Celebrating Bastille Day at Glimmerglass

Can't say enough good things about the Glimmerglass Opera. We just got back from a Bastille Day weekend getaway, thoroughly enjoyed three French operas: Lucie de Lammermoor, Donizetti's classic sung in French; Le Portrait de Manon, by Massenet; and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. All three were superb. All the singers were excellent. And the music and staging were good, too. The setting is lovely late Otsego, Glimmerglass State Park, a stone's throw from James Fenimore Cooper's final resting place in Cooperstown, NY. This time we stayed in Sharon Springs, a Jewish Ghost Town, filled with crumbling wooden hotels and lodging houses, set in a hollow smelling of sulfur from the spa waters that bubble up. On the hill is the hulk of Adler's Hotel, where former NYC Mayor Ed Koch once worked as a busboy. The few guests still remaining appear to be elderly Russian immigrants, walking and talking, sitting outside their rented cottages, little dachas that reminded us, too, of our time spent in Russia...