Francesca Zambello has been tabbed to replace Michael McLeod as Artistic Director of the Glimmerglass Opera Festival. One of the finest summer opera festivals in the Northeast, the Glimmerglass Opera is based in Cooperstown, NY, and offers four operas every summer in an idyllic setting by the banks of Lake Otsego.
The Alice Busch Theater, home of the Glimmerglass Opera
In 1992, Zambello came under fire for her coffin-strewn staging of Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor at the Met. However, the director has received much critical acclaim since. She staged the
Ring Cycle in Washington D.C., brought a successful
Les Troyens to the Met and even took Broadway with her version of Disney's
The Little Mermaid. Zambello's distinct visual and dramatic style can be jarring, but she often succeeds in finding hidden truths within the works she is staging.
Her hiring is a bold and exciting statement for the Cooperstown-based company, which has a reputation for compact productions and innovative stagings of classic operas, baroque works, and rarities from the outer reaches of the repertory. Past successes have included:
- Zambello's staging of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride
- The Mines of Sulphur by Richard Rodney Bennett
- The first American stage performances of Das Liebesverbot, an early opera by Richard Wagner based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.
