Hits in a baseball town

This small village appears to have one thing on its mind. But past the Baseball Hall of Fame and the endless souvenir shops is the imposing, beautiful Lake Otsego, which James Fenimore Cooper called Glimmerglass. And along the shore is the improbable, winning Glimmerglass Opera.

It’s improbable not just because there doesn’t seem to be much reason for summer opera to thrive alongside the commerce of sport but because important, adventurous opera companies don’t usually spring up so quickly from such humble origins anywhere, let alone in a village of 2,000 year-round residents. The company began when local opera lovers put together a production of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in the Cooperstown High School Auditorium.

Twelve years later, in 1987, it had grown sufficiently in size, stature and ambition to open a 900-seat theater on a wonderful lakeside site a few miles out of town. Neither air-conditioned nor heated, the Alice Busch Opera Theater is a handsome wooden barn, unnecessarily dolled up with Victorian ornaments and with sides that can open to the lawns outside. It might be stifling in hot weather, frigid in cold, but the atmosphere is congenially informal. At matinee performances on hot days earlier this week, many audience members arrived in shorts and sandals and picnicked on the grounds. But the house was not uncomfortable, and the acoustics are special. Perfect for Mozart.

Most important of all, the opera is world-class and interesting. The artistic director, Paul Kellogg, who is also general and artistic director of New York City Opera, often uses Glimmerglass these days to develop productions he will bring to Lincoln Center. But cognoscenti know it’s better to go upstate than to see the works in the acoustically troubled New York State Theater.

Each summer, the productions are unveiled throughout July and then run in repertory, seven performances a week, in August. On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, I saw Handel’s “Orlando,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Robert Kurka’s “The Good Soldier Schweik,” missing only Offenbach’s “Bluebeard.” The musical level was high, with impressive young singing actors.

I had pretty much expected that the company could pull off Handel and a jazzy comic opera about the literary antics of the hapless Czech soldier who inspired “Catch-22.” Bejun Mehta and Christine Brandes assured zestful singing in “Orlando.” It was impossible to resist Anthony Dean Griffey as Schweik, even if he did portray him as more a lovable oaf than a sly trickster.

But the surprise was the intense, disturbing “Don Giovanni,” staged as a violent modern drama. More surprising still was that Francisco Negrin, the Mexican director who made a muddle of Handel’s “Julius Caesar” at Los Angeles Opera, here created such a hair-raising staging for this co-production with New York City Opera.

Updated and performed on a cold, spare architectural set, Mozart’s semi-comic opera may never have seemed blacker. Mozart meant his Giovanni, the mythical seducer, to charm us on some level, even as we disapprove. The Danish baritone Palle Knudsen, head shaved, is, instead, a vicious, unrepentant serial rapist. Yet with what fascination we watch his animal cruelty, his tiger-like grace while on the attack, his irresistible self-confidence and control. This is a performance in which there is only Don Giovanni and his victims. The mob gets him in the end, but he goes down fighting, unrepentant. There are few laughs.

The good-looking young cast was captivating, particularly Maria Kanyova as a vibrant, tortured Donna Anna, and Amy Burton as a princessy Donna Elvira. The company’s music director, Stewart Robertson, led a sleek, graciously phrased and neatly played performance that included having the singers ornament the repeats of their arias.

For “Orlando,” one had to be satisfied with the singing. Twenty years ago, Peter Sellars updated Handel’s opera to Cape Canaveral and was attacked for his silliness. Under that concept, though, was a serious core. The new Glimmerglass staging by Chas Rader-Shieber, also a co-production with New York City Opera, is just silly. The set by David Zinn is a series of Postmodern cliches -- distorted angled walls and a precariously hilly floor, a confusion of outdoors and indoors, hospital beds in the forest, foppish costumes and kitschy cupids.

Mehta, in the title role, who was said to be suffering from sinus problems Sunday (he canceled an earlier performance), lacked his usual charisma but was still appealingly heroic in sound. Brandes as Dorinda, the shepherdess (here the nurse of a ward of cupid’s victims, tending their arrow wounds), brought to the afternoon a deeper level of rapt poetry. Bernard Labadie’s conducting was fast and light, rather than dramatic and moving, but it fell very pleasantly on the ear.

“Schweik” -- which was given its premiere by New York City Opera in 1958, a year after composer Kurka’s untimely death -- has recently shown up only now and then, although there is a new recording from Chicago, where Kurka was born. The opera makes a strong antiwar statement as the optimist Schweik wreaks havoc in the army, showing up the absurdities of war. The veteran director Rhoda Levine, however, treats it as a mere travesty. An overall theme of Glimmerglass this year is madness and war, and in Levine’s agitprop production, which she originally mounted in Amsterdam nearly 30 years ago, the inmates literally run the asylum. It’s all farce and no bite. It also plays things safe politically in an all-American baseball town.

Kurka has his fans for his lightweight score, which pays tribute to Kurt Weill and Milhaud while sharing little of their melodic inspiration. But Griffey, who is in every scene, looked as though he were having the time of his life on the stage, his tenor pure and plangent from first note to last. His voice is not as large as he is, but it is as vibrant, and that vibrancy can get lost in a big house. Glimmerglass puts the glimmer back in. Steward was again the sympathetic conductor.

The final opera of the four this season, “Bluebeard,” has a production by the often startling Christopher Alden. One rehearsal photograph shows an Elvis imitator. Like the other offerings at Glimmerglass, it is certain to have something to recommend it. Even failures here offer the great pleasure of experiencing opera put on with verve in a place where you feel connected to the action and don’t have to dress up.

At one intermission, Kellogg assured me that New York City Opera would eventually be moving to a new theater on the site of the World Trade Center, no matter what has been reported elsewhere. If not, he might consider building another Glimmerglass on the shores of the Hudson.