OPERA WEEKEND ARRIVES ‘Flute,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Cato,’ ‘Candide’ Performed Lakeside This is one of two summer weekends when all four of the Glimmerglass Festival’s productions are performed in the Alice Busch Opera Theatre on Otsego Lake. Below are reviews of this year’s productions by Pat Thorpe for The Freeman’s Journal (Cooperstown’s newspaper) and Hometown Oneonta, allotsego.com’s sister publications. New Mozart ‘Flute’ ‘Completely Magical’ Big Choruses Bolster Leads In ‘Macbeth’ ‘Cato’ Buoys Reputation For Baroque ‘Candide’ Overcomes ‘Relentless Tinkering’ Check for the SCHEDULE…
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‘Candide’ Overcomes ‘Relentless Tinkering’ Review By PAT THORPE for www.allotsego.com The musical “Candide,” now in a glittering production at the Glimmerglass Festival, is one of Broadway’s favorite death and resurrection stories. When it opened in 1956, it boasted a roster of bold-face talent: Tyrone Guthrie; Leonard Bernstein; Dorothy Parker; Richard Wilbur; Lillian Hellman. In spite of irresistible music and some of the wittiest lyrics ever to reach the stage, “Candide” closed after 73 performances. In 1974, with a rewritten book…
Big Choruses Bolster Leads In ‘Macbeth’ Review by PAT THORPE for www.allotsego.com I prefer Shakespeare to all dramatists,” wrote Guiseppe Verdi. Verdi knew the plays intimately, and that knowledge suffuses three of his greatest operas. “Macbeth,” Verdi’s 10th opera, was his first attempt to translate Shakespeare and a success from its earliest days. The opera is remarkably true to the original, but one of the most dramatic changes is evident even before the curtain goes up on this new production by…
New Mozart ‘Flute’ ‘Completely Magical’ Review by PAT THORPE for www.allotsego.com “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni,” “Cosi fan Tutti” – in five years, Mozart and collaborator Lorenzo Da Ponte produced one hit show after another and changed the shape of opera forever. But by 1791, Da Ponte was gone and Mozart began working with friend and fellow Freemason Emmanuel Schikaneder on a comic fairy tale for the general public, not just the Viennese elite, a return to the singspiel…
Seward Obtains $300,000 To Update Glimmerglass COOPERSTOWN – State Sen. Jim Seward, R-Milford, this morning announced that, “at his insistence,” $300,000 is included in 2015-16 state budget to help The Glimmerglass Festival in a “significant multi-year renovation project.” Plans include restoring interior walls at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, opening up the lobby to make it more inviting, moving the box office out toward the pond, adding canopies in front and on the sides to shelter patrons from the elements,…
Glimmerglass Plans National Campaign On 40th Anniversary By LIBBY CUDMORE • The Freeman’s Journal Edition of Thursday, Dec. 18, 2014 COOPERSTOWN With the Glimmerglass Festival’s 40th Anniversary arriving, Joan Desens, director of institutional advancement, and June Dzialo, marketing director, want to make sure everyone is invited to the party. “We want to support the community that has supported us,” said Desens. The Festival was one of the relatively few local entities to receive one of Governor Cuomo’s economic-development grants Thursday,…
Glimmerglass, Bassett Help Deter Cancers By Giving Employees Wide-Brimmed Hats COOPERSTOWN – Once again this season, The Glimmerglass Festival has teamed up with the Bassett Cancer Institute and Bluemack Creative Marketing/Promotional Products to combat heat-related illnesses, sunburn and skin cancer by providing staff with wide-brimmed hats. The partnership was inspired by Bassett Cancer Institute radiation oncologist Dr. Naoyuki G. Saito, who says, “I’m a big fan of the Glimmerglass Festival and this was something easy to do that would…
OPERA REVIEWS: All 4 Productions Rolled Out At Glimmerglass Festival Cast of International Excellence In ‘Ariadne’ By ROBERT MOYNIHAN • allotsego.com Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” auf Upstate German humor? Supposedly, it doesn’t exist outside Klink’s Stalag on aging TV. An oddity of reputation is that Germany, after two murderous conflagrations, may even now be wrongly cast. Arecent book claims that most “higher things” in the U.S. came from France. Not so. Most of our higher musical culture came from…
American Tragedy, Operatic Triumph? By ROBERT MOYNIHAN • allotsego.com Too many superlatives exist in this Glimmerglass production for reservations – yet a few exist. On the positive side, the staging is brilliant – with multiple levels originally seen in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” However, this staging far surpasses them. The horrible drowning – either by murder or accident – achieves a paradox of representative horror held within emotional bounds. So does the final electrocution, awful, but contained within…
OPERA REVIEW: Glimmerglass’ ‘Carousel’ Offers Talent, Verve, Fine Conducting, Etc. By ROBERT MOYNIHAN • allotsego.com The chief excellence of this production? The young cast members, their talent and verve – with fine orchestral conducting, dancing, and vocal performances – The Hammerstein dialogue, however, must have been written on his off days, with tedious near-rhymes and banalities meant to represent “the folk.”…