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Berkshire Opera Festival Debuts in August
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
01:53AM / Tuesday, August 02, 2016
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Brian Garman is the artistic director of the Berkshire Opera Festival.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Berkshire County offers summer visitors a world-renowned symphony, Tony Award-winning theater and important works of art from the Renaissance to the contemporary.
 
The region truly has it all ... almost.
 
Actually, there is at least one hole in the county's arts scene, a hole that Jonathan Loy and Brian Garman are aiming to fill.
 
"Absolutely, the Berkshires are the most culturally rich place in the country," Loy said recently. "For there not to be opera here is unfortunate and maybe even a problem.
 
"Opera is an art form that deserves to be heard and seen and supported. By bringing fully produced opera back, what we're doing is serving a very specific niche that needs to be filled."
 
Enter the Berkshire Opera Festival, which Loy and Garman co-founded in 2014. The BOF's debut season begins Wednesday, Aug. 10, with the first of two recitals in Lenox and Stockbridge and culminates in a fully staged production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," at Pittsfield's Colonial Theatre on three nights starting Saturday, Aug. 27.
 
Loy, a guest director on the staging staff at New York's Metropolitan Opera, is the BOF's general director. The Philadelphia native is a longtime seasonal resident of the Berkshires, having grown up spending summers with his aunt and uncle in West Stockbridge.
 
"I consider myself part of the community," he said. "I've been coming here since I was born."
 
He has known Garman, the festival's artistic director, for 18 years. The pair met at the Pittsburgh Opera, where Loy was an intern and Garman was the principal conductor.
 
"We hit it off then and always spoke about doing something together," Loy said. "We shared the same artistic tastes and ideals.
 
"I called Brian in 2014, and at that time I was unsure about my standing with the Metropolitan Opera because of the possibility of a strike or a lockout. He was in the process of transitioning back to New York City. It was a time for both of us to reflect on what the future might hold for us.
 
"I mentioned to him that there is no opera in the Berkshires."
 
And two years of groundwork and fund-raising later, the pair hope to change that for good.
 
The centerpiece of the inaugural season is "Madama Butterfly," for which they cast Inna Los in the principal role of Cio-Cio-San, a young Japanese geisha involved in an arranged marriage with an American naval officer.
 
Los has performed the role with Opera Las Vegas and has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
 
In the role of the naval officer, Pinkerton, will be tenor Jason Slayden, whose credits also include the Lyric Opera of Chicago as well as the Colorado Music Festival and Opera Santa Barbara in California.
 
Pinkerton's friend, Sharpless, will be performed by baritone Weston Hurt, whose voice "Opera News" described as "golden, weighty, and clear," in a review of the Boston Lyric Opera's production of "La Traviata" in 2014.
 
The principal singers are due to arrive Aug. 3 for 3 1/2 weeks of rehearsals leading up to the Colonial Theatre performance.
 
But many of the artists who will bring "Madama Butterfly" to life already are in the area. About 40 percent of the 34-member orchestra lives in or near Berkshire County, as do all 17 members of the chorus, Garman said.
 
The pair picked the Puccini classic for the debut season because they wanted something familiar — but not too familiar — for their Berkshire audience.
 
"Part of our mission is to produce operas from a broad spectrum of repertoire, which includes commissioning new works and performing things that are not all that familiar," Garman said. "For the first season, we wanted something that, on the one hand, has name recognition. At the same time, it's outside the sort of 'top three:' 'La Traviata,' 'Carmen,' 'Barber of Seville,' etc., which are all great operas, by the way.
 
"But I have found that companies that begin by producing those three — 10 years later they're still producing those three."
 
Garman promises a production that features the beauty and pageantry audiences expect from "Madama Butterfly," although he is updating the setting somewhat, moving the action to the 1960s, which allows him to explore the title character more deeply.
 
"It does several things in that context," he said. "Mainly, it elevates Cio-Cio-San in a great way. The story is happening against the backdrop of feminism that is rising in the United States. It was not happening in Japan, but in the '60s, she would have had access to media and would have learned about it.
 
"She uses Pinkerton as much as he uses him. She wants to get to the United States. … In Act 2, we begin to really understand Cio-Cio-San's mindset. We see her in a Chanel suit and trying to be the American woman she thinks the American sailor wants her to be."
 
The feminist theme carries over to BOF's Aug. 10 debut recital at Ventfort Hall Mansion. The evening is titled "Breaking Down Barriers: Songs by Female Composers of Puccini's Time."
 
The second recital, on Aug. 16, is dubbed "The 'Unknown' Puccini." The evening at Stockbridge's First Congregational Church will focus on more obscure works from Giacomo Puccini's songbook.
 
Both nights will feature cast members from "Madama Butterfly," which will run Aug. 27 and 30 and Sept. 2 at the Colonial.
 
"These will be songs Puccini wrote for voice and piano," Garman said of the Aug. 16 event. "People sometimes don't realize he wrote songs that weren't part of an opera. What's fascinating is to hear in some of these songs the germ of something that would become familiar later on as part of his opera."
 
Tickets and information about the Berkshire Opera Festival can be found here
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