All-American Opera

Of Mice and Men
by Carlisle Floyd
Glimmerglass Opera; Stewart Robertson, conductor.
Performers listed below.

Cooperstown, New York, is surely one of the best-known small towns in America. Not long ago, it was made famous by a prize-winning book chronicling the life of it’s founder - a robber-baron type named William Cooper -- and the village’s storied history. And William is hardly the town’s most famous son. That honor would go to his own son, the great novelist James Fennimore Cooper, whose vivid descriptions of the region made his works American classics.

And if that weren’t enough to cement Cooperstown’s all-American reputation, legend has it that the great American passtime, the game of baseball, was invented there. That may or not be true. But still, Cooperstown remains the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame -- a real Mecca for “red-blooded” American sports fans, from couch potatoes, to fantasy-leaguers to sandlot scrubs.

What you may not realize is that Cooperstown is also becoming famous for something else altogether: opera. The town lies on the south end of Otsego Lake -- which the Native Americans of the region called “Glimmerglass.” And just a few miles north of town, on the east edge of the lake, is Glimmerglass Opera, home to one of America’s finest and most prestigious opera festivals.

Over the past four years, NPR WORLD OF OPERA has travelled to Cooperstown three times to record productions at Glimmerglass, and this week’s show features a true “All-American,” the Glimmerglass production of Carlisle Floyd’s OF MICE AND MEN, based on the classic novella by John Steinbeck. If there were an “American Opera Hall of Fame,” it might just be in Cooperstown, and this opera would surely be in it.

So join host Steve Curwood and NPR WORLD OF OPERA for Floyd’s OF MICE AND MEN. And before and after the show, be sure to tune in NPR’s AT THE OPERA with Lou Santacroce, for more on this uniquely American operatic phenomenon.

Performers:
Anthony Dean Griffey, tenor (Lennie Small); Rod Nelman, bass (George Milton); Matthew Lord, tenor (Curley); Tony R. Dillon, bass-baritone (Candy); Juliana Rambaldi, soprano (Curley’s wife); Victor Benedetti, baritone (Slim); Andrew Richards, tenor (Carlson); Scott Bearden, baritone (Luke); Aaron Binder, tenor (Haygood); Nathan Granner, tenor (Pete); Kenneth Floyd, baritone (Johnson)


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