SAM GOODYEAR

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ART BEAT

This week we are considering two barns: The Windfall Dutch Barn, a pre-revolutionary restored structure in Salt Springville about eight miles north of Route 20 from East Springfield, and Glimmerglass Opera, hard to miss on Route 80 eight miles north of Cooperstown.
The Windfall Dutch Barn was used as a resting and feeding place during General Clinton’s wagon march to the Susquehanna River.
Noted architect Hugh Hardy used the barn structure and aesthetic as the starting point for his ingenious and moving Glimmerglass Opera house, which has taken to its rustic setting with increasing familiarity over its 21-year existence.
The Windfall Barn offers an annual summer concert series that is varied, pure, seriously stimulating, and criminally inexpensive. Ticket prices never exceed $8 and $3 (or even non-existent).
And yet on Thursday, July 24, there were far too many empty seats for a genial concert by the Leonata String Quartet and guest flutist Kyle Yacobucci.
I wouldn’t have minded if it had been amateurish and cacophonic
(which it was not), for the seductive structure itself invites reflection on how good life can be.
The second of Bach’s orchestral suites, a Mozart divertimento, Gershwin’s Lullaby, and Dvorak’s Humoreske satisfied the ear and the heart. There are several events left this summer. GO.
(518-993-2239/dalter@adelphia.net)
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Why is it that at vastly more costly tickets, the barn at Glimmerglass is usually teeming with hundreds of patrons? Is increased expense the way to go? It beats me.
I do know, however, that you get your money’s worth there, too.
The fourth Shakespeare production of this season opened Saturday, July 26, with Vicenzo Bellini’s telling of the Romeo and Juliet story, “I Capuleti e i Montecchi.”
Attending any version of Romeo and Juliet is a bit like going to a retelling of the Titanic catastrophe. Both are so well known, there is no suspense.
But the powerful melodies and vocal lines of Bellini make up for any flagging interest in the plot.
One hears his operas (“Norma,” “La Sonnambula,” “I Puritani”...) but rarely, because they are almost unsingable. Rare are the voices that can do justice to this master of bel canto.
Well, you’ll be rewarded and enriched by the performances in general, but assaulted by pleasure and wonder by Sandra Piques Eddy (Romeo) and Sarah Coburn (Giulietta).
The vocal pyrotechnics for which Bellini is famous are a potential crowd-pleasing trap, successful and worthy of note only if they serve the emotion of the moment.
When it’s a “look at me” undertaking, it betrays art, and insults the public. In this production, there is integrity, honesty and purity, real Bellini.
Grumblers deriding the “modernist” and rock approach to some of Glimmerglass’s productions, need have no trepidation in this case.
Nineteenth Century traditions are reverently observed, and the music, deceptively simple but exaltingly lofty, will carry you with it, even if you loathe opera.
It is a joy to be able to hear Bellini in the Alice Busch Theater at last!

Sam Goodyear’s column on the arts in and around Otsego County appears weekly.

Labels: Art Beat, Columns, Glimmerglass, Sam Goodyear