Brownstone Beautiful: Mount Desert Island

I was so lucky to perform the opening recital of the Bar Harbor Music Festival this summer. It was, of course, lovely to program and perform a recital, as song recitals these days are unfortunately a dying art, mainly relegated to graduating conservatory students and the few lucky opera stars with the clout to sell well at Carnegie. Not all opera singers enjoy performing song recitals, as they are innately somewhat minimalist affairs -- no grand orchestra, no costumes or props to hide behind. But something about the sparse, pure, intense aesthetic of this form greatly appeals to me. And even more, I love the repertoire that has been written for these recitals so, so much, so it was an honor to have the opportunity to sing it.

It was so lovely to get to travel for Maine for a week. For two summers as a middle-school aged person I went to a summer camp in inland Maine, but never developed a great love or appreciation for it. A bit later, in high school, my mom and I spent a few days with my piano teacher and her husband in their Maine island summer home. I remember chilly days of unrelenting fog, and a sweater-clad walk through reams of scraggly pine trees, which I found atmospheric, but for all the wrong reasons. "Pine trees are creepy," I privately declared. I kept waiting to stumble on a corpse or for a ghostly woman in white to emerge from the fog. In any case, I decided, for the record, that Maine was pretty, sure, but it was an alien beauty that didn't exactly warm my heart.

I don't know what's changed, but it must be me, because this time, for the first time, Maine hit me squarely in the heart. Sure, the first two days were glum and gray, but then the sun broke free, and I was struck by the beauty of it all... the bright blue skies, the rocky beaches, the clear, sparkling lake water, the heady scent of pine trees, the fields of wild flowers, the slight chill in the air at nights.