For as long as I’ve been in America, Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday. I never pass up an excuse for shameless calorific indulgence, and both Micah and I adore spending hours in the kitchen cooking for a crowd — I believe our record is three separate turkeys (deep-fried, smoked, and grilled). While large family gatherings aren’t always everyone’s idea of a relaxing time, for someone like me, living an ocean away from actual relatives, this day has always been about chosen and found family. This year will be no exception — we will spend it with three families with whom we have become close since moving to Cooperstown, even if only two turkeys are involved (deep-fried and wood-fired oven this time…).
As my annual schedule settles into a recognizable pattern, I’ve found myself noticing more and more at this time how widespread and important my opera (now Glimmerglass) family is to me, and how grateful I am for this extended network of artists, colleagues, supporters, and lifelong friends. Many I see but once every five or ten years, and yet we pick up exactly where we left off. Most joyous of all, this network is continually expanding as every new generation of singers and professionals enters the workforce — I met at least 50 new singers in the last couple of weeks.
By The Numbers
This is a time for scouting, for meeting with donors, for planning, and for catching up on all those social occasions that must be put on hold during the busy summer season. In the couple of months since my last blog, I’ve attended eight operas and a gala, participated in two Glimmerglass events and a Board meeting, judged two competitions, heard around 100 live auditions, attended a 100th birthday party, two weddings, a 60th wedding anniversary, three memorial services, and countless meetings and Zooms with people around the world. Every occasion I attended was filled with people I met and grew close to through this amazingly collaborative artform. Better yet, I discovered the talents of scores of emerging artists I had not witnessed before.
Those eight operas ran the gamut from one of the world’s oldest to one of the world’s newest operas…
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… from a beloved traditional production whose set could have been a living museum of fin-de-siècle Vienna to a production of a Grimm fairy tale set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the 1977 blackout…
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… and from small stages to large ones…
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The social occasions spanned international celebrities …
… and local celebrities …
… from celebrations of young couples to some of the wisest and most long-lived members of our community …
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On the subject of our Pavilion, Director of Production Abby Rodd, Director of Operations Christian Shaefer, and their teams did extraordinary work making it one of the most festive venues imaginable:
This event was a fabulously successful experiment, and we are now in the process of making our Pavilion available for all sorts of rentals in the post-season fall months — weddings, birthdays, bar and bat mitzvahs, club meetings, you name it. Although it will take us a little time to get this information up on our website, please reach out to our Communications team at communications@glimmerglass.org if you have an event you would like to hold in this great venue next fall.
We’ve also responded to the demand we saw at our gift shop this summer by making it available to you year-round through our website. The online gift shop just went live, so why not consider getting your loved ones the sweatshirt they never got around to picking up, a stocking filler with those funky Glimmerglass socks, or helping friends attend next season with a Glimmerglass gift card?
But back to that extended family I was talking about, and how grateful I am for you all …
Brought together by Art
All the travel, moving to new cities, running around the country, and bounding from production to audition to event would be desperately lonely without the people who make it so enjoyable — for most artists, it would be impossible without this sense of instant connection in every new project undertaken. I hope your opera family brings you similar joy — friends you run into at the Festival each season, your favorite pre-opera dining partners, artists whose careers you have followed from Glimmerglass Resident Artist to Metropolitan Opera debut. How lucky we are to be brought together in so many different ways by this beautiful artform.
One of the Glimmerglass family’s proudest moments came on November 13 when the Festival received its first International Opera Award, winning the inaugural Best Musical award for this summer’s production of Sunday in the Park with George. Although I could not attend the ceremony in person, Board Chair Michael Young, Trustee Allison Hill-Edgar, and production conductor Maestro Michael Ellis Ingram made the trip to Athens, Greece, to receive the award on Glimmerglass’s behalf.
This award is a testament to the amazing family we assembled this summer to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary. While we lost one of our great family patriarchs in our beloved Associate Artistic Director Emeritus John Conklin before opening night, I know he would have inwardly beamed with quiet pride to know that one of his final works received this honor (even if he would have publicly decried any attempt to label any production as “the best” as fundamentally unsound).
How grateful I am for the family who made this international recognition a reality, and to all our family members around the world who make this Festival such a special place every summer. I hope your Thanksgiving is full of gratitude, family, food, and friends, and I leave you with a happy selfie from my family to yours, taken while hiking the beautiful Robert H. Treman State Park outside Ithaca on a recent short vacation with my amazing husband, Micah.
