Hellenic Hullabaloo

Overindulgence Dept.: It's Thanksgiving again, and, although I swore I wasn't going to spend several days in menu planning and meal preparation . . . well, you can see the menu below. And there's a slide-show of past menus here. Just don't expect this again next year.

 

Cutting Classical

From the Classical Vault Dept.: I’ve grown much more hopeful about the state of large orchestras in the 32 years since I wrote the piece below. For one thing, the survivors are holding their own. Adventurous programming has very much increased, and the efflorescence of social media and alternative music distribution systems have, so to speak, spread the word. On the other hand, as the pandemic years proved, salaries for orchestral musicians are abysmal and some of those players are hanging by a thread. As for the Albany Symphony, my daughter is now working for that outfit, so I’m glimpsing more of its viscera than had been the case before, and I like what I’m seeing. And hearing, of course.

                                                                                

WATCHING A LARGE ORCHESTRA fold up and die is like seeing a stately old mansion collapse: You know it’s irreplaceable, and that with its demise goes a taste of the era in which it was built.

In our general area, we’ve seen recent season cancellations by the Syracuse and Hartford symphonies, and the Albany and Utica orchestras are doing pretty badly. But the problem is hardly confined to this region.

And it’s hardly surprising. Federal and state arts support has long carried the burden of supporting these musical behemoths, and that support has all but dried up. The audience for these orchestras is small, and even though it comprises an area’s wealthiest, to carry the brunt of the financing would force these folks to pay, in effect, hundreds of dollars a ticket to see their favorite ensemble saw through another all-Tchaikovsky evening.

In other words, the orchestras are now being forced to confront the fact that nobody—no appreciable majority, that is—really wants to hear them. The sooner they acknowledge this and bow out of existence, the sooner classical music stands a chance of coming back to life in this country.

On the March – Again

From the Pages of History Dept.: I blog-posted the piece below more than a decade ago, by which time they had become footnotes to an admirably sane settling-in of society – or so it seemed to naive me. The forces of horrific paternalism were arming themselves, so that soon the Supreme Court could be stacked with its worst-ever appointments by our worst-ever President. And, sure enough, Roe v Wade was overturned and women are once again dying because their reproductive rights are denied. With the clown car about to pull up to the White House once again, I’m reposting this piece as a reminder that our most important duty now is to resist the hopelessness that comes with so awful a political fate as this country soon will suffer. It’s my report on the March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives that took place in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1989.
    
                                                                                               

Photo by Michael Ackerman

“FREE BARBARA BUSH!”

It became the surprise rallying cry of the march, as a crowd estimated at between 300,000 and 600,000 chanted the slogan from pedestrian-packed Pennsylvania Ave., Constitution Ave., 1st St., 3rd St. and the steps and lawn of the Capitol itself.

 The march offically began Sunday morning on the north lawn of the Washington Monument, but for many Albany-area residents, the march began late Saturday as they boarded buses sponsored by local affiliates of the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood.

At 10:30 PM, three Greyhound buses idle their engines in a parking lot at the State Office Campus. During the next few minutes the scene resembles a workday morning as car after car arrives, parks, unloads. Just as it seems that the crowd will overwhelm the bus capacity, six more buses pull in and circle the lot in formation before joining the caravan. There’s a happy sense of a picnic or vacation, but buoyed by the energy of a crowd met to fight – or, in this case, affirm. The group is varied in age, but there’s an obvious socio-economic homogeneity. These are middle-class buses, carrying a segment of society that has been accused of too much complacency during the past administration.

The Doomsters

I’VE NEVER BEEN MUCH in thrall to the doomsayers. They used to be charmingly represented in single-panel cartoons as a bearded old man hefting a sign on which is block-lettered something wittily apposite; now they’re spewing their bile over talk-radio and internet shows. They have the skills of a cult leader, offering acceptance into an elite group that welcomes you once you have accepted the terms of membership, largely a matter of understanding that the persecution you feel comes from groups you can hate.

Thomas Hardy

I’m stopped right there. I don’t feel persecuted. I have learned that those responsible for denying me access to economical housing, healthy foodstuffs, and affordable healthcare are the white male gazillionaires who have created a world for themselves in which they are safe from the regulatory laws that, in a sane society, would stop them.

But I’m now in a state of what I’m terming “anticipatory persecution.” As an elderly white male of a solidly middle-class upbringing, I’m one of those whose paths long have been smoothed by our racist, patriarchal society. Thanks to a long marriage to a financially responsible spouse, my unreliable income has been pooled into a retirement fund that should see us through our dotages. I also have access to a robust health insurance plan that keeps my ticker ticking even as my ability to walk is waning and arthritis is waxing all over the place. I figured I could age and die in relative peace.

Voice of Freedom

JEROME KERN AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN insisted that they wrote “Old Man River” with Paul Robeson in mind, which is no surprise given the way the song luxuriates in a bass-singer’s range. They began work on it in 1925; it would hit the stage two years later. Robeson’s first public performance as a singer took place in Boston in 1924, and he sang again a few months later at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The songwriters either discovered him fairly quickly, or got to know his voice by way of the many private recitals Robeson had been giving  during the preceding years.

His father was a former slave who became a Presbyterian minister; his mother a mixed-race Quaker who died when the boy was six. Robeson attended Rutgers College (as it then was known), graduating in 1919 as a football star and class valedictorian. He earned a law degree from Columbia University three years later and was admitted to the bar – but by that time was being sidetracked by music and theater.

He had made his professional stage debut in 1924 in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” at the Provincetown, where a scene of him kissing the hand of a white woman created enough of a scandal to make the papers. He then starred in a revival of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” the success of which landed Robeson his first movie role (Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul”) and a recording contract.

The 14 CDs in this collection offer 287 songs recorded between 1925 and 1958, although there’s an eleven-year gap after 1947 because Robeson was too much of a political hot potato by then to be welcomed by the labels represented here. His repertory was comparatively small, and wisely so: Although his vocal quality was astonishingly warm and unique, he lacked the training for operatic roles, and he knew it. He added few art songs to his repertory, and stayed away from the opera stage.

Tom Paxton: A Fond Farewell

THERE WAS NO SENSE OF MELANCHOLY in Tom Paxton’s performance on Oct. 19 as he entertained a gathering of the faithful at the Eighth Step in Schenectady. True, it was part of his final tour before a well-earned retirement (he’ll be 87 on Hallowe’en), but he was as engaging as ever, a dynamic presence with a catalog of classic songs to his credit. And he was supported by the duo of Don Henry and Jon Vezner, known as the DonJuans, who have been performing and songwriting partners with Paxton since 2017.

Jon Vezner, Tom Paxton, and Don Henry

During one of his tours with the Kingston Trio, I interviewed Paxton in his dressing room after a show and mentioned how envious I was of him with so many tour dates ahead. He looked at me as if I were nuts. “It’s an awful grind,” he said. “Nothing to be envious about.” That was about forty years ago. Paxton estimates that he’s been on the road for sixty. A grind it may, but I’ve shared a lot of pleasure with an audience that has attended concert after concert, and that knows all the words and isn’t afraid to use them.

Thus it was, even as he launched into his opening song, “I Can’t Help but Wonder,” that the audience was right there with him, murmuring the lyrics as if they were emerging like apparitions in a dream. Because that’s the feeling you get when invited to sing songs you’ve know all your life, songs that are poignant and meaningful or just plain fun. All of that. Even better, you’re singing them back to the fellow who wrote them. And who is not above being in thrall himself to fellow artists: he noted that the fact that Johnny Cash recorded “I Can’t Help but Wonder” on the sixth (and last) of his “American Recordings” series was a dream come true. (And Paxton did a spot-on impression of Cash’s voice while telling us about this.)

Embarrassment of Riches

From the Theater Vault Dept.: During the late 1980s, an experiment in theatrical presentation settled into a small Schenectady theater for a couple of seasons. Run under the auspices of Proctor’s Theater (as the much less-ambitious entity styled itself back then), Proctor’s Too brought in an array of unexpected talent, among them Santa Fe-based Theater Grottesco. Founded in Paris in 1983 by former members of Theatre de la Jeune Lune (who also visited back then), the company is still going strong, having relocated to New York and Detroit before settling in New Mexico in 1996.

                                                                                         

THE PROGRAM BOOKLET PROMISED a full-length show with a large cast, but the stagehands could be seen nervously scurrying as the audience settled. Finally, the announcement: all of the cast and scenery had been delayed at O’Hare. The four stagehands would produce the show with a minimum of accoutrements.

"Richest Deadman," from a
more recent production

Those stagehands being, naturally, the Theatre Grottesco company, a Detroit-based ensemble that combines mime, dance and circus techniques into a theatrical experience that, as the prologue to “The Richest Deadman Alive” suggests, is not going to be your run-of-the-mill play.

What bogged down this production and ultimately proved to undermine the success of the show was the way in which this piece, conceived and written by the four performers, got into too traditional a groove. Terence McNally, for instance, could make a nice door-slammer out of this story of a man misdiagnosed as dead who joins his purported widow in a spending spree of his insurance money.

The Last Day

Guest Blogger Dept.: We hand over the reins again to Robert Benchley, who has an almost-timely piece about the end-of-the-season vacationer’s farewells.

                                                                                              

WHEN, during the long winter evenings, you sit around the snap-shot album and recall the merry, merry times you had on your vacation, there is one day which your memory mercifully overlooks. It is the day you packed up and left the summer resort to go home.

This Ultimate Day really begins the night before, when you sit up until one o’clock trying to get things into the trunks and bags. This is when you discover the well-known fact that summer air swells articles to twice or three times their original size; so that the sneakers which in June fitted in between the phonograph and the book (which you have never opened), in September are found to require a whole tray for themselves and even then one of them will probably have to be carried in the hand.

Along about midnight, the discouraging process begins to get on your nerves and you snap at your wife and she snaps at you every time it is found that something won’t fit in the suitcase. As you have both gradually dispensed with the more attractive articles of clothing under stress of the heat and the excitement, these little word passages take on the sordid nature of a squabble in an East Side tenement, and all that is needed is for one of the children to wake up and start whimpering. This it does.

On the Offense

TURNS OUT YOUR GREAT-GRANDPARENTS were just as filthy-mouthed as you. Filthier, even. Written bawdry has a long tradition, of course, but with the onset of the age of recorded sound, we were able to hear, as often as we wished, the kinds of story (and language) that previously were the province of men’s smokers.

Writing of Thomas Edison’s earliest experiments of audio recording, Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni note, “Reliable earwitness accounts tell of Edison and his men repeatedly shouting ‘mad dog’ into the machine and then gleefully running it backwards to hear from the tinfoil one resounding ‘God damn’ after another.” The temptation go blue has always been compelling.

Some recording artists went much farther than mere blasphemy, as proven by “Actionable Offenses,” a single-CD collection on the Archeophone label subtitled, “Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s.” Indecent they are. Gleefully so.

Archeophone’s mission is to rescue acoustic-era recordings from obscurity, and the label has copped a GRAMMY award and many nominations along the way. Until 1925, audio recordings were created using a large horn as a microphone. Audio waves set a diaphragm at the horn’s narrow end into motion, and that drove a stylus to cut a cylinder or platter. Frequency response was limited and further obscured by repeated playback.

I Don’t Have to Do That

AS EACH FLEETING WEEK swipes another physical ability and leaves a fresh pain in its wake, I’m comforted by the mantra I summon: I don’t have to do that. It’s not belligerent. It’s a gentle reminder, obedience to which keeps me free of ache and frustration.

For example. I’m six feet four inches tall, a height offset, particularly when viewed from a distance, by the bulges I wear in a horizontal direction. And I probably would measure up now as an inch or two shorter, thanks to spinal collapse and my general crouch, but I haven’t measured my height in years. I don’t have to do that.

That height, combined with what I assume was a pleasantly accessible mien, often inspired shorter fellow-shoppers to ask me to reach items down from high shelves. I happily obliged. Now my shoulders are shot – I blew out both rotator cuffs by hammering a stage platform into being – and I can barely reach to the height of my head. Should someone ask that favor now – well, you know where I’m going. Of course, they don’t ask, because that accessible mien has also gone away.

Which means I’m merely a grumpy old man – I’m 68 as I write this – who becomes one of many trudging a grocery cart through a checkout line reminiscent of Cold War-era photos of GUM store queues. This makes me a target for the complainers which, despite my infirmities, I am not. “How long are they gonna make us wait here?” might go the opener, or “Can you believe that parking lot?” (Are we questioning its existence?) or “Whoever heard of paying five bucks for a carton of eggs?” My tactic is to first pretend I’ve been startled out of a reverie and ask the questioner to repeat the query. Then I shrug – a shrug can be a focus-grabbing gesture – and respond, respectively, “I’m in no hurry,” “It’s a beautiful thing,” and “I wouldn’t know. I have hens.”

Sonny Days

IN THE END, it comes down to your Moldy Fig quotient. If, like me, you rooted yourself in a jazz era that barely stretched into the Second World War, making friends with bebop has been too much of a challenge to pursue. Sure, I’ve been tempted by Bird and Diz, but never enough for a lasting commitment. At least at first. My horizons eventually broadened thanks to the same vehicle that got me interested in non-mainstream music in the first place: friends who insisted I listen to something that was new to me.

I wish I’d had this Sonny Clark set back then. Mosaic Records has just released The Complete Sonny Clark Blue Note Sessions, which captures the recordings made under the pianist’s name between 1957 and 1961, resulting in nine LP releases. Clark is remembered as an inventive exponent of the “hard bop” movement, a label I find too ill-defined—but there’s a lot of hard-driving, angular music in these grooves.

And then there’s something else, to which I now wish to point you. Acquire this set (and do so soon, because you know how quickly these limited-edition Mosaic sets tend to sell out) and head to Disc Five. That’s the “Singles Session,” recorded November 15, 1958, with bassist Jymie Merritt and drummer Wes Landers. The idea was to create recordings for jukebox play. From the first notes of Don Redman’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” we’re on very accessible ground. Clark had a history of solo-piano work, and it shows. It’ll lure you on in, your fig condition notwithstanding.

Trumping the Tramp

HE WAS FAR FROM A SAINT. We want to forgive him because he was funny as hell, a process that grows less and less difficult as the misbehaviors of others in the public eye grow (or are revealed to be) more heinous. Charlie Chaplin’s biggest sin was that he liked women, liked them young, and liked them to satisfy a prodigious sexual appetite. Chaplin’s biggest crime was his outspoken political stance, which was misinterpreted vigorously enough to win him a fat FBI file and eventual banishment from the U.S.

Scott Eyman’s meticulous study places the comedian’s film career against a rising tide of manufactured disapproval, culminating in the horrific kangaroo trials to which Chaplin was subjected and deftly (but not at all overtly) paralleling them to the kind of ideological nonsense we’re sprayed with in the age of MAGA. You think Trump is a dangerous idiot? Wait’ll you get to know J. Edgar Hoover.

Chaplin’s early years are sketched with sympathetic precision, covering the important points of his career and examining a fraught relationship with his show-biz parents: a father, famed for his music-hall turns, who was mostly absent and soon dead, and a soubrette mother who lost her mind. Although Eyman doesn’t indulge in too much psychological speculation, he sees this a stage-setting the relationships Chaplin eventually with the friends, co-workers, and, especially, women in his life.

He started as a boy performer in England, eventually landing a berth in the Fred Karno troupe, which toured knockabout sketches throughout the U.K. and, ultimately, across the U.S. In 1914, when Charlie was 24, he was invited to make films for Mack Sennett. In breathtakingly short order he created the character of the Tramp and placed him 36 one-reelers, all in the space of a year. Skyrocketing popularity led him to set his own terms for his subsequent 25 films, now two-reelers, that he wrote and directed for two different companies through the end of 1917.

Tooning In

THERE HAS BECOME A TRADITION for symphony orchestras to devote an evening to serving as accompaniment to a feature-length movie. In nearby Saratoga Springs this summer, the Philadelphia Orchestra will be pandering to the masses by playing to a Harry Potter movie. Silent movies invite accompaniment even more, typically with a single performer at the keyboard.

Turns out there’s a middle ground, a place where six virtuoso musicians serve as the soundtrack to a eclectic selection of cartoons. The music is high-spirited, in the tradition of the John Kirby Sextet and the Raymond Scott Quintet (also a sextet, but don’t worry about it. Scott didn’t).

The Queen's Cartoonists

The Queen’s Cartoonists derive their royal appellation not from the late sovereign but from their New York City borough of residency. They are impossibly talented. Joel Pierson is the pianist and leader, providing commentary throughout the show. Greg Hammontree generally plays trumpet, but picks up other instruments or percussion items as needed. Mark Phillips plays clarinet and/or (curved) soprano sax, while Drew Pitcher is usually playing tenor sax but switches out to any number of other instruments and noisemakers. Bass-player Sam Minaie plucks, snaps, and slaps his instrument like a madman, although he can turn around a bow a charming melody as well. And Rossen Nedelchev, behind the drum kit, not only provides a solid drive for this ensemble but also manages the video portions of the program.

The Hour Has Come

THE WORLD THAT JAMES JOYCE presents in his writing is unique. It’s Dublin, of course, portrayed in prose and verse by a master of language. But it’s a city he knew in staggering detail, peopled by those he also knew well, given life in a few deft strokes of his pen. Joyce also loved music. He sometimes seemed as likely to sing as to write, and music threads throughout his writing, with mentions of song after song, popular and obscure.

Richard Wargo, Michael Pavese,
and Dorothy Danner

So it’s no surprise that Joyce’s words lend themselves to music. Better still, the characters he describes think and act with the intimate characteristics of chamber music. Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories finished in 1905, offers a view of the city through the lives of a number of seemingly unremarkable residents.

Two of them figure in the story “A Painful Case,” which is the subject of a new opera by Richard Wargo. It premiered as part of this summer’s music festival at the Sembrich Museum in Bolton Landing, New York, and it’s so new that only the first act (of two) was presented.

It was envisioned as a one-act but, as Wargo writes in the program notes, he didn’t anticipate “over the course of writing the libretto and developing one evolving relationship between the two characters in this intimate story, that the opera would double in size.”

“Bicycling,” the New Craze

Guest Blogger Dept.: We haven’t heard from Robert Benchley since January, at which time he was addressing a very seasonal topic - a mid-winter sport carnival, to be exact. Wishing to assert himself as a man for all seasons, or at least the current temperate one, he offers this disquisition on bicycling.

                                                                                        

THERE is a new sport this season which bids fair to have great popularity among the younger sets, a sport imported, as are so many of our outdoor games, from England, where it has had a great vogue for several years now. This sport is called “bicycling,” and derives its name from the instrument on which it is practiced—the “bicycle.” You will see that this word is made up of two words: “bi,” meaning “two,” and “cycle,” meaning wheel—“two wheels.” And such indeed it is, a veritable two-wheeled contraption, on which the rider sits and balances himself until he is able, by pushing two pedals arranged for the purpose, to propel the whole thing along the roadway at a great rate. And what a lark it is, too!

Drawing by Gluyas Williams

We show a picture of a bicycle here, and you may figure out for yourself just how it works. You will see that the pedals are so fixed that when one foot is up the other is down, thus giving the feet an equal chance at the rousing exercise and doing away with any chance of the rider’s becoming one-sided, as might well result from a position where one foot was up all the time and one foot down.

You will also observe that the saddle is placed at just the right height from the pedals, so that the rider sits on it easily without having to stretch his legs out beyond their natural length—or, on the other hand, without having to contract them. When experiments were being made on the first bicycle by the inventor, it was thought that it would be necessary for anyone who was going to ride one of the things to stretch his legs out anywhere from one to four feet beyond their natural length in order to reach the pedals. The inventor was very much discouraged when he realized this, “for,” as he said to his partner, “there won’t be enough people in the world who can stretch their legs out from one to four feet to make any decent kind of sale for my machine at all.”

Grin and Berlioz It

DURING A Q&A SESSION at the Bard Music Festival, the question was posed: “Do you ever fall asleep when you’re conducting?” The question was aimed at Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and conductor of the orchestral portions of the festival programs. “Do you ever get bored up there?” This took place during a panel discussion titled “A Revolutionary Life in a Revolutionary Era,” and the subject – the subject of two weekends’ worth of programming, in fact – was Hector Berlioz.

The question was inspired by Berlioz’s “Lélio,” a work for narrator, vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, performed at the festival the evening before. It’s a formidable work (not that you expect anything less from this composer) that resists categorization. It is rarely performed, which is a major reason it was part of the festival’s opening concert, paired with Berlioz’s most famous work, the “Symphonie fantastique,”to which it is intended as a sequel.

Dr. Botstein has an impressively elegant way of suffering fools. His reply was measured, with just a whiff of archness. In the days before media saturation, before recordings were available, he explained, concert pieces were constructed to give listeners some musical signposts. And those listeners (I’m not quoting exactly) had actual attention spans. They didn’t have phones in front of their faces. In other words, it’s not the music that’s the problem. It’s the distracted listener.

Yet if ever there was a composer for the distracted listener, it’s Berlioz. Not for him, generally, the intimate gesture. “Lélio” just happens to be one of his least-accessible works. I wasn’t there for that performance, but I spent the entirety of the following day soaking in the variety of events that characterizes each day of this festival.

Metamorphosis on the Lake

CLASSICAL MUSIC, as far as mainstream listeners are concerned, has become remote and intimidating. Probably because it has faded from pop-culture contexts. It used to permeate cartoons (saluted recently by an appearance at Caroga Arts by The Queen’s Cartoonists), not to mention mainstream movies and TV commercials, but my understanding is that such is now rarely the case.

Garrett Hudson, Jason Kutz, and Kara LaMoure

What’s needed is a community-based approach in which the music is performed in a welcoming space with a track record of presenting enjoyable stuff, and this is exactly the forum presented each summer for the past baker’s-dozen years by the Caroga Arts Collective. The group offers an ambitious program that takes place on the grounds of a former amusement park next to a still-popular but somewhat obscure lake in New York’s Fulton County, a damp dot on the map between Utica and Albany. It remains a popular summer resort, so the concerts have a built-in local draw, but the series has gained a reputation that summons an audience from beyond as well.

They take a two-pronged approach to programming, nesting the classical-music concerts amidst a schedule of pop-music events. And the classical music is performed by an ensemble comprising players drawn from throughout the country who participate in a summer-long program of training and performance, players who are immensely skilled when they get there and are no doubt even better when they leave.

Which brings me to the concert I attended on August 2, held in the venerable Sherman’s Park Dance Hall building. It’s a large space with a flexible layout, largely defined by the placement of chairs. The concert was titled “Metamorphosis: Where Nature Meets Music,” and the presence of four large TV screens portended what was to come.

Splendid Vibes

ON THE FIRST TRACK of his first album as a leader, Bobby Hutcherson doesn’t solo until four minutes into the song. It’s “If Ever I Would Leave You,” from the then-recent Broadway show “Camelot,” and we start out with the domineering inventiveness of Joe Henderson on tenor sax. Recorded at the very end of 1963, this album, titled “The Kicker” after a Henderson original, wasn’t released until Mosaic’s Michael Cuscuna oversaw its issue in 1999.

And it seems to be a Henderson showcase throughout, although when Hutcherson brings his vibes to the fore, it’s always arresting. As in a Joe Chambers ballad, “Mirrors,” that puts Hutcherson squarely in the forefront and doesn’t welcome Henderson in until the four-minute mark.

Hutcherson was a performer steeped in the swing-era language of the vibraphone but with the innovations of Milt Jackson intruding to push Hutcherson’s creativity even beyond as he leaped into the world of hard bop. In that regard, he’s well-matched on this recording by pianist Duke Pearson. Listen to the piano on “For Duke P.,” a Hutcherson original, where Pearson tears through the up-tempo piece with the fleetest of fingers. And there are some surprises squirreled away throughout. Hutcherson’s “Step Lightly” finds Pearson slyly quoting “I’m Beginning to See the Light.” Perhaps in retaliation, guitarist Grant Green finds a moment in “Bedouin” to quote, of all things, “And the Angels Sing.”

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.