Feeling blue at Glimmerglass opera festival
“Glimmerglass”. The name of the opera festival held annually in Otsego county, upstate New York, near Cooperstown, sounds a siren call. It’s not a real location, which only adds to the allure. Cooperstown is real enough, home to the Baseball Hall of Fame and a totem of ghastliness to be avoided at all costs. Unless you like baseball. Which I don’t.
Glimmerglass was a term coined for Lake Otsego, near which the festival takes place, by early 19th century author, James Fenimore Cooper in his novel “The Deerslayer”. When an area of 593 acres to the north of the lake was dedicated as Glimmerglass State Park, naming the festival “Glimmerglass” was a slam-dunk choice.
It’s the “Oz” of opera festivals, an enchanted, isolated place accessed from Manhattan, not by a Yellow Brick Road, but by the more prosaic New York State Thruway, turn left at state capital Albany, and – passing through Schenectady – on for another 75 tortuous miles – on to “Glimmerglass”.
That’s if you’re smart. I chose scenic Route 23, to the west of the River Hudson, because it would take me through iconic Woodstock, though not Bethel Farm where the 1969 festival was actually held. You can see why Joni Mitchell opted for “Woodstock”. “By the time we got to Bethel, we were half a million strong” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
It took forever. Not helped by the fact that I veered off by mistake onto the even-more-scenic Route 23A and meandered through village after village. That satnav glitch proved an education.
Slight diversion: I had stumbled into a different America, leaving the bustling, rich – if sometime crumbling – Tri State area and penetrating a soft underbelly of rural poverty. Every village was dotted with shuttered clapboard homes, standing out like rotten teeth. Often, abandoned furniture was strewn across front porches. Once thriving farming communities were down and out.
This is Trump country. In 2016 the Bronx voted 9.6% for Donald Trump. In unentitled Otsego County, where I was headed now, he scored 53.4%. Out of the car window I was seeing the reason why he is President and Hillary is not. I was in the land of the despicables, usually by-passed by visitors.
Enough! Back on track. An opera festival has been held in Glimmerglass since 1975, first in a school theatre, then in 1987 moving to the pale, tiered, wooden opera house – The Alice Busch Opera Theater – that rises suddenly from the surrounding countryside, as Route 80 skirts Lake Otsego, then heads off into a deeper landscape between the Catskill and Adirondack mountains.
The festival is a showcase for rising-star students who spend the summer honing their craft and experiencing the thrill of performance. The pay may be rubbish, but the setting is idyllic and scouts from opera houses around the US are on the prowl. If they’re lucky the students might even get fed. Still, Glimmerglass is a sought after invitation.
This year, the programme featured Jerome Kern’s “Showboat”; Verdi’s “La Traviata”, “The Ghosts of Versailles” by John Corigliano, which I dearly wish I could have seen, and the world premiere of “Blue”, offered up by Jeanine Tesori, composer, and librettist/director Tazewell Thomson, which I did see – and dearly wished I hadn’t.
Keen to understand what “Blue” was all about, I bowled along to a pre-opera talk by Professor John Palmer of Colgate University, who teaches courses on “Race, White Supremacy and Education”. No preconceptions there then!
Silly me, I thought he was going to talk about the opera. What we got was a frenzied rant about white privilege, in which he encouraged the audience to “recognise” their inner prejudices and, “lay them on the table”. This was a repeating trope. I don’t know what he meant. We had to wake up and “lay it on the table”; reach out and “lay it on the table”.
All hyperventilating drivel, which boded ill for the opera to follow. At one point he told the audience we had to confront inner white supremacy and invited us to “take that message to people we know in the Ku Klux Klan”. Eh? Must keep that in mind at my next Chapter meeting in Wandsworth.
I turned to the tweed-clad elderly lady with a bun and round wire specs sitting next to me, who had been nodding and twitching vigorously in approval throughout and asked, who in the Ku Klux Klan she intended to confront. Aghast, she chirruped, “Of course, he doesn’t mean I know any of them”. Yes he did! I turned to the elderly gentleman on my right. He had simply nodded off.
Finding myself next to Professor Palmer in the interval coffee queue I cheerily asked what “laying it on the table” actually meant. He looked at me pityingly and said, “It’s in there. You need to lay it on the table”, He wandered into the night, a self-satisfied exemplar of what is wrong in today’s American higher education system, where tenured charlatans pop up everywhere like ill-sown dragons’ teeth.
In spite of the Prof, I was looking forward to “Blue”. It was rubbish; one of worst conceived operas I have ever seen. Billed as a searing condemnation of racism in America, the plot was founded on a fabricated – and corrosive – premise – that pregnant African Americans are dismayed if their offspring is male, because they are likely to be shot by white police officers. Tout court. Where did that come from? No evidence base offered.
Of course, that’s exactly what happened as the plot unfolded. The action centres on an African American family in Harlem. The husband joins the police force – hence “Blue” – amidst scenes of dismay from his pals.
In Act 1 the mother, Pennsylvanian mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter, calls a coven of girlfriends to her Harlem apartment, to tell them she is expecting a boy. Shock and despair all round.
From the get go, composer, Jeanine Tesori, falls flat on her face. Ms. Tesori is acclaimed for her Broadway work – five Tonys to her credit – but her arch, Broadway style clashed with the serious intent of Mr. Thompson’s libretto.
He is a playwright and opera director, turned librettist. His best-known play, “Constant Star”, depicts in graphic detail the horrific carnival atmosphere that typified Southern lynchings. He has a mission.
Presumably “Blue”, cack-handed though it is, was meant to be that mission’s next chapter, targeting the phenomenon of police violence in the USA – 1,000 shootings of civilians a year, many of them captured gruesomely on CCTV; many of them involving racial prejudice. Valid topic. But, Ms. Tesori’s tuneful arias and Mr. Tazewell’s inexplicably comedic direction undermined any serious purpose a more charitable observer than I might credit him with.
Spool on sixteen years, we find the now-grumpy, inevitably-hoodied son – ably sung by 20 year old Maryland tenor, Aaron Crouch – alienated from his cop father – sung by Washington bass, Kenneth Kellogg, a dignified stage presence in spite of the duff libretto – railing at him for upholding “an oppressive system”. This was “Yes, but… No, but…” dialogue of the most simplistic sort.
Now came a fatal dramatic flaw. When we next encounter the mother and father the son has been shot already. No explanation is given of circumstance, no depiction of the shooting portrayed. The audience is barred from forming any balanced judgement as to the rights and wrongs of what has happened. We are a jury deprived of evidence.
Instead, we learn it was, inevitably, a white policeman – preordained to kill him from curtain up – who has shot him any old how. Is blame to be apportioned elsewhere at all? Forget it. It was as if in “Julius Caesar” the complex stabbing scene in the Theatre of Pompey – with all its subtle inflections of guilt – is avoided and action skips straight to Mark Anthony’s speech.
In the next scene the father adopts the attitude of his son, stripping off his police badge and, after a tearful funeral, returns to “his community”.
There follows a bizarre epilogue in which the father, mother and son – somehow resurrected – gather around the kitchen table and, reconciled to his father, the son announces he is going to embark on one, last peaceful protest. I have no idea what that scene means theatrically. I recount it simply because it happened.
Individual performances were excellent, Ms. Hunter being the standout. She will star elsewhere. Set Designer, Donald Eastman, did an excellent job, framing the action against a white backdrop, which reflected moods in ever changing colour. Simple, but effective and good use of a limited budget.
The conductor was John DeMain, a veteran with 20 seasons notched up at the Madison Symphony Orchestra, Wisconsin. The question nagging me was, why don’t they use one of the rising star conducting students from New York’s Juilliard School to perform at what is, after all, a festival celebrating a new generation of musicians?
I shall return to Glimmerglass next year. It would be unfair to tar a festival with the brush of my misfortune of having to sit through “Blue”. My bad luck that I missed the good gigs. As I drove back to New York, past Fenimore Cooper’s glimmering lake, I consoled myself with a thought. No-one is likely to perform “Blue” again anytime soon.