Opera Review: The Start of Something Beautiful

Will Crutchfield's Teatro Nuovo tackles Tancredi.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Warrior woman: Tamara Mumford as Tancredi confronts the chorus.
Photo by Steven Pisano for Teatro Nuovo courtesy Unison Media.

For the past twenty years, Will Crutchfield brought the sound of bel canto opera to the Caramoor Festival. Now, in 2018, the conductor and musicologist has turned impresario, launching Teatro Nuovo, a new series of opera performances held in the less sylvan but more sturdy environs of the Arts Center at the State University of New York at Purchase. An ugly brick block-house on the outside, the Purchase venue is everything Caramoor is not: acoustically live, air conditioned and endowed with theatrical basics (like a proscenium arch and orchestra pit) that are not readily available at the Venetian Theater.