40th Season for Glimmerglass Opera

In this town, people are talking about Francesca Zambello.

This town being not Washington, D.C., where Zambello is artistic director of Washington National Opera, but Cooperstown, New York. As you may have heard, this bucolic upstate village is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where four new members will
inducted July 24-27.

Soon thousands of visitors, many times the resident population, will be streaming in for the baseball festivities. But the weekend before, quite a few people will be heading out to State Highway 80, also known as Lake Street. Just outside of town on scenic Otsego Lake is the Glimmerglass Festival, which will be in its second week. Glimmerglass, where Zambello has been artistic and general director since 2011, is celebrating its 40th summer season of presenting top-drawer operas.

This year’s festival, which runs through Aug. 23, kicked off with back-to-back Friday and Saturday openings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Guiseppi Verdi’s “Macbeth.” It continues during Hall of Fame weekend with “Macbeth” on Friday, the rarely seen Vivaldi opera “Cato in Utica” on Saturday and the Zambello-directed production of Leonard Bernstein’s musically wondrous take on Voltaire’s “Candide” on Sunday.

“Up here,” one local said, “it’s baseball and Butterfly” (as in “Madama Butterfly”) or, more currently, Mantle and Mozart. The baseball you would expect. But opera, Zambello-style, that’s another matter.

And it’s had an impact. Taking in the highly original and stirring “Magic Flute” opener, a patron — who had travelled from New York City for the occasion — told us that Zambello had made “a huge difference. She’s turned it around.”

The next day, while waiting at a Main Street ATM, we talked with a local man who had moved to what he called “baseball heaven” from the New York City borough of Queens. The self-described baseball fanatic noted Zambello’s effect on the town. “Glimmerglass has a great reputation,” he said. “We’re glad to have her here.”

“She works closely and partners with other local cultural institutions like Hyde Hall,” a Cooperstown tourism professional said. Jonathan Maney, executive director of haunting and historic Hyde Hall, on the other side of the lake, praised Zambello’s spirit of cooperation and partnership.

At both openings last week, Zambello seemed to be everywhere — thanking patrons and contributors, board members, audience members and the town itself, being the evangelist for opera. This is not dissimilar from what she does on Washington Opera opening nights, turning greeter and up-close opera champion.

We spoke with Zambello at the Glimmerglass administrative offices last week, as the company prepared for its big anniversary opening. She was in her full opera-pied-piper persona.

“We want to create work and productions that resonate with audiences,” she said. “I see my job here as expanding the audience, growing it, but also making this a true festival. This is a very specific place, a beautiful place, with a lot to offer, and we want to connect to this community. As a for-instance, Madeline Sayet, our director for “The Magic Flute,” staged it in a way that the forest setting resonates to the history of the area, and the Native American inhabitants. And she herself is a descendant of the Mohicans.

“I want the festival to be an integral part of the town and the surrounding area. We draw mostly from the surrounding New York state area, and 50 percent come from within a two-hour radius of Cooperstown. We also get a lot of people coming up from Washington,” Zambello said.

The company has a 40-year history. It presented its first, abbreviated season in 1975, with four performances of “La bohème” in the Cooperstown High School auditorium. Twelve years later, the company opened the 850-seat Alice Busch Opera Theater at the Lake Otswego site. Ever since then, especially in the last few years, the company has grown in size, repertoire, variety of offerings and reputation.

There’s something heady about finding a company like this in a small town, the historic shrine to America’s Pastime. The Glimmerglass site is at once accessible and elegant with its scenic lake backdrop, stylish theater and sense of youthful energy. Here, it’s not your urban opera night out. You can ritz it up if you want, but informality is encouraged. “Blue jeans, khakis, informal — not that you can’t dress up if you want,” says Zambello.

This year’s season is characteristic of her touch. Since she took the reins as artistic director, she’s planned seasons with very specific goals. “Each year, we present a season that includes an American musical, a baroque opera, a contemporary work and an opera that’s somewhat obscure and rarely done.” In her first year, she brought in celebrated soprano Deborah Voigt to star in “Annie Get Your Gun.”

But wait … there’s more. The gifted rising-star bass-baritone Eric Owens (“The Flying Dutchman” at WNO this year), who gave a powerful, layered performance as “Macbeth,” will sing with tenor Lawrence Brownlee in a concert on Aug. 23. Voigt and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade will give master classes Aug. 7 and 21, respectively. There’s also “Odyssey,” a world-premiere youth opera featuring the Glimmerglass Youth Chorus and members of its Young Artist Program, presented at the Cooperstown Arts Festival Aug. 11, 13, 18 and 20.

“We are thinking of Glimmerglass in terms of a destination experience,” Zambello said. “It speaks to being part of this place, in connecting and resonating with audiences and offering a number of different experiences. We are telling stories here, that’s the key to opera.”