Skidmore to offer Margaret Garner performance, discussion

Mezzo-soprano Tracie Luck and tenor Mark Panuccio will visit classrooms at schools in Saratoga Springs, Albany, and Schenectady later this month to discuss Margaret Garner, the new American opera in which they performed. 

Luck and Panuccio are among four original cast members of Margaret Garner who will be in residence at Skidmore College Tuesday through Saturday, March 20–24. Their visits to area schools, and to a variety of student classes at Skidmore College, are part of an extensive schedule of events planned by McCormack Artist-Scholar Richard Danielpour, the award-winning composer of Margaret Garner, which is based on one of the most poignant stories of pre-Civil War slavery in America.

Singers Luck and Panuccio will be joined by soprano Lisa Daltirus and baritone Eric Greene in a staged concert performance of selections from Margaret Garner at 8 p.m. Friday, March 23, in the Bernhard Theater, and will be joined by the composer for post-performance conversations from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, March 24, in Filene Recital Hall. Admission is free.

Robert B. Driver, general and artistic director of the Philadelphia Opera Company, will stage the concert at Skidmore, working with Philadelphia's artistic coordinator and assistant conductor Laurie Rogers.

Margaret Garner was premiered in Detroit on May 7, 2005, jointly commissioned by the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit, the Cincinnati Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Directed by Kenny Leon, it had successive performances in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, and was performed last spring by Opera Carolina.

Luck served as understudy to Denyce Graves in the "cover cast" production, and has now been named to fill the lead role in a new production by New York City Opera, to open Sept. 11, 2007, and run for the rest of the month. Daltirus also was chosen for a major role in the new production. She will take the role of Cilla, Margaret Garner's mother-in-law.

Featuring a libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner is loosely based on the story of a young slave in Kentucky who fled her captivity along with her husband and four children. Facing recapture in Cincinnati, Ohio, she said would kill herself and her children rather than see them returned to slavery, and she succeeded in killing her 2-year-old daughter before being overpowered and captured. Her plight became noted as much for its legal implications as for its passion and tragedy: because Garner was subject to both the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and also liable for murder by the state of Ohio, there was intense debate about whether she should be tried for murder or for destruction of property.

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), based on the Garner story.

The McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar residency, presented annually by Skidmore's Office of the Dean of Special Programs, brings a guest artist or performer to the campus to share their talents with the campus and the local community. Each residency takes on its own special character and format, dependent on the artists' vision. All McCormack residency events are free and open to the public.