The Glimmerglass Festival offers a unique opportunity to singers and audiences alike to be around living composers. The “live relationship” creates a work that breathes and where new discoveries in the process can bring about further growth and development. This has happened with having composer John Corigliano as artist-in-residence all summer serving as mentor to […]

Glimmerglass Festival has made a bold choice in re-mounting The Ghosts of Versailles, a complicated, multi-layered late 20th-century opera, as part of its 2019 season. Contemporary opera tends to suffer through an unusually difficult and long gestation before it is brought into this world. The Ghosts of Versailles is no exception.  Commissioned with the team […]

Glimmerglass Festival opened its 45th season with a sensational Show Boat. The musical, based on Edna Ferber’s novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi, could have been delivered as just a slice of Americana and even get sweetly sentimental under less capable hands.  But Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has dug deeply into this enormously […]

A “new” production of La traviata shared the buzz opening weekend at Glimmerglass Festival. Nonetheless, as a co-production with Washington National Opera (and a handful of other opera companies because this is how opera sustains itself these days,) it was seen first at the Kennedy Center last Fall as its season’s gala opening. My review […]

For parents pondering how they might introduce their children to opera and which might be most appropriate, look no further than The Cunning Little Vixen. This curious and fanciful little opera by the Czech Leos Janacek is based on an early twentieth-century series of newspaper cartoons filled with woodsy-critter characters then compiled into what we […]

In 1692, Tituba and a gaggle of Puritan girls frolicked by night in the woods outside Salem and allegedly conjured up the devil, an event that embroiled the witnesses and a whole township in a massive, tragic witch-hunt.  By night, during this summer of 2016, surrounded by the woods of Cooperstown New York, there has […]

 Is it true, as Stephen Sondheim insists, that mostly audience expectations dictate whether a work is to be experienced as an opera or a musical?  When pushed, however, he is equally adamant that his Sweeney Todd was squarely conceived as a musical.  Well, Artistic Director of the Glimmerglass Festival, Francesca Zambello, and the entire ensemble […]

 Well, this one’s for the birds! Full disclosure. I love a production that is steeped in fanciful storytelling.  My background as a former teacher of theatre-movement makes me a sucker for anthropomorphic exploration in character building.  And I swoon for the bel canto vocal sound, its clear bell-like tones and the agility of the voices […]