Soprano Deborah Voigt will be interviewed by radio host Nimet Habachy at the Metropolitan Museum’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at 6 p.m. tomorrow, May 10. The interview will cover Voigt’s great success in the Met’s new production of Die Walküre and her upcoming performance in Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun with us this summer. Tickets are at the door or go to Metmuseum.org for more information.
Deborah Voigt to Discuss Annie Get Your Gun
Designing Annie Get Your Gun
Court Watson designs sets and costumes for our upcoming production of Annie Get Your Gun, which will feature leading dramatic soprano Deborah Voigt as Annie.
Court’s designs have most recently been seen at Salzburger Landestheater, Ford’s Theater, the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. and Theatre Madgeburg in Germany. His production of Cabaret runs through March 27 at the John W. Engeman Theater at Northport. The New York Times review can be read here.
He took a break from his busy schedule recently to tell us a little about his designs for the Francesca Zambello-directed production of Annie Get Your Gun.
“Francesca and I were interested in exploring a time in American history when the real “Wild West” was already gone and we began to romanticize it in a fictionalized glossy way. By the 1890s, there was a Transcontinental Railroad, and Cincinnati was a big city. We looked at the graphic style of the period, from travel posters selling the idea of the Great West as well as folk art and barn paintings. The idea of the sunburst actually came from [a] photo of the rooster on the side of a barn in Ohio, near where Annie Oakley was really from. This graphic style is a romanticized version of the natural landscape in the same way that the musical romanticizes the West, but keeps it late enough that the real West is already gone.
The space is essentially an open space, like the Prairie, that can easily reconfigure as the cowgirls and cowboys of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, in and of itself a celebration of the lost West, push crates of scenery and costumes around. We are presenting their theatricalized version of the West, not the reality of the 1850s, long gone by the 1890s.
Conveniently, there is a WEALTH of biographical information and wonderfully stage studio photographs of Annie and Frank. We have drawn on them, along with period research to create a brightly colored world reminiscent of the Buffalo Bill poster art, tempered with real dirt and grime of these people working with live animals in the Great Outdoors.”
Gunslingin’ Soprano
Deborah Voigt will have had her fair share of on-stage gun handling leading up to her role as Annie Oakley this summer thanks to her recent appearances as Minnie, Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West.
Minnie is a poker-playin’, motherly and endearing, bossy yet self-conscience woman. Many of those qualities are found in Irving Berlin’s Annie Oakley – that, and both women carry a gun.
After performing the role of Minnie at San Francisco Opera last summer, Voigt went on to a run at the Met this December/January. New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini wrote “She looks in her element when she appears in Act I, breaking up a brawl in her bar by shooting three rounds on her rifle.”
She has gone on to sing the role at Lyric Opera of Chicago (which may be seen through Feb. 21). Of this portrayal, the Chicago Classical Review wrote, “Dramatically, the soprano seemed completely at home in the role whether in her hearty camaraderie with the boys in her saloon, breaking up bar fights with her six-shooter, or cheating at cards to save her man. Yet Voigt also showed touching vulnerability when conveying Minnie’s loneliness and her reawakened love for the on-the-lam bandit Ramerrez.”
While being interviewed backstage of The Girl of the Golden West during the Met’s Live in HD transmission (of which we are a proud partner), on January 8, Voigt mentioned her upcoming performances as Annie Oakley. Take a look:
Video courtesy The Metropolitan Opera.
Notes From Francesca: Shout Out
On Saturday, I had the opportunity to meet many of our Syracuse friends when I attended The Met: Live in HD broadcast at Carousel Center. The Glimmerglass Festival is now a proud partner with the Met’s Live in HD series, so in addition to traveling to Syracuse to tell everyone about our upcoming summer season we watched the Met’s production of La Fanciulla del West, which featured many singers you will see at Glimmerglass this summer. Debbie, for one, sang the title role – did you hear her mention her upcoming appearances as Annie Oakley at Glimmerglass? The mezzo-soprano who sang the role of Wowkle is Ginger Costa-Jackson, who joins us this summer as Carmen. Keith Miller, who sang the role Ashby, will sing the role of Escamillo in Carmen this summer. Dwayne Croft, who sang Sonora, also made a mention of his upstate New York upbringing during an interview.
All in all, we saw a lot of familiar faces during the Fanciulla broadcast. Expect to see many of these wonderful performers at Glimmerglass this summer.
Voigt: Brünnhilde to Annie Oakley
Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde on a poster outside the Met
Deborah Voigt makes several notable debuts this year, including her performances as Annie in next summer’s new production of Annie Get Your Gun. Prior to that in April, Voigt takes on the role of Brünnhilde for the first time in Robert Lepage’s new Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, conducted by James Levine. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Matt Dobkin at PlaybillArts.com back in March about her upcoming performance as Brünnhilde:
“PlaybillArts: Speaking of complicated roles, next season you’ll sing your first complete Brünnhilde in Robert Lepage’s new Ring. How are you feeling about that role?
Deborah Voigt: I’m excited and thrilled about it, but I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am sort of daunted by the challenge. It’s in the early stages, but I think it’s where it should be at the moment. You know, once you take on Isolde and Brünnhilde, there’s no going back. It is sort of the pinnacle of my career. But the timing is right given the repertoire that I’ve done and the experience that I have.”
Read the full interview here.
Goin’ West: Education and Recreation
During the summer, many Glimmerglass staffers are asked – “do you ever take vacation?” The Glimmerglass season is a labor of love. We work many, many hours during the summer, but we love what we do.
That being said, yes, sometimes we do take a vacation. In fact several of us went on a trip out west in early September, which proved to be a somewhat work-related excursion. Abby, Andi and I went west with Yellowstone, the Black Hills and Badlands in mind, and found ourselves steeped in much of the history of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West – the show around which much of Annie Get Your Gun is based. Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1885 and stayed with the show for nearly 16 years, becoming about as famous as Buffalo Bill himself.
Upon exiting Yellowstone, we traveled to Cody, Wyoming, which Buffalo Bill helped found in the 1890s. We stopped at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center on our way through. And here you can see us posing with Ms. Oakley at Wall Drug in South Dakota.
Glimmerglass staffers with Annie Oakley
Our trip finished at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis where we saw the first preview of The Master Butchers Singing Club, which Francesca Zambello directed and developed. Adapted for the stage by Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Marsha Norman from the best-selling novel by Louise Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club is based in a small town in North Dakota and follows the lives of German immigrant and butcher Fidelis and sideshow performer Delphine. The world-premiere production resonated with us particularly because we had just driven through the landscape in which this work is set. To hear more about the work, click here for an interview with Francesca Zambello and Louise Erdich on Minnesota Public Radio.
Glimmerglass staffers with Francesca Zambello at the opening preview of "The Master Butchers Singing Club" at the Guthrie.
Deborah Voigt in Annie Get Your Gun
We recently announced that Deborah Voigt will join us as Annie in next summer’s Annie Get Your Gun. If you missed it, be sure to read Dan Wakin’s recent NYT blog post on the role of Annie. He provides some interesting history on past Annies, such as Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, and provides some great clips for comparison. Be sure to check out the final clip he references of Voigt singing Berlin’s “I Love Piano.”
Glimmerglass Announces Plans for 2011
Francesca Zambello, Glimmerglass Opera’s incoming General & Artistic Director, has announced her plans for the Central New York company.
Beginning with the 2011 season, Glimmerglass Opera will become The Glimmerglass Festival. The company will continue its tradition of four new fully staged productions, now to include three operas and one piece of American musical theater, performed as intended with full orchestra, large cast and no sound amplification. These four productions will be supplemented by special performances, cabarets, concerts, lectures and symposiums throughout the season.
“Our new name – The Glimmerglass Festival – reflects our new breadth of activities and spirit of adventure,” Zambello said. “My goal is to have a variety of offerings, so you can come to a concert or reading in the afternoon, have a picnic, go to the opera, and then stay afterward for a cabaret.”
In 2011, The Glimmerglass Festival will present new productions of Bizet’s Carmen, Berlin’s American classic Annie, Get Your Gun and Cherubini’s rarely performed Medea. Additionally, a double bill of two new operas about American artists will feature the world-premiere production of A Blizzard in Marblehead Neck, a Glimmerglass-commissioned work by award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tony Kushner, and the professional premiere of John Musto’s and Mark Campbell’s Later the Same Evening, an opera based on five Edward Hopper paintings.
The Festival will run July 2 through August 23, 2011. The four main stage performances will perform in rotating repertory. Ancillary activities will include concerts, cabarets, lectures, question-and-answer events and performances by members of the Young American Artists Program, the company’s apprentice program for young singers. In August, The Glimmerglass Festival will also feature a Symposium Series, where visiting lecturers will explore topics related to the 2011 productions.
Another new feature will be The Glimmerglass Festival Artist in Residence. A major international artist will be fully integrated into the life of the Festival, with a leading role in a main stage production and special solo performances throughout the summer. The artist will work closely with members of the Young American Artists Program. Casting and production teams for the 2011 Festival will be announced in late July.
THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL 2011
Carmen (Bizet/Meilhac & Halévy, 1875)
July 2, 9, 11m, 15, 19m, 23, 25m, 31m; August 5, 8m, 11, 13m, 20, 23m
Medea (Cherubini/Hoffmann, 1797)
July 8, 10m, 23m, 28, 30m; August 1m, 6, 14m, 16m
Annie, Get Your Gun (Berlin/Fields, 1946)
July 16, 18m, 22, 24m, 30; August 2m, 4, 6m, 9m, 12, 15m, 18, 20m, 21m
Double Bill:
world premiere: A Blizzard in Marblehead Neck (Tesori/Kushner, 2011)
professional premiere: Later the Same Evening (Musto/Campbell, 2007)
July 21, 26m, 29; August 7m, 13, 22m
m=matinee
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Francesca Zambello officially assumes the role of General & Artistic Director commencing September 1, 2010. She succeeds Michael MacLeod, who held the position for five years. The company is a professional and non-profit organization that offers approximately 45 performances of four productions that run in rotation during July and August. Since its opening in 1987, the company’s Alice Busch Opera Theater has been home to more than 85 productions. The 2010 Festival runs from July 9-August 24 and will feature four new productions: Puccini’s Tosca, Copland’s The Tender Land, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and the U.S. professionally staged premiere of Handel’s Tolomeo. For additional information, call (607) 547-2255 or visit www.glimmerglass.org.
