Even Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: The fourth and final opera of my Glimmerglass season was that perennial, “Pagliacci.” Often paired with “Cavalleria rusticana,” another verismo one-act opera, it was here given a delightfully different performance context, as described below.

                                                                                      

COMEDY AND DEATH GO HAND-IN-HAND. When you fail onstage, you complain that you “died.” And comedy loosens audience emotions, making us more susceptible to the effects of tragedy. I offer the finale of Chaplin’s “City Lights” as proof.

Robert Stahley as Canio.
Photo by Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera “Pagliacci” is the mother ship from which many a “laugh, clown, laugh” story emerged (including Lon Chaney’s 1928 movie “Laugh, Clown, Laugh”). The aria that ends Act One, “Vesti la giubba,” has been a favorite since the dawn of recordings, with artists as diverse as Enrico Caruso, Freddie Mercury, and Spike Jones waxing distinctive versions.

This summer’s Glimmerglass approach deconstructs the piece. First, with the festivities that precede the opera proper. Weather permitting, there’s a performance on lawn. It’s a loose-limbed commedia dell’arte show, reminding us what the onstage “Pagliacci” audience had assembled to see. And would have seen, had jealous passion not intervened. Next, with an eerie approach to the opera’s Prologue, in which Tonio (Troy Cook) wanders through a gloomy warehouse, uncovering the props and set he remembers from an ill-fated performance.

Murder and the Music Hall

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: Our third opera this summer was a recent work, “Elizabeth Cree,” commissioned by Opera Philadelphia in 2017 and here making its Glimmerglass debut. My review is below.

                                                                                 

A SERIAL KILLER IS STALKING LONDON. It’s 1880, just a few years before Jack the Ripper cuts his own swath through the city. Dan Leno is a rising star in the music halls, and has been the salvation of young Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, lately escaped from an abusive mother, now a stage star in her own right. How these stories intersect is the marvel at the heart of the Glimmerglass Festival’s brilliant presentation of “Elizabeth Cree,” a recent opera by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell.

Rear: John Chest, Tara Erraught, and Elizabeth Sutphen.
Front:  Tristan Tournaud, Evan Lazdowski, and Geoffrey
Schmelzer. Photo: Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Glimmerglass last presented the work of composer Puts and librettist Campbell in 2018, with their Pulitzer Prize-winning opera “Silent Night,” which you can read about here. Their new piece is every bit as captivating as that one.

Theater, by definition, is an unreliable medium. We’re asked to believe in the memorized words of actors placed in an artificial location presenting some manner of heightened reality. Yet we’ll respond with more emotional intensity than we give to the outside world. Add music and the pipeline to the emotions is even more intense, which is why opera is the most satisfying of the performing arts.

But it’s still unreliable. We don’t usually question that aspect, because it’s part of the pact we make with ourselves before we take our seats. But “Elizabeth Cree” will put paid to that pact.

Landed Gentry, Humble Berths

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: Here’s my review of the second of the four productions I’m seeing at the Glimmerglass Festival this summer.

                                                                               

BEFORE SONDHEIM, THERE WAS GILBERT – W.S. Gilbert, that is, he finest English-language lyricist of his era, and a dab hand at concocting the books to go with them. He was, of course, a product of his time, and the libretto he devised for the 1879 “Pirates of Penzance” overflows with the misdirections and other zany plot devices that Gilbert & Sullivan audiences adored.

Elizabeth Sutphen and Christian Mark Gibbs
as Mabel and Frederic.
Photo by Brent DeLanoy

And still adore. Familiar as the operettas may have become, Sullivan’s scores have a freshness that rewards repeated listening. So it’s a treat to see that the Glimmerglass Festival is offering its first G&S production in 20 years, and doing so with appropriate talent and energy. (If you’re interested, here’s my review of that 1994 “Patience.”)

“Things are seldom what they seem,” sings a character in a different G&S, but that observation rings true here, too. The crew of pirates we meet at the top of the show is a bunch of softies. The policemen we meet in the second act aren’t at all courageous, while the virginal maidens who egg them on turn out to be rather bloodthirsty.

Keeping in mind the Victorian-era sensibilities this story played against, there was plenty of room for social satire, in which Gilbert always gloried. Director-choreographer Seán Curran, reviving his 2013 Opera Theatre of St. Louis production, offers a dazzling festival of movement that pauses long enough to let the plot elements go by, but rarely otherwise slackening the pace.

But there is a meditative Act Two duet – “Stay, Fred'ric, stay,” “Ah, leave me not to pine” – between the sweethearts Mabel and Frederic that is the emotional heart of the piece, rendered by Elizabeth Sutphen and Christian Mark Gibbs with tug-at-your-heartstrings intensity.

For the Love of Gods

Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: We have four productions to consider in the coming days as the Glimmerglass Festival presents its 2024 season. The operas, in the order in which I’ll be seeing and reviewing them, are Cavalli’s “La Calisto,” Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” Kevin Puts’s “Elizabeth Cree,” and Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”

                                                                                          

WE PREFER to space out our big emotional moments. The frenzy of infatuation, the despair over marital betrayal, the death of a loved one – too many of them in quick succession become a waking nightmare. But what if it’s all happening to someone else? You might be inclined to enjoy the schadenfreude aspect – or, if you’re in the land of Italian opera, gioia per il male altrui. Because that’s what Francesco Cavalli’s “La Calisto” is offering: heightened passions, from unrequited love to jealous despair, from egotistical aggression to that peculiar feeling you get when you realize you weren’t actually planning to lose your virginity but, well, there it went.

Emilie Kealani (Calisto) and Craig Irvin (Jove).
Photo by Sofia Negron

The work premiered in 1651, helping define, a generation after Monteverdi, the recitative-aria form of opera that has persisted ever since. Three love triangles anchor the plot of Giovanni Faustini’s libretto, drawing from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” among other sources. And a triangle outlined by color-changing light defines the stage on which this excellent Glimmerglass Festival production plays out.

For a piece like this to be effective, it needs top-notch voices. That’s pretty much par for the course where Glimmerglass is concerned, but Baroque opera also demands an ability to explore the nuances of those vocal demands through varied tone production, ornamentation, and other period techniques. And a commanding presence doesn’t hurt – after all, you’re probably playing a god. Thus it was that Eve Gigliotti, as Juno, dominated the stage, catching her errant spouse in an unfaithful act and punishing the victim. Yet, “Mogli mie sconsolate,” she sings in a virtuoso moment – “My disconsolate women,” noting that even when married, a woman ends up beside a man who’s irritable or exhausted.

No Power, Some Glory

TUESDAY AFTERNOON the sky darkened and the wind picked up, falling right in line with the tornado warning that caused my cellphone to buzz into life. Tornado skies are different from any other, adding a feral green to the shades of grey and black. I’ve seen it a couple of times since relocating to Montgomery County, NY, 34 years ago. The view from my porch looks downhill to the Mohawk River, which is four miles away, and the river invites weather phenomena like fog and rain and, when conditions are right, twisters.

Not long after moving to this area, I drove in the wake of a small tornado (not that size really matters when the winds are that strong), foolishly piloting a VW camper-bus across the river and on into a little town called Sammonsville. I wanted an ice cream, and Sammonsville hosts a 1897-vintage general store that has specialized in home-made ice cream since long before I got here. Which is only to plead my sugar addiction as an excuse for such reckless behavior. I had heard no tornado warning, but there’s no mistaking that sky.

I was still a few miles from the store when the wind grew so malevolent that horizontal rain and blusting leaves and branches blocked my view. I pulled over. Actually, I just stopped. No road-shoulder was visible. The sounds – wind, rain, branches, leaves – were bad enough, but there also seemed to be a pressure differential that caused the walls of my van to vibrate. I was scared.

Recital by the Lake

SOPRANO MARCELLA SEMBRICH, born in Poland in 1858, made her debut in Athens at 19, singing in five demanding operas; the following year she made her Dresden debut in “Lucia di Lammermoor,” which led to a five-year contract at Covent Garden. She debuted in 1883 at the brand-new Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she created roles as the Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute,” Gilda in “Rigoletto,” Rosina in “Barber of Seville,” and many others. In all, she sang over 450 performances during her eleven seasons at the Met. After she retired in 1917, she created the vocal programs at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, as well as building a vocal studio near her summer home in Bolton Landing. That studio is now the Marcella Sembrich Opera Museum, an elegant tribute to the singer-teacher’s legacy.

Rubén Rengel and Ahmed Alom

Part of its mission is to present music, and this season’s series opened with a recital by violinist Rubén Rengel and pianist Ahmed Alom, performing in what’s essentially a large salon, a perfect venue for this kind of program. As the museum’s artistic director, Richard Wargo, explained, Sembrich knew many contemporaneous composers, among them Liszt, Brahms, and Kreisler, each of whom was represented in the programming.

Beginning with Liszt’s “Paraphrase de concert sur ‘Rigoletto,’” composed in the late 1850s. Opera arias were the pop songs of their day, and this piece followed a popular tradition of incorporating those arias into virtuoso showcases for instrumentalists.

Gone with the Moon

From the Food Vault Dept.: By the time I wrote the review of Luna 61 you see below, that restaurant had only another two years left. Chef-owners Debra and Peter Maisel moved to Burlington, VT, where they opened Revolution Kitchen – their third vegetarian restaurant together – which they ran for nine years before easing into semi-retirement. Where Luna 61 once prevailed in Tivoli, NY, you’ll find an ice-cream shop. Not quite the vegetarian cuisine I seek for nourishment.

                                                                                               

A CROWD FILLED THE SIDEWALK in front of the restaurant, a crowd that spilled into the street and seemed intent on a vintage yellow VW convertible that puttered nearby. It was an odd sight in this sleepy little town at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, but revealed itself as we walked closer to be a film crew. The shot was set, following an attractive fair-haired woman who piloted the car from its parking space.

“They’re filming something for German television,” said a woman who stood in front of the restaurant Luna 61. “Doesn’t look like she knows how to drive a stick.”

The VW lurched from its spot, stalled, was re-started and lurched again. I looked at the restaurant hours, posted on the door. “We open in about half an hour,” the woman said. “But you’re welcome to sit out here and have a drink.”

A half-dozen wooden tables sit in front of the restaurant. Although the buildings on this stretch of street are close together, the sense, as we sat, was of pleasant intimacy. Even with all those film-crew people hanging around, conversing in a mix of German and English.