Not Every Rake Is Rescued

POOR TOM RAKEWELL! He’s a lazy fellow looking for easy money, trying to hang onto his fiancée Anne Trulove even as her father disparages his indolence. He makes a wish; the wish comes true. He has fallen into a fortune. And fallen is the word: The fortune comes with devilish strings attached. 

Adrian Kramer as Tom Rakewell, Marc 
Webster as Trulove, and Lydia Grindatto 
as Anne Trulove. Photo credit: Kayleen 
Bertrand/The Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival debuted its first-ever production of Stravinsky’s only opera, and it’s a knockout. Adrian Kramer is a Tom who manages to be endearing in spite of his obvious self-involvement; Lydia Grindatto beautifully sings the rather thankless role of Anne, the role having been here written more as a 1950s TV wife than a 1730s bawd. But it’s Aleksey Bogdanov, as the evil, delightful Nick Shadow who steals the show. He almost can’t help it: villainous baritones usually are the most charismatic of the cast, but Bogdanov brings an extra dimension of vocal agility to his performance, to my ears edging out the Shadows I grew up hearing on recordings (viz., Mack Harrell, John Reardon, and Samuel Ramey).

William Hogarth’s series of eight paintings known collectively as “The Rake’s Progress” were completed in 1734 and immediately followed by a series he made of nearly identical engravings, the better for public distribution. It’s essentially an eight-panel cartoon strip, each panel advancing the plot of the decline of Tom Rakewell (as he was named in the series) alongside busy visual commentary driving home the attendant moral message. Eighteenth-century England reveled in misbehaving and then regretting such behavior; Hogarth’s satiric paintings thus were greatly popular.

Back to the Land

YOU’RE SAVVY ENOUGH to wish to dine responsibly. You visit farmers’ markets in season; perhaps you cultivate a vegetable plant or two. You’ve restructured your personal menu to allow those vegetables more opportunity to shine, and you may even be paying the price for locally sourced meat. Or you’re on the brink of discovering all this, and would like to know where to begin.

Let me recommend Origins Café. Located in the wilds of Cooperstown, New York, far enough from the village to bring nothing baseball-related into view, this seasonal restaurant has been successfully operating for 14 years. And if you didn’t know that everything they serve is carefully chosen and good for you, you’d be lulled into enjoying it as just another fine restaurant.

It was founded by sisters Kristen and Dana Leonard, who grew up on this property. “Forty-two years ago, our parents started a little greenhouse here,” says Kristen, “basically a small nursery in a little hoop house in a place that evolved to be the café. We literally grew up there, in a little crib in the corner of the greenhouse. And then like anyone who grows up in a small town, you want to get out and travel as much as you can. So we went off to school and studied environmental sciences. And that's actually how we got into food. It was through more of an environmental sustainability lens.”

A House of Her Own

PUBLISHED IN 1984, the novel The House on Mango Street became a best-seller for author Sandra Cisneros, selling over six million copies and becoming a classic for readers in casual and academic settings. It’s an episodic books, its 44 chapters running anywhere from a sentence or two to several pages, the first-person account of a 12-year-old Chicana living in a changing Chicago neighborhood.

The 2025 Glimmerglass Festival world premiere 
production of "The House on Mango Street." 
Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/
The Glimmerglass Festival

The tone of each story is provocative but charming at the start; soon darkening as the stories proceed. We follow Esperanza, the narrator, as she comes to terms with evolving social and sexual challenges. How does a book that’s become a schoolroom classic translate to the opera stage? As we learned from its world premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival, it couldn’t be more timely and compelling. 

Cisneros, who co-wrote the libretto with composer Derek Bermal, preserves her slyly evocative literary style, in which a simple description can be colored by an unexpected simile or metaphor. “Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke,” runs one description; “At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth,” is another. The novel presents as a memoir; the opera turns it into a memory play.

Art Isn’t Easy

THE 1985 PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING MUSICAL “Sunday in the Park with George” makes its Glimmerglass Festival debut in a handsome, enthusiastic, but flawed production. It inspired the theme of the current season, “The Art of Making Art,” which is drawn from a lyric in the show.

An amazing cast fuels this production. John Riddle and Marina Pires carry the show through two challenging acts, and though I detected some first-night nerves at the top of the opening-night performance, they quickly settled into the world of the piece with virtuosic aplomb. Riddle is George. In Act One, he’s the painter George Seurat; Act Two returns him as the painter’s (fictional) great-grandson, also named George, who is an artist using laser technology.

John Riddle as George and Marina Pires as Dot (far R) 
with the ensemble. Photo by Brent DeLanoy/
The Glimmerglass Festival.

Pires is Dot, the audaciously named model who adores George but bristles at his offhand treatment of her. She and Riddle carry the bulk of the musical numbers, alone or in duet; a lively ensemble picks up the rest.

Inspired by George Seurat’s pointillistic painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the first act follows the obsessive artist’s challenge of capturing an idyllic pastoral scene on an oversized canvas as he splits his time between plein-air sketching on the island itself and applying, in his studio, the thousands of colored dots that make up the work.

The Desire That We Love

JEALOUSY AND DESIRE: Two emotions that provoke nearly all the pain we suffer and the pain we inflict. Each is a confluence of component emotions, making them hard to put into self-aware words. But they’re easily reflected in music, the abstract nature of which carries it deep into our emotional core. Put words to that music and the feelings those words provoke become much more compelling. 

Greer Grimsley as Baron Scarpia, Kellan Dunlap as Spoletta, 
Yongzhao Yu as Mario Cavaradossi, with Jabari Lewis and 
William Predmore, members of the ensemble. 
Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival

Puccini’s “Tosca” was criticized by its premiere critics for being too haphazard in structure, too ghastly in subject matter, and even too musically ugly. Wrote a Boston critic: “The composer shows a well-nigh diabolical ingenuity in massing together harsh, ill-sounding timbres.” Added the New York Sun: “Both eye and ear are often offended by the consecutive fifths, raw harmonic progressions, and alterations of the tawdry with the solemn.” And a London critic concluded: “Should this opera prove popular it will scarcely indicate a healthy or creditable taste.”

Blues with a Feeling

MANY OF THE SONGS we choose to sing spring to our lips because they’ve been drilled into our brains by corporate profit-fueled repetition, clogging airwaves and streaming channels. But there are other songs, songs that speak to our dreams and disappointments, songs that offer reassurance. Those are songs we have to seek out, parting the waves of noise to get to these underheard jewels.

Annie, Hannah, and Jonny Rosen
Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Those are the songs that Annie Rosen sings. She offers her selections in a carefree manner, but it’s clear that she’s living the material, drawing from it a power and joy that help shepherd each song into the hearts of her hearers. In one way, it’s the work of a mystic. In another – and this is probably what her Caffè Lena audience felt – it’s a rollicking good time.

Annie and the Hedonists is a family group, anchored by Annie and her husband, guitarist Jonny Rosen; many of the other performers have been working with them long enough that it wouldn’t surprise me to see them together at the Thanksgiving table. And there was a special guest vocalist at this particular show – daughter Hannah, who sang with her mother on “Here in California,” a Kate Wolf song, to the accompaniment of Dad’s guitar. 

O, Say: Can You See?

Happy Independence Day. As we continue to move through the most fraught, dangerous era in American history, let me offer some advice culled from Timothy Snyder’s excellent and more-appropriate-than-ever book “On Tyranny.” (Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2017). I recommend that you buy a copy for yourself as a handbook for the resistance that is so badly needed today.

                                                                                                  

Defend institutions: It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

Beware the one-party state: The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

Be wary of paramilitaries: When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the
system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Stand out: Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.