Superconductor 2016 Summer Festival Preview V: Glimmerglass Festival

Cooperstown, NY is your summer home for opera.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Sweeney Todd cuts heads at this year's Glimmerglass Festival.
Photo of the Alice Busch Opera Theater © Glimmerglass Festival.

Strong and fair, see it stand on the northeast bank of Lake Otsego, that famed body of water featured in the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. It’s the Alice Busch Opera House, home of the Glimmerglass Festival, Cooprstown, New York’s most significant contribution to the performing arts.

Opera Review: Destination: Nowhere

Washington National Opera takes on La Forza del Destino.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

She wants YOU: Preziosilla (Ketevan Kemoklidze) summons the troops in La Forza del Destino.

Photo by Scott Suchman © 2013 Washington National Opera/The Kennedy Center.

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It is a bold stroke for new Washington National Opera artistic director Francesca Zambello to tackle Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino in a new production for the composer's bicentennial year. Forza is Verdi's great theatrical experiment, crossing a Spanish revenge tragedy with the sprawling worldview of a Schiller play. The sprawling plot gleefully demands abandonment of Aristotelian unities (and even logic) to tell a story that amounts to an interconnected series of unfortunate events. It is also the opera world's equivalent of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Whispered backstage stories tell of ill fortune--even death--befalling those who dare to sing its three leading roles.

2013-14 Preview: Washington National Opera

Wagner and Verdi centennials at the Kennedy Center.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Whalers vs. capital: Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick (opening Feb. 22 2014)
highlight of the upcoming WNO season at the Kennedy Center. Image © JakeHeggie.com

With the Metropolitan Opera offering a Wagner-free 2013-14 schedule, it is left to opera companies in other cities to satisfy a yearning for music drama.  The Washington National Opera has stepped up. the company announced today that its first season under the stewardship of new Artistic Director Francesca Zambello will open Sept.15 with an imported production of Tristan und Isolde.

Valkyries on the Potomac

Washington National Opera to finally stage the complete Ring.

Act I of Die Walküre in Francesca Zambello's production of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.

Raw naked greed. Unnecessary construction projects. And workers at each other's throats after going unpaid. All on the banks of the Potomac.

No, we're not talking about the 112th Congress. According to a report by Anne Midgette in the Washington Post, the Washington National Opera has announced that it will (finally) present their complete production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, directed by new WNO Artistic Adviser Francesca Zambello. The production will be staged at the opera house in the Kennedy Center in 2016.

Act I of Siegfried in Francesca Zambello's production of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.

Ms. Zambello's production of the Ring was originally planned to premiere in 2009. WNO staged Das Rheingold in 2006, Die Walküre in 2007, and Siegfried in May of 2009. But a radical drop in donations, caused by the 2008 financial crijsis led to the company nixing the premiere of the last segment, Götterdämmerung. The longest opera in the Ring, which has the most expensive and difficult technical requirements of any Wagner opera, was presented in 2009 in two concert performances.

The complete Zambello Ring Cycle had its full premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2011. It is colloquially known as the "American Ring." The director makes Wagner's Germanic story the vehicle for a pell-mell ride through American history, presenting the gods as old-fashioned capitalists and Siegfried as an industrial worker. Uniquely, the staging is visualized as paralleling the American expansion westward, with Hunding's hut as a prairie settlement, Mime's cave as a trailer house and the Gibichung Hall atop a skyscraper.

Act II of Götterdämmerung in Francesca Zambello's production of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Opera.

The San Francisco run also afforded Jay Hunter Morris the opportunity to make his debut in of the title role Siegfried, a part which he repeated with great success at the Metropolitan Opera in October of 2011. Mr. Morris will sing his first Götterdämmerung at the Metropolitan Opera on Jan. 27.

In other WNO news, the company is also planning New American Works, an initiative to present home-grown operas to audiences. The plan is three-fold, with 20-minute works commissioned from student composers, hour-long operas by composers on the rise, and productions of reliable works by what the company is calling "American Masters." Ms. Midgette's article also pointed out that since the WNO is officially part of the Kennedy Center, the Opera can use the smaller theaters in the Center to present chamber works and experimental operas. 

Casting details for the Ring are not available. The full 2012-2013 Washington National Opera season will be announced in March.