Glimmerglass Festival. Puccini's Tosca. July 20, 2025.

Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, NY.  Balcony (Seat E6, $119.50).

End of opera.  Standing to the left of the conductor are Tosca and Scarpia, to his right is Cavaradossi.

Story.  See prior post.

Conductor - Joseph Colaneri; Tosca - Michelle Bradley, Cavaradossi - YongZhao Yu, Scarpia - Grimsley, Angelotti - Donhoon Kang, A Sacristan - Sergio Martinez, Spoletta - Lellan Dunlap, Sciarrone - Luke Harnish.

This was the second of the two-opera package we got for our first year at Glimmerglass, and we were not disappointed.

The entire story of Tosca happened in one day (well, it may spill into the next morning), where Tosca's and Mario's lives got upended from blissful banter to utter despair.  Indeed all three protagonists die at the end, and in this production all three bodies were show on stage.  Let me describe how it was set up.  First of course was Mario being executed, and then Scarpia's body was brought out onto the stage (usually it's someone announcing that Scarpia's body was found), and Tosca killed herself with a gun (other productions I have seen have her jump to her death).  What we saw today worked, very well in my opinion.  (Although one could argue the blood splatter wasn't necessry.)

All the singers had strong voices.  One of the (many) defining arias was of course "Vissi d'arte."  To me a great rendition would have Tosca start softly and wistfully, eventually turning into a full-throated rage at fate.  Today it was loud, and louder.  Not ideal (for me anyway), but it worked.  A missed opportunity, in my opinion, as the auditorium is small enough that a soft voice would carry well into the hall.  If I trust my pitch, she had a little trouble with the two high notes.

The sets were relatively simple, but worked.  Act I took place inside a church.  I didn't understand why some structures (for lack of a better term) were covered in tarp at the beginning, and later revealed.  Also I wanted to see the painting of Magdalene that Mario was working on, unfortunately it faced away from the audience (and I bet it was a blank canvass).  For Act II the stage was divided into three parts, the left was a bathroom, the middle was Scarpia's office, and the right was the torture chamber (or its anteroom).  For Act III we have the execution grounds, the bathroom was kept and Tosca went there to kill herself with a gun she took from Scarpia's office.

End of Act I.  The Sacristan and Angelotti took their bows.

I snapped this photo at the end of Act II, not knowing there would be no break before Act III (oops).

I rained heavily during intermission.  There was no covered walkway between the Theater and the washrooms, and some people wore proper attire (e.g., ladies in high heels).  The rest of the time the weather was very nice.

Our first encounter with Glimmerglass was a "success."  I used the term "it works" quite a bit in these two blog entries.  It may be due to the small auditorium, or my expectations (no preconceived notion), or the simple but effective set designs.  A major factor, however, is the singing was uniformly superb.  That goes for The Rake's Progress also.  As an indication of the Festival's popularity, they were remarking their initial fundraising goal of $5M was reached, and they were upping that to $7.5M.

Whether it is intentional or not, Glimmerglass Festival seems to strive to make opera accessible to everyone, and succeeds in doing it.  The music director Colaneri, who would conduct today's performance, gave the pre-concert talk. He described Puccini as a not very successful musician when he started out, but changed  after he saw Aida in Pisa.

To be fair, I recently read a review of "House on Mango Street" that was quite brutal.  So not everything comes up roses, or there are always detractors (as I often am, not in this instance, though).

I rate our return next season as likely.

Glimmerglass Festival. Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. July 19, 2025.

Alice Busch Opera Theater, Cooperstown, NY.  (Balcony, Seat E4, $119.50).

At curtain call, from left: Sellum, Trulove, ?, Anne Trulove, ?, Conductor, ?, ?, Tom Rakewell, Nick Shadow, Baba the Turk, Mother Goose. The ?s are the production team.

Story.  Tom Rakewell turns down a job arranged by his fiance Anne Trulove's father.  While he wants to be rich, he doesn't want to work for it.  Nick Shadow shows up and informs Tom that he has been left an inheritance, and the two go off to London to settle the affair.  When Tom asks Nick how he could be repaid, Nick says the wages will be fair, and determined in a year and a day.  Nick brings Tom to a brothel, while Tom initially shows some hesitation, he eventually spends the night with Mother Goose, the madam of the house.  Tom then wishes for happiness, and Nick arranges for him to marry Baba the Turk, a bearded lady on display at the fair.  Anne comes to London and meets Tom, who says he is now unworthy and asks Anne to leave.  Tom and Baba get into an argument, Tom falls asleep, and dreams of an invention that turns stone into bread.  When he finds out the invention is real, he wants to do good with it, but is convinced by Nick to use it to fool potential investors.  Tom eventually ends up broke, and his possessions, including Baba, are up for auction.  Nick leads Tom to a graveyard and tells him time (one year and a day) is up, and he is to kill himself before midnight.  Nick, who turns out to be the devil, then offers Tom an alternative: they will gamble for Tom's soul.  Tom wins as he bets on Queen of Hearts.  Nick Shadow then condemns Tom to insanity.  Tom now imagines himself as Adonis, the lover of Venus.  Anne visits Tom in the asylum.  After Tom falls asleep as she sings, she leaves.  For the epilog, every principal describes a moral of the story.  The opera concludes with them singing "for idle hands hearts and minds, the Devil finds a work to do."

Conductor - Joseph Colaneri; Tom Rakewell - Adrian Kramer, Anne Trulove - Lydia Grindatto, Nick Shadow - Aleksey Bogdanov, Baba the Turk - Deborah Nansteel, Trulove - Marc Webster, Mother Goose -Tzytle Steinman, Sellem - Kellan Dunlap.

Over the years "Glimmerglass" would come to my attention every now and then.  Other than its being an opera festival, I knew very little about it.  Something as fundamental as if it is where well-known musicians come together for the summer, or a training program for young artists.  We decided to find out this year.

Stravinsky wrote several operas.  A search of the web would indicate The Rake's Progress and Oedipus Rex are his most popular ones: their titles translate to rather intense subject matters.  The Rake's Progress tells the same story depicted in a series of eight paintings by William Hogarth, completed in 1735.  The is the first time the opera is staged at Glimmerglass.

We attended the pre-concert talk given by the Principal Coach and Orchestra Keyboard Christopher Devlin - we would see him at the harpsichord at the performance.  I jotted down a few things he said.  The opera is among the top 5 performed English opera, and is a challenging work.  Devlin also described how the beginning referred to Monteverdi's Orfeo, and that Stravinsky used a fanfare to start the program.  The opera starts and ends on A major (most people can't tell after 2 1/2 hours).  There are four tenor arias, the last three are for dramatic introductions/effects that the audience doesn't not applaud.  Well, it is difficult to decide which of the solo passages sung by the tenor were these arias, and the audience didn't get the memo about the applause as they did it anyway.  While I was expecting an overview of the work (this is the premiere after all), I found his remarks quite useful.

The auditorium has a capacity of 918, so the singers could be heard clearly most of the time.  And the projected titles helped.  The set design is on the simple side, but quite effective, but there were times that I wasn't sure what was being depicted (e.g., the sedan Baba the Turk was in).  The singers all did well, and made this fictional story quite believable.  I would note for future reference that the harpsichord was the only instrument used during the card game between Nick and Tom (not sure how that's significant).

The Alice Busch Opera Theater is built like a barn to blend in with the surroundings.

The side walls of the auditorium are closed before the performance.  They do have fans to provide some relief if the theater gets too warm.

The opera was written during Stravinsky's neo-classical period, and is quite accessible even for a first-time listener.  The arias are not always easily hummable, but are as classical as what one can expect from that period.  While the story is simple, I still managed to get lost every now and then.  What is most interesting for me is there is such a strong moral element to it.  Of course it could well be a parody - we are talking about someone who wrote the Rite of Spring, after all.  (A good 40 or so years earlier.)

The Opera Theater does not have air conditioning.  In the balcony there are a couple of giant fans - they were not on this afternoon, but they were on Sunday during Tosca.  The sides were open before the performance started, but the walls were "drawn" at the start of the opera.  Today wasn't excessively hot, so it felt okay in our short-sleeves.

The opera started at 1 pm (well, a couple of people said something), and ended just before 4 pm.

Metropolitan Opera on Demand. Wagner's Die Meistersing von Nurmberg. Watcheded July 15, 2025.

Performance date: December 13, 2014.

Conductor - James Levine.  Walther von Stolzing - Johan Botha; Eva - Annette Dasch; Magdalene - Karen Cargill; David - Paul Appleby; Pogner - Hans-Peter Konig; Beckmesser - Johannes Martin Kranzle; Hans Sachs - Michael Volle.

We are heading to Bayreuth next month to see three operas: Meistersinger, Lohengrin, and Parsifal.  As we did last year, we plan to watch these operas online beforehand so we won't get completely lost during the performances (in German, no surtitles of any kind).

We had only one prior encounter with this opera live, that was in December 23, 2014.  In the performance we saw, the only major cast change was James Morris singing the role of Sachs.  That was over 10 years ago, and the only things I remembered were (1) the guilds marching into town square; (2) Sachs had some extended passages that tested any singer's endurance; and (3) was their any historical basis to what unfolded in the opera?

The story itself was rather straightforward.  It was easier to grasp compared to last time (or at least as described in my blog entry).  In the last scene there had to be about 200 people on stage; I wonder if that was necessary.  It's also interesting that this is the only opera Wagner wrote that was close to being realistic.  I do worry, given how slow the story unfolds, if I will manage to stay with the plot when we see it live next month.

Many associate Beckmesser with having antisemitic overtones, I frankly didn't detect any.  German cultural identify had a more prominent position.

As to my earlier perceptions:  (1) I somehow remember maypoles showing different guilds being part of the set; only individual guild standards were brought out.  Well, the tradition of maypoles dates back to the 16th century; this story is from a similar time.  (2) while the role of Sachs is taxing, it didn't appear as impossible as last time; and (3) now that we have been to Nuremberg several times, I am certainly more interested in the background to the opera - at least to the extent I will read the Wikipedia article on it.

The opera is 4:30 hours in length, the last act is close to two hours.

Manhattan Chamber Players. Yasmina Spiegelberg, clarinet; Luke Fleming, viola; David Fung, piano. July 14, 2025.

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton, NJ.  Balcony (Left front, free).

The concert started at 7:30 pm and concluded at 9:43 pm.  Notice the second clarinet on the floor.

Program

Trio in E-flat major, K. 498 "Kegelstatt" (1786) by Mozart (1756-91).

Marchenerzahlungen for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 132 (1853) by R. Schumann (1810-56).

Concertpiece for Viola and Piano (1906) by Enescu (1881-1955).

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, FP 184) (1962) by Poulenc (1899-1963).

Selections from Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 83 (1908) by Bruch (1838-1920).

I don't recall ever listening to so much music where the instruments were the viola, the clarinet, and the piano.  Tonight we had about an hour of it.  The concert lasted over 2 hours, counting the introductions and the intermission.  A duet each of viola/piano and clarinet/piano were also included in the program.

Remarks were made - mostly by Fleming, who is the Founding Artistic Director of the ensemble - about each of the pieces.  What follows is my recollection of what was said about each piece,  "Kegelstatt" is the game of bowling, Mozart supposedly wrote the piece during the breaks in the game.  By the time he wrote the trio on today's program, Robert Schumann was already suffering from mental issues - he would attempt suicide in 1854.  Evidently much of his music written during this time was "chaotic" (not sure what word Fleming used); Marchenerzahlungen was an exception.  The title means "fairy tale narratives."  I forget the descriptions of the Enescu (other than his contemporaries) piece.  Poulenc wrote the clarinet/piano sonata in memory of a friend, the first movement is sadness, the second movement is more sadness, the last is "life goes on."  Poulenc died before he could premiere the piece with Benny Goodman.  (Spielberger didn't say the "substitute" pianist was Leonard Bernstein.)  Fleming (jokingly) said Burch should have died younger, as then he wouldn't have to contend with all the new composition methods in the early 20th century (12-tone being a prominent one).  Nonetheless Bruch stayed with classical romanticism and left behind some popular works.  The last movement in the program (VII. Allegro vivace, ma non troppo) was selected so the trio could finish with a flourish - fair enough.

It was overall a very enjoyable evening.  Despite the heavy rains, attendance was good.  The applauses were also enthusiastic, deservedly so.  For me it's a chance to really listen to the viola, which somehow is an instrument I have trouble picking up in any ensemble.  That was less so today, but some passages still proved elusive.  In the Bruch Moderato (VIII) there are a couple of passages the clarinet and the viola played in unison, yet I had to strain to pick out the viola line.  The unspoken hero/workhorse was of course the piano.  Not only were the pieces a challenge, the pianist didn't get any breaks.

The Manhattan Chamber Players is a "collective" of over 20 musicians (per their website).  We attended a concert in 2022 where the instrumentalists were more traditional: 3 strings plus piano.  Interestingly, Spielberger isn't listed in their roster.

There were four concerts in this year's Princeton University Summer Chamber Concerts series.  Our schedule allowed us to attend only the July 11 and July 14 concerts.  The July 11 concert was canceled (last minute) because of weather in Chicago causing many flights to be canceled, and the cello quartet artists couldn't find 8 seats (for cellos as well) after their flight was canceled.  Indeed today's concert could have been canceled as well - a weather emergency was issued for the entire state in the evening.  We decided to stick with major roadways on our way back, with my bad eyesight, winding roads through unknown terrain, who knows what would have happened had I taken the route suggested by Google.

At Princeton they spell it "cancelled."

All in all a nice evening, even though both Anne and I got our shoes wet stepping into (unavoidable) puddles.