At Glimmerglass Festival, what was old can sound new again

Opera may have less historical justification for its presence in the middle of a farmer’s field outside the town, but that is where the Alice M. Busch Opera Theatre was built in 1987 to become the summer oasis for opera lovers in Southern Ontario as well as Northern New York.

Not that the Glimmerglass Festival is devoted exclusively to the world of short tenors and screaming sopranos. Since becoming artistic and general director six seasons ago, Francesca Zambello has broadened its terms of reference in an effort to attract a larger audience, exchanging one of the repertory season’s traditional four mainstage opera productions for a musical, and adding a range of concerts and talks to the program, for the past five years including the voice of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a convicted operaphile.

By the way, among next season’s offerings (which also include Donizetti’s The Siege of Calais, Handel’s Xerxes and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, plus the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!) will be a one-act opus titled Ginsburg and Scalia, commemorating the one enthusiasm shared by these philosophically opposed high court justices.

This season’s offerings — the final performance takes place Saturday night — reflected the balance Zambello habitually seeks in programming: one popular opera (Puccini’s La Bohème), one rarity (Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra, The Thieving Magpie), one more or less contemporary opera (Robert Ward’s The Crucible, vintage 1961) plus one musical (Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd).

Yes, Sweeney Todd seems to be enjoying a high profile this summer, with major productions at both Glimmerglass and the Shaw Festival. It is arguably Sondheim’s most sophisticated and nearly operatic score. But as John DeMain, the splendid conductor of the Glimmerglass production, reminded his audience in a pre-performance talk, Sondheim regarded the tale of “the demon barber of Fleet Street” as “a horror musical.” He wanted to scare us.

With the exception of Mrs. Lovett, the baker of human pies, he also wrote characters with nearly operatic voices (not that I recall the original Sweeney, Canada’s Len Cariou, as possessing one), which is why Glimmerglass could meet him on his own ambitious terms.

Broadway singers are amplified these days, which makes it possible for smaller voices to be heard comfortably. In the intimate (914-seat) Alice M. Busch Opera Theatre, singers have to be able to project without such assistance, accompanied by a larger than Broadway orchestra.

Glimmerglass occasionally uses well established singers — Metropolitan Opera tenor Jay Hunter Morris played Judge Danforth in The Crucible — but has made a specialty of employing rising young talents, with a Young Artists Program one of its features.

Such is the enormous talent pool available nowadays that even smaller roles tend to be well sung in the field outside Cooperstown, whether in Sondheim or Rossini.

Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie requires virtuoso bel canto singing and in such fresh-voiced artists as soprano Rachele Gilmore (Ninetta) and tenor Michele Angelini (Giannetto) Glimmerglass was able to supply them.

The opera itself, a tale of theft, real and supposed (the magpie does steal the silver), suffers from a weaker book than Rossini’s better-known comedies, The Barber of Seville, The Italian Girl in Algiers and Cinderella, but boasts a score full of melodic invention.

The rather fanciful Peter Kazaras production brought a live magpie to the stage in the person of dancer-choreographer Meg Gillentine, whose avian flitting even extended into the audience.

E. Loren Meeker’s well-cast new production of La Bohème wore an old look but illustrated how a traditional approach can still yield animating performances through the application of clever details.

But the standout production turned out to be Zambello’s staging of The Crucible, an opera set against the 17th-century Salem witch trials and, like the Arthur Miller play upon which it is based, inspired by the 20th-century communist witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Still thematically relevant, the opera also illustrates how a conservative 20th-century musical vocabulary can still evoke and express powerful emotions. The Crucible no longer sounds as old-fashioned as it did in the 1960s thanks to music’s re-embrace of tonality. What was old can sound new again.