Glimmerglass season shines with vibrant vocal performances

Melody Moore as Lady Macbeth and Eric Owens as Macbeth in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2015 production of “Macbeth.” (Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival)

By Anne Midgette Classical music critic/The Classical Beat August 23

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Stage direction is the most controversial element of today’s opera world. And stage direction divided opinions about the just-concluded 40th season of the Glimmerglass Festival — fittingly, since the festival is run by a stage director, Francesca Zambello.
Not everybody wants the kind of updating Anne Bogart offered in her 1930s version of Verdi’s “Macbeth.” Not everybody wants the biting sarcasm Zambello brought to Bernstein’s “Candide,” the token musical of the season. Both productions, though, offered a lot to like — and, most important, inspired some strong vocal performances, which is the point of the exercise. This was one of the strongest Glimmerglass seasons I’ve seen.

Anne Midgette came to the Washington Post in 2008, when she consolidated her various cultural interests under the single title of chief classical music critic. She blogs at The Classical Beat. View Archive

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At both Glimmerglass and the Washington National Opera, where she is artistic director, Zambello has aspired to build a “home team” of young singers, giving opportunities to current and former members of the apprentice program — a goal shared by many U.S. companies today. I have some mild general reservations about the ubiquity of the apprentice system, with its odd combination of mind-numbing hard work and artistic coddling. But there’s no denying the appeal of watching an artist like Soloman Howard, a past member of WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, grow into his voice and shine in a main role such as Banquo in “Macbeth” — alongside other former WNO young artists who sang leads here this summer (Jacqueline Echols as Pamina in “The Magic Flute,” Andrew Stenson as Candide).
There were other Washington connections. Ryan Brown, the founder and artistic director of Opera Lafayette, made his Glimmerglass debut conducting “Cato in Utica,” while John Holiday, who sang Handel’s Caesar so well at Wolf Trap last summer, was excellent as Vivaldi’s version of the same character: a voice both sweet and ardent, and an effective stage presence.
The stage direction wasn’t controversial in “Cato”: Tazewell Thompson’s thoughtful production was beautifully framed by the dusky red Roman ruins of John Conklin’s set. And the pacing of baroque opera was picked up here, due to dramatic compression: Act I of “Cato” is lost, and this production opted simply to present Acts II and III, after filling in the plot outlines with brief thought bubbles project Mesko as Emilia and Megan Samarin as Marzia, also did their best to offset stasis.

Megan Samarin as Marzia in The Glimmerglass Festival's 2015 production of Vivaldi's “Cato in Utica.” (Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass Festival)

The production also finished particularly strongly. When “Cato” premiered in 1737, its tragic ending went over so badly that the creators tacked on a happy one for subsequent performances. Glimmerglass returned to the spirit of the original Metastasio libretto and offered a silent tableau of Cato’s suicide, and the characters’ reaction to it, enacted during a beautiful orchestral postlude: not necessarily true to the period, but eloquent nonetheless. (Opera Lafayette will perform a semi-staged version of the work, with some of the same singers, at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in November.)
For those who still frown on Glimmerglass’s embrace of American musicals, “Candide” is a fine compromise; with its shifting, syncopated score and vocal riches, it’s not out of place on an opera stage. Indeed, the only questionable casting move was using the musical actor David Garrison, instead of an opera singer, as Voltaire/Pangloss; he was dramatically sound, but vocally weak, which removed the zing from a couple of the big songs. (The same could be said of Marietta Simpson’s otherwise delightful, character-ful Old Lady.)