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By: Paul Joseph Walkowski
OperaOnline.us

The Adirondacks in northern New York State host a whopping 6 million acre Park, 40 state campgrounds, 2,000 miles of hiking trails, the highest mountain peak in the state, including 40 peaks over 4,000 feet, and more scenic shoreline to view than both New Hampshire and Vermont, courtesy of Lake Champlain.
It is in this scenic setting that you will find the small city of Saratoga Springs, New York, population, roughly 32,000, with a winter and summer influx of population from tourists who come to experience the fresh air, beauty and feel that makes this area a uniquely New England experience.
Three hours from Montreal, New York and Boston, an hour-and-a-half from the Berkshires and a half hour to Albany, Saratoga Springs might fairly well be described as an all-American small city – an artistic community with something for everyone – restaurants, boutique shops, art stores – and an opera company located beside city hall that has been around since the early sixties, but in residence in Saratoga for the past nine years.
The city’s website promotes its “Health, History and Horses”, a reference in the latter case to its rather famous race track and the “National Horse Racing Hall of Fame”. In 1996 Saratoga Springs was awarded the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Great American Main Street Award” given to cities that combine “historic preservation with economic development to restore prosperity and vitality to downtowns and neighborhood business districts” and was also honored in 2005 with a designation of American Heritage’s “Great American Place”.

About five miles south of downtown Saratoga just off I-87 visitors will come to Spa State Park, one of a network of parks and campgrounds that line the base of the Adirondacks. In this park and setting, right off the Avenue of the Pines, situated among the trees and pine needles, visitors will come across a cozy 500-seat theater known as Spa Little Theater. It’s nestled in the heart of the woods, and has for the past nine years served as the performance center of Lake George Opera.
The aptly-named, Spa Little Theater may not have the grandeur of the Met, said its affable new general director 39-year old Curtis Tucker, in a mid-March phone interview with OperaOnline.us, but what it lacks in style it more than makes up for in charm “It’s not your typical opera house [but] the intimacy of it creates a really unique opera experience.”
“It’s a wonderful location,” he added, stating that the theater offers great acoustics and is small enough that it allows one to view “opera without the need for glasses.” The theater is also home to performances of the chamber festival as well.

A NEW GENERAL DIRECTOR:
Tucker, who studied as a voice major in the eighties at Central Methodist College (now Central Methodist University), earned his master degree in conducting at the University of Northern Colorado in the nineties, but found himself moving away from music and toward a career in law when he went through what he described as, “my starving artist period while I was out in California.” The son of a devoted music teacher father, he said he looked at his prospects for a career in music in the mid-nineties and decided that for the time being, at least, there was no future. It was time to move on.
“I switched things up a little,” he said, when “I moved to Boston and went to law school”. He earned his law degree from Northeastern University in 1997 but found the lure of a career in music too great to ignore. “Coming out of law school,” he explained, “I ended up responding to an ad from a small company, Sorg Opera, out in the Midwest. They were looking for a managing director, initially.”
He not only got the job, but when the general director retired shortly after his arrival, he was promoted to general director. “I went out there as their managing director and their founder, who was the artistic director, retired and I became the general director and principal conductor, and all of a sudden I was wearing a lot of different hats, both administrative and artistic.” It was the experience he gained over a period of eight years at Sorg, he said, “that served me well and served to be a good background for me that brought me to Lake George Opera.”
He assumed duties of general director at Lake George in June of 2005, after learning through “good old-fashioned networking” that its former general director William Florescu, accepted an appointment elsewhere. The notice of an opening at LGO came in the Fall of 2004, and the position became available concurrently with the closing of his final show with Sorg that 2005. “I’d been there eight years; I accomplished a lot and was ready to move on.”

MIXING NEW AND OLD – A TRADITION CONTINUES:
If Curtis Tucker is new to his position, the company itself, traces its roots all the way back to 1961, or so, when an opera enthusiast by the name of Fred Patrick had an idea that the 20 mile lake area could offer more to visitors than just scenic splendor. Drawing on friends of opera both from New York City and locally, he began a series of performances at Diamond Point on the lake, in what Tucker described as “a makeshift space for a handful of summers”. It was there, on the shores of Lake George, that Lake George Opera, circa 1961, was born.
“I’m not sure it really was a theater or outdoors,” Tucker said as an afterthought, since there is very little written about the early days, “but I read stories that when it rained you could hear the rain on the tin roof.” In those days, he said, “It was almost a summer camp kind of environment.”

Unfortunately Patrick didn’t live long enough to see what his dreams would one day become. Two years after its founding, he died, and was replaced by David Lloyd, one of the early tenors who sang with the company. No less enthused than Patrick, Lloyd drew from a circle of friends to join him on the lake for a summer of opera.
Tucker explains it this way: “Both gentlemen, I believe, lived in New York City and both of them had sufficient contacts and experiences within the opera field that in those early years they would simply ask their friends to come to the lake for some opera.” It was a combination of local interest in the experimental company and “some professionals in the industry that took a liking to the area and decided that it would be a nice place to start a summer program, and they built from there.”
Since it founding, Tucker noted, the company has been in search of a space suitable for opera and a place to call home. “We performed at the lake, at Queensbury High auditorium, at Adirondack Community College and the Spa Little Theater, all of which served us reasonably well.”
“In our forty-five years,” Tucker said, “we have not been able to do what Glimmerglass has successfully done: to build our own facility” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in his dreams he said.
Today, Lake George Opera operates with a full time staff of three, on a yearly budget of about $900,000, allocating approximately $250,000 per production, which includes full sets and a behind the scenery orchestra of thirty-four – an accommodation to the fact that there is no orchestra pit or space in front of the stage for the orchestra.