The Glimmerglass Opera of Cooperstown, New York, housed in a nine-hundred-seat opera house that is one of the finest facilities in which to see and hear operas in the United States, has in recent years served as a feeder for productions at the New York City Opera (most—if not all—wend southward to the New York State Theater)—where generally they look worse. The summer repertory is a mix of operas from the four centuries of the form’s history and includes out-of-the-way works as well as standards. The house is particularly suited to baroque opera, and the current Handel boom owes a good deal to productions at the Glimmerglass.

This year’s Handel, the early (1700) Agrippina, was—perhaps surprisingly—an audience favorite; its lively plot (the Nero theme) and youthfully brash music (Handel emerging full-grown from his cocoon), allied to a deftly updated staging by Lillian Groag and a strong cast under the knowing baton of Harry Bicket made for a very diverting evening. The other rarity, Emmanuel Chabrier’s operetta L’Etoile, could be termed a croque-en-bouche du générale because you either love it for its effervescent tunefulness or hate it for its frothy insubstantiality. It is typical of a whole genre of French light works that are all too rarely performed. Mark Lamos’s production made the most of the work’s wit without allowing it to degenerate into tastelessness. And the cast and the conductor Stewart Robertson recognized that lightness, in operetta no less than in champagne, has a real value.