Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Glimmerglass Opera

The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York always does themed seasons. This year the season was about the idea of home. As such, the production directed by Francesca Zambello was updated from the Middle Ages to a modern-day refugee camp.

Handel’s Xerxes (1738) was part of this year’s “home and homeland” season at Glimmerglass Festival.

Glimmerglass’ Porgy and Bess proves one more time that Gershwin’s opus remains America’s most important 20th-century opera.

Francesca Zambello stages a new production of Robert Ward's opera The Crucible at the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. 

Today, Vivaldi’s operas remain rarities. The American première of Cato in Utica at the Glimmerglass Festival (located an hour south of Utica, NY) attempted to elevate this little explored corner of Baroque repertoire.

Whether you call it Un giorno di regno or “King for a Day”, Giuseppe Verdi’s second opera and his first comedy is mostly unknown. That has not stopped the Glimmerglass Festival from mounting a spirited production for its 2013 season in the Alice Busch Opera Theatre on the shores of Otsego Lake in upstate New York.

What does any theatergoer want from a stage musical? For starters, beautiful singing, solid acting, striking costumes, clever direction, and characters to love and to loathe. A melodic score with a few toe-tappers and a smart book and lyrics. The new production of Camelot presented at the Glimmerglass Festival is that theatergoer’s dream – a crowning glory, a royal treat.

If an evocative and provocative crowd-pleaser is your preferred summertime fare, then catch the new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at Glimmerglass Festival. Dutchman was Wagner’s first unabashed hit, deservedly so.

You won’t see plumed horses, a procession of camels, or a hundred supernumeraries as standard bearers parading across the Glimmerglass stage. In fact, you have to step outside the Alice Busch Opera Theater to see any elephants at all, the animal most commonly associated with Aida, Verdi’s greatest grand opera.

Want to know what small-town America looks and feels like in the thick of summertime, circa 1940? The Glimmerglass Festival’s purest musical theater offering, The Music Man, is festive, frolicsome Americana, brimming with spectacular sets, clever staging, and a sensational ensemble showcasing Olympic-sized talent.

The opera is way too dark. It runs far too long. It’s requires a soprano with vocal cords of amalgamated steel to sing the title role. No wonder Cherubini’s Medea is rarely performed. According to OPERA America records, the opera hasn’t been performed in the United States in nearly 20 years.

Sultry and brassy, calculating and cruel, the character Carmen is, well, hard to like. By contrast, Bizet’s opéra comique of the same name playing in repertory at Glimmerglass Festival this summer is resoundingly popular, bringing audiences to standing ovations. The shining virtue of this Glimmerglass production is the music—especially the singing.