The Glimmerglass Festival Announces 2013 Season

The Glimmerglass Festival, the Central New York summer opera and musical theater company, has announced its 2013 season and its partnership in The Festival of American Romantics in Cooperstown, New York.

Next summer, Glimmerglass will present new productions of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman; Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot; Verdi’s King for a Day (Un giorno di regno); and Passions, a double bill of David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. The productions will run in repertory July 6 through August 24 in the Alice Busch Opera Theater.

American baritone Nathan Gunn and pianist Julie Gunn will serve as the company’s 2013 Artists in Residence. The pair will work closely with members of the Young Artists Program, the acclaimed apprenticeship for young singers.

The 2013 Festival marks Francesca Zambello’s third season as Glimmerglass Festival Artistic & General Director. After her appointment in September 2010, Zambello initiated the company’s Artist in Residence program and began to incorporate an American musical into each season. Collaborations with area organizations also expanded. In this spirit, The Glimmerglass Festival, Fenimore Art Museum and Hyde Hall, a historic house and museum set on Otsego Lake, will join forces for The Festival of American Romantics inspired by Romantic composers, painters and writers in 2013.

The Fenimore Art Museum will offer a major loan exhibition highlighting the Romantic landscape. The show is themed around the Hudson River School painters with works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, among others. With more than 45 works, this will be the largest single exhibit on this topic ever presented by the Fenimore. Also on exhibit will be a 30-painting loan exhibition featuring the works of the Wyeth family including Andrew, Jamie, N.C. and his two daughters Henriette and Carolyn.

“The ideals and ideas of the Romantics underscore our 2013 season repertory,” said Francesca Zambello, Artistic & General Director of The Glimmerglass Festival. “We are excited to collaborate with a museum and historic site to highlight the connection of the art, music and literature of the Romantics in our pastoral setting.”

Glimmerglass will begin a new collaboration with Hyde Hall, where literary works of the American Romantics will be explored in the historic home during the 2013 Festival. Authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman will be presented in readings by writers and actors, complemented by musical performances.

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Richard Wagner, 1843)

The Flying Dutchman is the second opera by Richard Wagner to be produced by Glimmerglass, following the company’s 2008 production of Das Liebesverbot. Inspired in part by a harrowing ocean voyage, Wagner based his fourth opera on the story of a ghostly vessel doomed to traverse the seas for eternity. In The Flying Dutchman the ship’s captain finds redemption when a young woman proves her love by abandoning her life for him.

Glimmerglass’s new production, directed by Francesca Zambello, will celebrate the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth and be inspired by the Hudson River School’s romantic vision of the majestic natural landscape that continues to be associated with Central New York. The opera will be conducted by John Keenan. Keenan conducted Götterdämmerung with Deborah Voigt and Stefan Gould in Robert Lepage’s recent Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera and previously conducted the Met’s Das Rheingold with James Morris and Rene Papé. Jay Hunter Morris will sing the role of the huntsman Erik, fresh off of his performances as Siegfried in the Met’s 2013 Ring cycle. Melody Moore, recently seen in San Francisco Opera’s world premiere of Heart of a Soldier and as Mimì in English National Opera’s La bohème, will perform the role of Senta. Ryan McKinny will sing the role of The Dutchman. This winter he will perform the role of Melot in Tristan und Isolde with Canadian Opera Company and Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde with Houston Grand Opera. Peter Volpe will sing the role of Daland. Volpe has recently performed with the Met, as well as Vancouver and Arizona operas.