Glimmerglass Festival stars Christine Goerke in dual role

And yet, where is she singing this summer? In the middle of an open field on the shores of Lake Otsego, just outside Cooperstown, N.Y.

It isn’t as bad as it sounds. Indeed, it is much better. That open field plays host to a remarkable building, the Hugh Hardy-designed, 914-seat Alice M. Busch Opera Theatre, home to one of the continent’s leading summer opera producers and the closest one to Toronto, the Glimmerglass Festival.

In case you were wondering, Glimmerglass is the nickname given the lake in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. And in case you were wondering further, Cooperstown was named after the novelist’s father. Everything seems to be interconnected in this part of New York state.

Goerke herself embodies the phenomenon. The Glimmerglass Young Artists Program supplied her first training experience as an aspiring singer. She made her debut in 1993 covering the role of Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

She is back this year as artist-in-residence, working with the next generation of young singers — Glimmerglass employs 36 of them as part of its company of 300 summer employees — as well as performing in recital and as the title character in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos.

The bilingual Glimmerglass production, directed by the festival’s artistic and general director, Francesca Zambello, has been moved from the house of “the richest man in Vienna” to the barn of a rural homestead, much like those surrounding the festival property.

Complete with farm animals, it is a production that, like so many of Zambello’s projects in her four years at the festival’s helm, seeks to connect the world of opera with the realities of today’s larger world

It is no accident, for example, that the contemporary opera in this year’s season (which runs through Aug. 24) is Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, which she directed at its Metropolitan Opera world premiere in 2005.

The Theodore Dreiser novel on which the opera is based is actually set in neighbouring Herkimer County and that fact in itself was part of her strategy to tempt upstate New Yorkers (as well as southern Ontarians) to investigate a modern opera.

Better known to some of these people from the film A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters, the story of the upward-striving Clyde Griffiths was longer in its telling at The Met, where Picker and his librettist Gene Scheer included an opening scene portraying their hero’s deprived childhood.

The co-creators have since reworked the opera, eliminating that scene, so the handsomely staged, more dramatically focused Glimmerglass production, directed by Peter Kazaras, effectively represents a new premiere.

All three of the season’s main stage operas (the fourth production, as part of Zambello’s goal to broaden the audience, is the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel) are works that underwent extensive revision before achieving their present popularity, and that includes Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

A further revision of Butterfly takes place in Zambello’s new production in that most of the opera is set not in a traditional Japanese house but in the American consulate in Nagasaki.

The advantage of this change eludes me and, despite the sympathetic conducting of Glimmerglass’s new music director, Joseph Colaneri, the production was sung with a singular lack of subtlety.

Although operas, especially the Italian kind, are primarily about singing, not every composer is equally generous toward the human voice. Puccini was a master in this regard, but Picker, in order to convey emotional extremity in his characters, often pushes their voices into a challengingly high register, to the obvious discomfort of some of his Glimmerglass cast.

Of course, not everyone possesses the voice of a Goerke. Ariadne’s aria, “Es gibt ein Reich” (There was a place), is one of the great showpieces in Strauss and, together with the succeeding duet with Bacchus (ably if not memorably sung by Corey Bix), represents a challenge few sopranos can face successfully.

Another high-powered soprano, Jessye Norman, presented one of this year’s Glimmerglass master classes last week. Together with an assortment of talks (one of them by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another by celebrity director Jonathan Miller) and various panels, previews and concerts, they make for a festival comprehensive in its temptations.

But what has drawn an internationally active stage director to make part of her living on the shores of Lake Otsego?

“This morning,” Zambello enthused, “I was kayaking at 6 a.m. Where else can you run an opera company and do that?”