The Litchfield Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala !

SAVE THE DATE!
SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2012

The Litchfield Hills Food,
Wine and Opera Gala
"A Musical Feast!"

 at: The Country Loft
557 Main Street South
Woodbury, CT

Tickets: 203-266-4500

   The  Litchfield Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala, "A Musical Feast!", will take place on Saturday evening, September 8th, 2012, from 6 PM to 10 PM, at The Country Loft, in Woodbury, Connecticut.

    It will be an evening of wonderful farm-to-table dining, fine wines  and glorious operatic arias, all to benefit a new  music foundation, The Connecticut Summer  Opera Foundation (CSOF)  www.ctsummeropera.org  

   The goals of CSOF are twofold: first, to  provide support for conservatory-trained vocalists to study operatic technique and performance through an annual two-week summer program , with mentor-student teaching, while ensconsed here in the beautiful and serene Litchfield Hills; second, to engage in educational outreach by presenting opera highlight programs to grade schools and middle schools, thereby introducing the next generation of concert goers to this sublime art form.

The Gala on September 8th evening will unfold with a spectacular farm-to-table dinner with paired wines,  prepared by three of Connecticut's most celebrated chefs: Carole Peck of Good News Cafe, Tom Gould of Brass City Bistro, and Jerry Reveron, founder of the Woodward House and executive chef at the Taft School.

   
    I have invited some of the operatic vocalists from Opera Company of Brooklyn (OCB), on whose Board of Directors I serve, to perform a program of operatic highlights after the dinner. OCB, which mounts concert performances of opera  in midtown Manhattan venues, features and mentors conservatory-trained operatic vocalists from Juilliard, Mannes College, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, Yale and Harvard.  We will be featuring four of these splendid singers at the Gala - lyric soprano Roseanne Ackerley, mezzo-soprano Lauren Pastorek, tenor Darren Andersen and baritone Kenneth Overton. Maestro Jay Meetze will conduct and Ming Kwong will provide piano accompaniment. There will be other musical surprises as well !
  
     I won't tell you what the food courses will be. But, I will give you a lagniappe, a musical aperitif as it were, from the opera program. One of the pieces to be performed at the Gala on September 8th is the famous duet from George Bizet's Le Pecheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers ), the iconic Au fond du temple saint. Here is a 1957 performance  by tenor Jussi Bjorling and baritone Robert Merill, what many consider the best essaying of this most famous of operatic arias:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PYt2HlBuyI&feature=related

    Food, wine and song, curated and performed by stars, under the stars, on September 8th !
     Tickets are $ 100. All proceeds after expenses will  go to benefit The Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation. For more information, please call 203-266-4500 or go to  www.ctsummeropera.org