One of the benefits of living in far West Texas, in addition to the spectacular sunsets (due the dust-laden air), is the proximity to Santa Fe and its cultural charms. Founded in 1607, Santa Fe is the capital of a state that’s almost as empty as it is beautiful and is also the unlikely agglutination of music, opera, dance, very overpriced art, almost equally overpriced restaurants, and outrageously overpriced real estate. A rigidly policed building code makes every building in the city look just like every other building. The entire city is beige and rounded conforming to the zoning board’s idea of desert chic. After a few days there you’d almost be willing to swear off Pinot Grigio for a building with a corner. Artists and artists manqué have been coming here, and to nearby Taos, for close to a century in search of isolation and peace. Inevitably we tourists have followed making solitude and calm impossible. In short, it’s the place to go when you’ve got more money than common sense. It’s Las Vegas for people who sometimes read a book. I go there whenever I can.

In 1957 thirty-one year old John Crosby, using his father’s money, founded the Santa Fe Opera. He thought that music was missing from the local artistic stew. He started with Madama Butterfly and ran the company until 2002. He died shortly after stepping down as general director. America’s premier venue for summer opera is his monument. He conducted every season in addition to performing his administrative chores. He ran a program for young singers and jump-started a number of important careers. The programming evolved into five operas given over an eight week summer season. Crosby had a passion for late Strauss operas and an annual modern opera. Both were usually very boring, but they attracted a captive audience that was in Santa Fe for the opera. Wagner and the big Verdi operas were typically avoided. The company could rarely afford more than one high priced voice per opera. Thus La Traviata was scheduled a lot. This year’s season of La belle Helene, Cosi fan tutte, Intermezzo, Katya Kananova, and Madame Mao with a concert by Natalie Dessay and two apprentice performances is typical of his scheduling. Under the new management late Strauss seems to be out and big Verdi in. Simon Boccanegra is up next season. Whether the company can get the requisite voices for this difficult opera will be interesting to see. Also coming in 2004 is Don Giovanni, Agripina, Beatrice and Benedict, and La Rondine. I hope Richard Gaddes and Alan Gilbert - respectively the new General Director and Music Director are up to the job they’ve set themselves.

      Over the years the theater grew into a beautiful structure set in the hills north of the city. Santa Fe is 7,000 feet above the sea which is a long way off and the theater is higher than that. There used to be hole in the roof right over what otherwise would have been the best seats in the building. It rains in the desert in the summer. But now the roof covers all of the seats and only the sides of the hall are open to the air. The scenery is so dazzling that it’s worth a trip just to see the building and its surroundings even if you’re not going to a performance. The Santa Fe Opera also has the dubious distinction of being the last American opera company to offer simultaneous translations of its shows. They use the same system the Metropolitan Opera employs. Monitors that can be turned off are on the back of the seat in front of you. I know that sounds like up the street the soldiers they’re marching down, but that’s where they are.

     Crosby successfully planted the music seed; now there’s more music in town than I care to discuss. Most noteworthy is the Chamber Music Festival which runs for more than a month at the same time the opera’s on - so you can go to both on the same trip.

We arrived in town on July 25 and went to Radisson Hotel to see Maria Benitez’s flamenco company. Ms Benitez, a local girl, has been appearing in Santa Fe for a 12 week season for about the last 30 years. She learned her trade in Spain and then formed her own company. When I first saw her a long time ago there was little more to her show than herself and a guitar player. Now she has musicians, a singer, and a whole lot of dancers. She still dances (though briefly) with her troupe; she must be 65 or more. She’s become a national institution having appeared in all 50 states and in much of Europe. She’s choreographed three operas with Spanish connections for the Met (Forza, Traviata, and Carmen) and has also choreographed La Vida Breve at the local opera. I’m no expert on flamenco, but her style seems to me to have evolved into a sort New Age flamenco. There was so much vigorous foot stamping on the small raised wooden stage that childhood memories of Rumpelstiltskin came surging back. The ages of her dancers appeared to span close to four decades. Her lead male dancer, Alejandro Granados, looked past 50 and packed about 30 pounds too many, but nevertheless moved with the energy of Andre Agassi and with considerably more grace. If you’ve been to the tango clubs in Buenos Aires you know that old men can dance with considerable effect, but the great old tango dancers get by on grace not athleticism. Granados displayed both, though I was worried that he might drop dead at any moment. If you get to Santa Fe be sure to see Benitez and company.

     It just happened that we arrived the weekend of the Spanish Market. It’s the biggest tourist attraction of the year. If we had been staying at a hotel instead of a private home we’d have been aware of the event because we likely wouldn’t have been able to get lodgings. There’s nothing particularly Spanish about the Spanish market – merely a lot of cloth covered stalls flowing out of the town’s main plaza like a mercantile tsunami. The goods are much the same as those available in the regular stores. There’s just more stuff, however, at prices not quite as out of sight as usual. Now, if all this is not enough for you there’s a flea market just north of the opera house where you can get almost anything at reasonable (for Santa Fe) prices. I asked one vendor there for a Royal Bengal tiger and he told me he’d just sold his last one, but that he expected another shipment the next day. But if you really want to blow some serious money go to art galleries on Canyon Drive; there’s more than a mile of them.

     The next night we devoted to gastronomy at Bistro 315. When the bill came to less than $100 per person we begged them to take more, but they refused. Sunday night we found the new (to us at least) the Santa Fe Cultural Center where Winged Migration was showing at the movie theater. It’s so good that it might bring about a Franco-American rapprochement. It took a French team of apparently thousands four years to get these magical films of birds in flight. The French couldn’t resist a snide aside about American bird hunters, but the movie’s so good I forgive them. See it!  »›