Glimmerglass Opera
Glimmerglass Opera
Glimmerglass Opera is an opera
company which was founded in 1975 and presents an annual season of operas at the
Alice Busch Opera Theater on the lake eight miles (13 km) north of Cooperstown,
New York, United States.
The summer-only season usually consists of four operas performed in rotating
repertory. Glimmerglass is well-known for producing new, lesser-known, and rare
works, many of which are co-produced with the New York City Opera. It is the
second-largest summer opera festival in the United States, led by Artistic and
General Director Michael MacLeod and Associate Artistic Director John Conklin.
The company presented its first season in the summer of 1975, when four
performances of La bohème were staged in the auditorium of the Cooperstown High
School. In the years since, it has grown considerably and now offers more than
40 performances of four operas, nearly always in new productions, each summer.
Operas have been performed in repertory since 1990. For the first seventeen
seasons, all operas were sung in English; since 1992 they have, with some
exceptions, been performed in their original language with English projected
titles.
Several works have had their American or world premieres at Glimmerglass; the
1999 season featured the world premiere of Central Park, three one-act operas
performed as a single work. The triptych was jointly commissioned by
Glimmerglass Opera, New York City Opera, and Thirteen/WNET's Great Performances,
which telecast it on PBS in January 2000. The telecast was nominated for an Emmy
award.
Stewart Robertson was music director of Glimmerglass Opera from 1988 to 2006. In
October 2008, Glimmerglass Opera announced the appointment of David Angus as the
company's next music director, starting in the summer of 2010.
Glimmerglass Opera's Alice Busch
Opera Theater, which opened in June 1987, was built on 43 acres (17 ha) of
donated farmland. The 900-seat theater is notable for its pastoral setting, for
being the first American opera house built since 1966, and for its sliding
walls, closed only while singers are on-stage and in foul weather.
Glimmerglass Opera’s 2009 Festival Season features three new productions of
Verdi’s La Traviata, with director Jonathan Miller, Kevin Newbury's rendition of
the Cinderella story in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Menotti’s The Consul, directed
by Sam Helfrich and dramatized concerts of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. The season
runs July 18 through August 25, 2009.
Text from Wikipedia
