RINALDO – REVIEW OF 2023 GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

There are times when you see a production of an opera where the imagination of the director has taken such a leap that it leaves you breathless. It does not happen often but it does in Louisa Proske’s production of Handel’s Rinaldo at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York.

Rinaldo premiered in 1711 and is an opera seria that was sung by castrati. It has a plot about war, love and sorcery around 1099 during the Crusades. Briefly, the hero Rinaldo loves Almirena, the daughter of King Goffredo. The enemy is led by Argante who is told by the sorceress Armida that the only way he can win is is by capturing Rinaldo. She agrees to capture him herself and she abducts Almirena as well.

Moving on, Argante is in love with Armida and sorceress falls in love with her prisoner Rinaldo, The Christians also have a Sorcerer and, you may have guessed it, Rinaldo and Almirena are rescued and they all live happily ever after,

Handel and his librettist Giacomo Rossi call for a magic castle, a mountain, views of Jerusalem and paraphernalia that Cecil B. de Mille would have been hard put to provide.

Proske and Set Designer Montana Blanco  do away with most of that and leave it to our imagination. The opera opens in a modern hospital room with two youngsters in separate beds, One of  them is unconscious and the other one is awake and dreaming of the heroic deeds of the knights who fought in the Crusades and specifically of Rinaldo. His imagination takes flight and knights jump in through the window of his hospital room. They outfit him as a knight and we see Goffredo outfitted as a leader of the crusades. 

The cast of the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Rinaldo.
 Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival

The two youngsters become Rinaldo and Almirena. The hospital staff and visitors become the rest of the characters of the opera. The large window at the back is used as a screen for the projection of photographs and videos including a cartoon representation of the climb of Goffredo and his followers up the steep mountain to fight the sorceress, Armida. They are blown away. The Sorcerer on Rinaldo’s side arms them with injection needles  and they go back and blow the Armida side off.

The imaginative transformation of two youngsters in a hospital into the main characters of the opera and the ability to carry the whole idea to the end struck me as brilliant. The opera begins and ends in the hospital room where the hospital staff and visitors who became the medieval characters revert to their modern selves.

The staging and directing are accompanied by some extraordinary singing. The production boasts three countertenors. Even in Handel’s time, the castrati who sang the major male roles were rotated by undamaged singers but for this production Glimmerglass found three outstanding countertenors. Rinaldo is sung by Anthony Roth Costanzo who has a delicate physique and a voice of surpassing beauty and versatility that manages all the trills with utter ease.  The same high praise belongs to countertenor Kyle Sanchez Tingzon  who sings Goffredo as well as countertenor Nicholas Kelliher who sings the smaller role of Sorcerer.

Peter Murphy, Kyle Sanchez Tingzon, Madison Hertel, and Anthony 

Roth Costanzo. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festiva

Jasmine Habersham sings Almirena in a fine performance. But when it comes to female characters, the show is stolen by soprano Keely Futterer as the sorceress Armida. Dressed in black and accompanied by three Furies dressed completely in black, she plays up the role and manages magical appearances and disappearances as Almirena. A robust and vocally accomplished performance.

Bass-baritone Korin Thomas-Smith sings Argante, the leader of the “other side’ who is in love with Armida. Fine, resonant voice and superb performance.

I make no secret of my admiration of Louisa Proske’s imaginative treatment of the opera. But in all fairness, I should mention that there was a production of Rinaldo at Glyndebourne in 2011 that bears some resemblance to Proske’s It was directed by Robert Carsen and it set in an English private school where the students take on the roles of the opera. It is not as well thought through as Proske’s and the singers are more conventional. But that production is more Monty Python’s Spamalot than Handel.

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Rinaldo George Frideric Handel is being performed five times between July 28 and August 17, 2023, at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, New York. www.glimmerglass.org

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press

CANDIDE – REVIEW OF 2023 GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

The Glimmerglass Festival has chosen to revive Francesca Zambello’s 2015 production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide for this season. It is an unwieldy and at times difficult work to produce but Zambello managed to bring it together as a well-done satire and opera that thrilled the audience.

It is a robust, fast-moving, colourful and very well-sung production that almost zips you through all the plot complications to the final philosophical conclusion that the work is all about. You may not follow every detail, especially the philosophical backdrop  but you should enjoy the overall production.

And, yes, Candide has a serious philosophical underpinning that is presented through biting satire and comedy. On the more earthy level, there is murder, rape, war, pillage, robbery and a few other such happenings in human life that are a part of the comic operetta. It is based on a novella by Voltaire, after all.

Dr. Pangloss lives in Westphalia with the un-aristocratic Candide (Brian Vu) who loves Cunegonde (Katina Galka), the aristocratic daughter of the Baron of Westphalia (Carlos Ahrens). A commoner loving an aristocratic lady is verboten and Candide is summarily thrown out of Westphalia. Cunegonde joins him. Thus begin his travels around the world. He meets colourful and evil characters and goes through dramatic events in places like Bavaria, Montevideo, Paraguay, El Dorado and Venice. Cunegonde is with him but they are  separated and she is raped by soldiers during a war, he is flogged almost to death and I will not bore you with all the cruelties and examples of inhumanity that the operetta contains. Remember that the intent is a comic and satirical view of human conduct and institutions.

The novella and the comic opera are in the style of a picaresque work that depicts the adventures of a hero like Candide covering numerous episodes across many venues.

Brian Vu as Candide and Katrina Gulka as Cunegonde. 
Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival.

During the travels and various encounters, there is music and numerous songs, of course. Bernstein’s compositions from the now-famous overture to the incidental music to the songs are brilliant, muscular, lyrical, frequently demanding and a feast for the ear. 

The cast is led by actor Bradley Dean, a man of the theatre, who takes on the roles of Voltaire as the host and as Dr. Pangloss, the wise companion of Candide. He is charismatic and a vivacious raconteur who gives a splendid performance.

Candide is the eternal optimist who believes all is done for the good. Yes, we do live in the best of all possible worlds and no facts or disasters can dissuade him from that conviction. Needless to say, it’s all a joke.  Bernstein makes serious vocal demands on Brian Vu as Candide and he performs brilliantly. The same applies to Katrina Galka as Cunegonde who scales her high notes effortlessly and gives us a very admirable heroine.

The 2023 production of Candide. Photo credit:

 Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival.

Our heroes do give as well as take punishment. Dr. Pangloss is sentenced to death and Cunegonde to flogging. She is “shared” by the Grand Inquisitor (Ryan Johnson) and Don Issacar but they are both killed by our stars. The same thing happens to Maximillian when he objects to Candide marrying Cunegonde. Sweet revenge. 

As I said, Candide is based on Voltaire’s 1759 novella. The musical/opera based on it opened on Broadway in 1956 with music by Leonard Bernstein and libretto by Lilian Hellman. It didn’t really work. Since then, it has gone through head-spinning changes and revisions. The Glimmerglass production credits Hugh Wheeler for the book and Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John la Touche, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Leonard Bernstein for the lyrics.

The current revival of Francesca Zambello’s 2015 production is a lively and colourful Candide that flowed reasonably smoothly despite its unwieldy plot and far too many twists and turns. Eric Sean Fogel’s revival with set designs by James Noone  and costume designs by Jennifer Moeller gives us a coherent and well-sung production. Joeph Colaneri conducts the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra and Chorus.

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Candide by Leonard Bernstein et. al. opened on July 8 and will be performed twelve times until August 20, 2023, at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, New York. www.glimmerglass.org 

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greel Press

LA BOHÈME – REVIEW OF 2023 GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

The Glimmerglass Festival came to life in 1975 with four performances in the auditorium of Cooperstown High School. Things picked up after that modest start and in 1987 it constructed the Alice Busch Opera Theatre along the shore of Otsego Lake, in the beautiful rolling countryside a few miles from Cooperstown. Yes, that is the one-street town that is famous for the Baseball Hall of Fame and one street full of stores selling baseball memorabilia.

The opera that was produced in the high school auditorium was Puccini’s La Boheme, which happens to be one of this year’s offerings in the 1200-seat Alice Busch Opera Theatre and not in the high school auditorium.

The current production, conducted by Nader Abbassi and directed by E. Loren Meeker, is a pleasure to watch, moving, well-sung, on superb sets. It is pure Bohème without directorial high jinks. Meeker knows the opera well. She directed the original 2016 production at the Glimmerglass Festival and had it set in the Paris of the colourful Belle Epoque of Toulouse Lautrec.    

What do we want? Give us a Mimi that will make Rodolfo  (and us) fall in love with her while searching for her key and make him and everyone in sight bawl in the final scene when she dies. Soprano Teresa Perrotta steps onto the stage to achieve all that. She is a young singer who won the 2023 Grand Final of The Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. That propelled her into some minor roles until she was cast as Mimi for the Glimmerglass Festival production. 

Teresa Perrotta as Mimi and Joshua Blue as Rodolfo.

Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festiva

She has a sweet and affecting voice that makes us love her and cry for her, and root for her when she describes her status as a poor but hard-working and virtuous young woman. She wants her candle lit by Rodolfo, she loses her key and tells us so delicately “Mi chiamano Mimi.” Perrotta carries us along Mimi’s love story, her distress and her fortitude when she separates from Rodolfo with no ill will.

What about Rodolfo, the poor, passionate poet, living in a cold garret in Paris who falls in love with Mimi deeply and forever and leaves her shortly after that.  Tenor Joshua Blue has been around the operatic block a few times and is climbing the artistic ladder with what seems to be a handsome and firm voice. Rodolfo has some fine moments and needs some high notes to express passion, pain and regret. He succeeds superbly. Puccini and his librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa make him look like a jealous cad who abandons Mimi when he realizes she is seriously ill. But he is no cad. He separates from her because he cannot provide for her. He leaves her so she can find someone who can look after her. A superb performance by Blue.

Rodolfo’s garret mate and two friends do not always get the notice and appreciation that they deserve. True, they are relatively minor characters but they make a significant contribution to the opera. 

The cast of 2023's Glimmerglass Festival production of 

La bohème. Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival

I tip my hat to them and endow them with kudos. We have Darren Lakeith Drone as Marcello, the painter; Justin Burgess as Schaunard, the musician and Nan Wang as  Colline the philosopher along with Rodolfo, of course. Under Meeker’s direction, they make the friendship appear real through thick and thin. They can laugh and find fun in their poverty and stand with Rodolfo and Mimi in her last moments. Fine vocal performances by all.

Kevin Depinet’s sets are perfect for the production. The garret set is a reflection of the artists’ wherewithal, the scene at the Café Momus is colourful, full of activity and carnival joy.

Nader Abbassi conducts the Glimmerglass Orchestra, Chorus and Youth Chorus with vivacity and superb playing.         
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La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini (music) and Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (libretto) opened on July 7 and will be performed thirteen times until August 19, 2023, at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, New York. More information at: www.glimmerglass.org

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press

ROMEO AND JULIET – REVIEW OF 2023 GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

The Glimmerglass Festival on the shore of Otsego Lake in upstate New York is at it again with its wonderful productions of operas in an idyllic setting. In its classic format, the Festival offers five productions this summer, namely La Boheme, Candide, Rinaldo and  The Rip Van Winkles, a new opera commissioned by the Festival. An Evening With Anthony Roth Costanzo and Love & War, a program of Cladio Monteverdi madrigals are two bonus performances.

Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet gets a superb production, directed by Simon Godwin and conducted by Joseph Colaneri. It is a modern-dress production, beautifully designed and judiciously directed with attention to detail with superb playing by the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra.

Librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré were faithful to Shakespeare’s text subject to making cuts to allow the opera to be performed in less than three hours with one intermission. It is sung in French but we do get some of Shakespeare’s memorable lines in the English surtitles.

The singing was very good with some superb performances. Tenor Duke Kim was agile vocally and physically as Romeo. He showed versatility and displayed Romeo’s passion and despair with fervour and gave an all-around enjoyable performance.

Juliet was sung by soprano Magdalena Kuzma, a young and developing singer who showed some fine vocalizing. However, her vocal strength was more apparent when she showed conviction and defiance rather than when she expressed love and passion. I felt that her voice may be more suitable for dramatic soprano roles rather than the lyrical quality that is more suitable, indeed essential for Juliet.  

Magdalena Kuźma (above) as Juliet and Duke Kim as Romeo.
Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival

Bass-baritone Stefano de Peppo as Lord Capulet starts the opera with the joyous aria “Allons! jeunes gens!” inviting the guests at his party to have fun. It is an ironic opening to an opera that will end in utter tragedy. De Peppo’s performance is marvelous as a forthright singer and Juliet’s father.

Baritone Olivier Zerouali (Mercutio), another young singer, had the opportunity to display his versatility and showmanship especially in “Mab, reine des mensonges” and he did with pizazz.

Bass Sergio Martinez sang Friar Laurence with sonority and a beautiful display of decency. Contralto Meredith Arwady plays Gertrude, better known as the Nurse, as a comic and upfront character that is quite enjoyable.

The set by Dan Soule is superb in its effect and versatility. It consists of several moveable pieces that at first show the aristocratic house of the Capulets. A grand staircase can be seen and a balcony. The pieces are moved around for the balcony scene, the street scene, Friar Laurence’s cell, Juliet’s bedroom etc. Efficient and effective without ostentation.

 

(L to R) Magdalena Kuźma as Juliet, Stefano de Peppo as 

Count Capulet, and Meredith Arwady as Gertrude. 

Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival

Director Simon Godwin is a man of the theatre who has directed many Shakespeare plays including Romeo and Juliet for the stage. His sense of theatre serves him well in directing this production. The various scenes are handled meticulously and with Choreographer Jonathan Goddard the fight scenes are done splendidly.

The masked party of the opening scene gives the impression that the costumes may be some adaptation of sixteenth century attire. In the subsequent scenes the actors wear modern clothes which work just fine for the production.

The Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra shone under the baton of Joseph Colaneri  

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Romeo and Juliet by Charles Gounod opened on July 15 and will be performed in repertory seven times until August 19, 2023, at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, New York.  www.glimmerglass.org

James Karas is the Senior Editor - Culture of The Greek Press