LOGGERS BY THE LAKE

By CHARLES MICHENER

As the glorious strains of Handel filled the opera house on a recent July evening, an aroma of farm manure wafted through the ventilation. Talk about opera in the boondocks. At the annual Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, New York, productions are staged in a barnlike structure that overlooks Otsego Lake, which is scarcely less spoiled now than it was nearly 200 years ago, when it provided a setting for James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (in which the lake was called Glimmerglass). In the nearby village is the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Stretching in all directions is rolling farmland, Grant Wood vistas of an America that doesn't crinkle up its nose at the smell of manure.

Neither do the operagoers. As usual at Glimmerglass, they were riveted by what was happening onstage. The Handel opera was Tamerlano, a 1724 rarity about a Saddam-like emperor in the 15th century. It's been fashionable to update obscure Baroque works by putting them into contemporary settings, the more incongruous the better (or worse). At Glimmerglass, British director Jonathan Miller and set designer John Conklin play it sumptuously straight. On a richly lighted stage dominated by an enormous sliding screen of gold, extravagantly costumed singers enact the intrigues of the despot's court with the stylized poise and dignity of figures in 18th century European Orientalist paintings.

While the eyes are being ravished, so are the ears. Conductor Jane Glover leads a scintillating performance by unusually nimble-fingered string players and by singers of passionate virtuosity--notably countertenor David Daniels in the title role and soprano Dana Hanchard as his reluctant Turkish prize. What seems at first arcane and distant becomes hypnotically human--opera on a level of taste, imagination and musicality that would do any of the world's most celebrated opera houses proud.

The same can be said of the summer's other productions. From Britain, Glimmerglass has imported a splendidly colorful mounting by the Welsh National Opera of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard. And Swedish director Peter Stormare, a protege of Ingmar Bergman's, has put Mozart's Don Giovanni in a surprising, provocative new light. This Don is an aging lech so enervated by his exploits that he spends most of the opera being pushed around like a paraplegic. The approach may not be quite what Mozart had in mind, but the gutsy cast of young American singers, led by James Maddalena and Lauren Flanigan, makes a thoroughly gripping case for it.

The freshest production is a real oddball: one of the few stagings ever done of Benjamin Britten's first opera, Paul Bunyan. Written to a libretto by W.H. Auden shortly after the composer and poet came to America as pacifists in the late 1930s, the work was conceived as a comic-populist valentine to their new country, one that would be suitable for school productions. Singable it is: the stream of songs and choruses exploits and gently parodies everything from American folksiness to Broadway jazziness, from Italian opera to Victorian ballads.

Dramatic it almost is. Having decided that the title character was too big for the stage, Britten and Auden reduced the mythic giant logger to a booming invisible voice, sounding like a cross between Walter Cronkite and Big Brother, that directs the taming of the wilderness. His minions include a creatively frustrated egghead, a hot-tempered muscleman, a pair of winsome young lovers and all manner of ax-swinging loggers and their "wimmin." Inexplicably absent is Babe the Blue Ox.

Miraculously, what could have tipped over into camp or condescension doesn't, thanks to director Mark Lamos and his energetic cast's affection for the piece's sweetly earnest belief in the promise of America. The tone is whimsically wacky: a cat sings coloratura on Rollerblades; a corrugated moon turns a heart-stopping shade of blue. The whole enterprise, done in kiddie-book colors, is so infectious and wholesome that you begin to think, Move over, Oklahoma!

Discovery and freshness are what Glimmerglass is all about. It started in a Cooperstown high school 20 years ago, and is regularly touted as "America's Glyndebourne"--meaning that it rivals England's legendary summer opera festival in replacing grandeur with intimacy and theatricality. Thanks to its policy of giving directors their head, Glimmerglass has had a few high-risk clinkers. "Not everything in every production is going to come together," says artistic director Paul Kellogg. "But whatever we do, there will always be something to look at, think about and talk about afterward. Opera, after all, isn't just a musical experience; it's theater. And in the end, it's life."