A WEEKEND AT GLIMMERGLASS--THE SUBLIME & THE RIDICULOUS

Reviewed by Bill Breakstone, Somers, NY, July 20, 2010

My friend Phebe and I drove up to Cooperstown, NY this past Saturday for two opera performances at The Glimmerglass Festival—Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro on Saturday evening and Handel’s seldom-performed Tolomeo on Sunday afternoon.

The Figaro was as fine a production and performance as I’ve ever attended, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Glimmerglass, despite its reputation for memorable offerings, is limited in funding and utilizes new or newer talent that do not have the performance experience of world-class singers who are regulars at major houses like The MET, Covent Garden or La Scala.

Donald Eastman designed the sets, which were perfectly fitted to this smallish stage and complimented the action to a tee. The costumes evoked the period of the 1880s in France, in particular Renoir’s famous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881).

The excellent cast included New Yorker Patrick Cafizzi as Figaro, Muscovite Lyubov Petrova as Susanna, Aurhelia Varak, from Lyon, France as a most captivating Cherubino, Iowan Mark Schnaible as the Count and Detroit native Caitlin Lynch as the Countess. They, and the supporting cast, all possess outstanding voices and innate acting abilities. Varak was perhaps the best Cherubino I have seen on any stage, and Schnaible’s Count had all the qualities of a young Sam Ramey.

English conductor David Angus led a briskly paced performance from first note to last, eliciting brilliant playing from the Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra. Jonathan Kelly provided an excellent continuo accompaniment on a reproduction forte piano.

Here was Mozart’s masterpiece and genius in all its glory. How many times have I attended performances of Figaro over the 40 years of opera going? Never has the humour of the play been so readily approachable. What an evening of theater!

Unfortunately, the same could not be said, from this reviewer’s standpoint, of Sunday’s production of Handel’s Tolomeo. General & Artistic Director Michael MacLeod introduced the performance noting that this premiere was the first professional North American production of the work.

Not much is said of Tolomeo by Handel scholars Winton Dean and Donald Burrows in their books, other than it was produced near the end of the Royal Academy of Music era in London in 1728, and had roles written for the famous “Dueling Divas” Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, and the legendary castrato Senesino. One can only speculate as to what extraordinary vocal gifts Senesino possessed; the two sopranos no doubt exemplified the finest in opera seria vocal technique, but we modern listeners to baroque opera do have many fine examples of this type of singing.

The arias written for these three roles, at least those that we heard obviously played to the talents of these three artists. In this performance, sopranos Julie Boulianne as Elisa and Joelle Harvey as Seleuce executed their demanding vocal pyrotechnics admirably, though their ornamentations of the da capo repeats left much to be desired. Tolomeo was sung by male soprano Anthony Roth Costanzo, and though his voice was a very interesting true soprano as against a countertenor, it simply lacked the power and freedom that a contralto would bring to this role.

However, the singing, nor the excellent conducting of baroque specialist Christian Curnyn, was not the problem with this production. The evil lay in the concept of the director Chas Rader-Shieber and its execution by costume designer Andrea Hood. The opera was treated as pure camp, a comedy a la Figaro, but with none of Da Ponte’s comic genius or Mozart’s matching comedic music. The libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym is the most convoluted of any of Handel’s operas; it is near impossible to make sense of any of it at all. As for the costumes and make-up, I have hardly ever seen anything so vulgar.

An absolutely awful evening, or half-evening, as by intermission, we had had enough! After close to 50 years, it finally came to the point where an early exit was preferable to continuing the misery.