Two for the Road; It's Worth the Trip to Cooperstown to Savor a Trio of Winners at Glimmerglass Opera

Summary

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Some productions require more of audiences than others. Most demanding is the rarified pleasure of Benjamin Britten's last work, 1973's Death in Venice, based on the Thomas Mann novella, and directed by former Syracuse Stage artistic head Tazewell Thompson. Still an acquired taste, although more accessible to the Verdi/Puccini sensibility, is Francois Poulenc's one-act La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), based on Jean Cocteau's one-woman play about a desperate phone call to a lost lover. Paired with Poulenc, Jules Massenet's lightweight Le Portrait de Manon almost seems a summer parfait, but it will have more resonance with audiences already familiar with Massenet's full-length Manon, written 10 years earlier.

Compared with these, the remaining 2005 productions look as though they could give pleasure to the widest audiences: One boasts the 19th century's most famous mad scene and the other is a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart comedy. But this mad soprano in a nightgown sings not in Gaetano Donizetti's 1835 Lucia di Lammermoor, one of the most popular of all operas, but rather in Lucie de Lammermoor, a considerably different vehicle Donizetti wrote four years later for an 1839 Paris opening. And while Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte (1790) has appeared at Glimmerglass before in a 1993 production, it comes across as more piquant than the beloved Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute. The title, "Women are like that," teases misogyny, and no less than Ludwig von Beethoven found Cosi fan Tutte to be excessively naughty.

In Glimmerglass' production of this libretto, the male singing roles are bound to be less rewarding. Take the love duet in Act I where tenor [Raul Hernandez] reaches impressive high As and Cs, but [Sarah Coburn]'s soprano springs up to high Ds and Es. The storyline also sabotages Hernandez in the second act when his Edgard is supposed to lose some of his vocal power when overcome by guilt. [Earle Patriarco]'s robust, sonorous villain sets a menacing tone early in the first act. Also darkly shaded is the bass-baritone of Craig Phillips as Raymond, an ambiguous clergyman.

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Two for the Road; It's Worth the Trip to Cooperstown to Savor a Trio of Winners at Glimmerglass Opera

It's the 31st summer season with consistently packed houses. Since 1975 Glimmerglass Opera of Cooperstown has drawn audiences from farther afield than any company in The New Times' purview, but you'd hardly say it has a winning formula. Oh, yes, excellent singers, often young rising stars, and edgy, inventive productions, usually of the most arresting that we cover, including those at the beloved Shaw Festival of Ni...

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