated with. The second is that, much of upstate having been since the Gilded Age a summer getaway land for wealthy, art-appreciating New York City people, a lot of art gets done in the hinterlands, not least an opera festival way out in Otsego County, in a little semi-gentrified farming town surrounded by more semi-gentrified farming towns.

So the conceit for this production is the entirely plausible idea that a wealthy estate owner has decided to have a summer entertainment put on in his barn, and to accomplish this has imported the talent to the sticks somewhere NNW of New Paltz. The barn has a fairly unreliable map of New York State painted onto it, and head shots of the principles in the scheduled opera seria pinned up next to the doors, which slide open to reveal a vintage tractor and a piano amid the hay bales. Also there are goats and a chicken. Later there will be a stage.

The Diva arrives, as we know somewhat disconcerted by what it turns out she’s being asked to do, more so in this production by where she’s being asked to do it.

Christine Goerke as Prima Donna in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2014 production of
Strauss' "Ariadne in Naxos." Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Then Zerbinetta’s troupe arrives, looking a bit like a Brooklyn punk cabaret act lured up the Thruway from the Bard Festival’s Spiegeltent.

L to R: Carlton Ford as Harlequin, Brian Ross Yeakley as Brighella, Rachele Gilmore as Zerbinetta, Gerard Michael D'Emilio as Truffaldino, Andrew Penning as Scaramuccio and Wynn Harmon as Manager of the Estate in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2014 production of Strauss' "Ariadne in Naxos." Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Chaos ensues, you know the spiel.

In keeping with the general drift of women being in control of the creative process in this production within a production (the Prima Donna, the Comedienne, the Director, and the Conductor), Zambello has tossed out the Composer as trouser role and just made the Composer a woman in trousers.

Catherine Martin as Composer in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2014 production of
Strauss' "Ariadne in Naxos."
Photo: Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival.

SPOILER: The Composer gets the girl, and so does Zerbinetta.

Catone Approximately Thirty Miles Southeast of Utica (As the Crow Flies)

Wasting no time whatsoever, Glimmerglass has announced its 2015 (and 40th anniversary) program here. Psyched for the return of baroque opera, the return of Eric Owens, the return of Melody Moore, and the return of John Conklin. Also psyched for the opportunity to hear more from Jacqueline Echols, and reasonably enthused for the idea of getting The Magic Flute lost in the woods.

sundry items

Culturebox has Théâtre du Châtelet's Einstein on the Beach from last week archived here for a good long while. 

Some cool concert stuff is housed on Trinity Wall Street's website, including this hour with BEMF regulars Robert Mealy (baroque violin) and Avi Stein (harpsichord and organ). 

Bard Summerscape's 2014 opera will be Weber's Euryanthe. Details will no doubt materialize somewhere around here at some point. 

This Digital Theatre thing is pretty excellent, in a Where have you been all my life kinda way. 

In that same vein, having had a fair success with streaming opera (we imagine), the Guardian now ventures into streaming theater: Howard Brenton's Drawing the Line, about the partition of India, is up live this Saturday at 2:30pm ET. Reviews from Guardian and Arts Desk.

For those contemplating a road trip to Glimmerglass this summer, Induction Weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame is July 25-28.  Don't pick that weekend if you need a room or restaurants within forty miles. Oh wait, they're inducting Joe Torre...make that eighty miles.

How to get to Glimmerglass

Cross the cloud-deck'd heights of V'ville

and D'burg's airy regions of light

through invading hosts of the dreaded Purple Loosestrife

- following a pickup is a good bet -

ever westward-ish

down straightways so belov'd of all New Englanders

past verdant fields dotted with cows, sheep, haystacks and homemade anti-Obama signs,

beyond the hills

and the vernacular architecture

you're there

la donna del lago

Francesca Zambello talks to the locals about the strategy behind this year's Glimmerglass season.

Update: Meanwhile, trouble down the pit.

Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report

Anthony Tommasini in the NYT thinks Jonathan Miller's CDC-approved Traviata at neo-NYCO shows some signs of life. James Jorden in the NY Post thinks it should get its affairs in order.

http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/details.asp?pid=8438

agenda