69. Saratoga

Episode 69: Saratoga

69.0 History of Saratoga (Intro)

Mat:  A health resort. A gambling center. A racetrack. A decisive battle. Saratoga Springs is known as the “Queen of the Spas.” For much of the 20th century, it catered to the body. Or to betting. Much earlier though, there was also the battle of Saratoga, a turning point in the American revolution. Then the British unsuccessfully tried to cut off new England from the rest of the colonies by trying to take the upper Hudson River. Benedict Arnold played a very helpful role you might be surprised to know. Feeling unappreciated though, he later became a turncoat. There's a statue of a lone boot in Saratoga National Historical Park which supposedly represents Arnold's actions and his leg wound at Saratoga.

The springs though, of course, that's what got the town the world's notice. Mineral water for drinking and bathing was long a European tradition for the health conscious.

Plentiful mineral waters and help by the railroad 1831 I brought a lot of tourism. You could visit bathhouses to cure your ailments. In the late 18 hundreds though, the mineral Springs were getting so depleted that the New York State Reservation was created in 1911 to conserve and protect things like Saratoga Springs special mineral waters.

But if it's horses that make you think of Saratoga, you'll want to know that in 1863, right after the battle of Gettysburg and the civil war, a wealthy gambler and future Congressman John Morrissey hosted a four-day thoroughbred. It was a big success, and he and several others created a racehorse association and built what would become one of the three oldest racetracks in America.

“Health. History. Horses.” That's the slogan of the city of Saratoga. And that's all I know about it. Well until recently….

SFX: CIDIOT THEME MUSIC

69.1 Saratoga Intro

Mat: I'm Mat Zucker and this is Cidiot: learning to live and love life in the Hudson Valley.

Episode 69.  Saratoga Performing Arts Center, or SPAC as it's known, has a 50 plus year history. Ground was officially broken for the amphitheater in 1964, by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. Over time, it became the summer home for the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Harry Belafonte performed in 1967 and then 1978 superstar dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov made his New York City Ballet debut at SPAC. 

Spec is just about half an hour north of Albany, which makes it just about an hour and a half or so from most places in the Hudson Valley and Catskills. This cidiot didn't just speak to someone at SPAC. I spoke to Elizabeth Sobol, president and CEO of SPAC. You know I love to learn about new places upstate and new people. And this episode,  we do both.

You'll hear about Elisabeth's journey to leading SPAC, her discovery and full-on love of Saratoga. What's on the season at SPAC - jazz to the ballet, plus a delicious innovation "Choreographers' Feast" - dancers do eat. And of course, the Philadelphia Orchestra for which there's a ticket giveaway for cidiots - courtesy of Elizabeth and SPAC.

And be sure to hear part three, especially if you ever want to visit Saratoga. You'll hear about the weekend itinerary. She has already planned for me and Brian, although he doesn't know that yet.

69.2 Interview with Elizabeth Sobol – Part I

Mat: hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hey, how are you doing?

Mat: Welcome to Cidiot.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Mat: Oh, me too. I'm really excited to speak to you.  I'm not quite a peformer, but I'd like to think of myself as a performer.

Elizabeth: Well, you certainly are. Podcasts are the ultimate performance in my mind.

Mat: I miss live entertainment is great. Although live podcasting is pretty popular right now, too, but I don't have the courage.

Elizabeth: Well, I'm an insomniac. And so podcasts get me through my misery many nights.

Mat: Oh, I'm glad. Well, I hope this becomes one of yours. So tell me about what you do.

Elizabeth: So before I say what I do, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my path to what I do now. , because I think it kind of fits in with the story of the show.  I grew up in a small town in North Carolina , and it's kind of semi rural and spent lots of time out in nature  , learning about the natural world. My grandmother grew up on a farm with 13 siblings and her mother taught her about plant medicine cause there were no doctors that went out to the farm. So you had to treat yourself with what grew around you.

And so I grew up with that love of the natural world and the feeling a part of it and everything. , but I also grew up studying the piano and I thought I was going to be a performer. And then around the age of 18, I realized I did not have what it took to be a great pianist. And so I ended up going to New York City and getting involved in the music management business, started with startup— that word didn't even exist at the time. It was a little basement apartment on west 85th street where these two amazing human beings decided to make a go in the music management business. And you know, the phone would ring three times a week and two of those would be one of the founders moms calling to see how the business was doing.

Elizabeth: I mean, it was really, really start-up. But then we got bought by IMG and music company on this like big skyrocketing went from startup to global leader in the field over about a two-decade trajectory. And I kind of rode that rocket, which was amazing.  And went from being intern to managing director over a number of decades, kindof everything there was to do at IMG. It was an amazing experience. And then later on, after I'd done a lot of times in every sense of the word at IMG, I was recruited by Universal Music to start a new label at Universal, and for what it's worth was the only female label head at the whole company at the time. So ,these are like very interesting, very interesting jobs to do, particularly as a woman in the entertainment field and everything.

Elizabeth: But by 2016, I had worked so hard for so long. And my husband and I, my husband's Cuban, he was living in Miami. We had an apartment in Miami. And I was finally going to go back to the apartment and be able to go to the beach.  And about four days into my sort of retirement, the phone rang, and this person said, you know, I'm from blah, blah, blah, search firm. And we're doing the search for the new president of SPAC. And your name keeps coming up. And I said, because I'd never been to Saratoga Springs before. "Yeah, I'm looking at the ocean here from my balcony. And let me describe it to you. And you're going to tell me why in the world I would ever move to upstate New York" and I totally blew it off. Summarily dismissed it.

Elizabeth: Luckily, I had some friends in the business who started calling me going, "Are you out of your mind, like you and Saratoga are made for each other, get over yourself and just go up there and see what the city is like." Because in all those years that I was running IMG and I was a talent manager to a lot of talent that we're going to Tanglewood, to Saratoga, to Wolf trap, to all the major summer festivals, I would go frequently to Tanglewood. I had never made it to Saratoga. But the point is that when I did finally get over myself and came to Saratoga on a cool June Sunday afternoon and I ended up walking into the city, walked by Congress Park, which is a glory and magnificent glory of a park with fountains and our art architectural beauties. And then walked into the town, turned on a tiny little street where I saw a place called Lyrical Ballad Bookstore that turns out it's one of the best antiquarian bookstores in the Northeast, turned left on another little rambling street ended up having a fabulous Italian meal, walked onto what's called Caroline Street, turned up. It started hearing amazing music of all kinds, live jazz, cover bands, world, all sorts of music coming out of multiple doors. As I walked up the street, got to Broadway, took a left, and now discovered that there was another Northshire Bookstore, which I knew very well from Manchester, Vermont, where I would frequently go in the summer-- one of the best indie bookstores on the east coast. And now on top of the bookstore, I'm seeing just exquisite, historical preservation that sort of really is a hallmark of downtown Saratoga.

Mat: But it's got a big history, right? It's a really beautiful dates back - a storied place as they say.

Elizabeth: It is a storied place. And you know what I sense as I was walking down the street was a sense of ethos around green space, around literature, around music, around historic preservation. It's almost like the city spoke to me and was like, you want to live here.  

Elizabeth: So I did end up taking the job and came here, SPAC - the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the job that I took, the, you know, took the job as the president of speck sits in one of New York state's flagship parks called the Spa state park, 2,400 acres of. Woodland walks, geysers and creeks and streams, historic architecture, particularly going back to the twenties and thirties. And most importantly, this is sort of like the, the real identity of Saratoga that there are curative, mineral Springs here that , go back, you know, the Algonquin  and people tended the waters here and came here as sort of a curative  trips to, to Saratoga  to be in these, in these curative waters. So the mineral Springs have been part of Saratoga history going back 10,000 years. And that continues to bring people to the city.

Mat: How did the music tradition start?    

Elizabeth: In addition to the Springs, there's also as happens when you've got tourists and in this case a lot of high-end tourists coming to the area, there was a lot of gambling. There was horse racing going back to the late 1800s. So that brought a particular kind of clientele. And with that clientele, music and performance started springing up. There were different types of clubs and performing arts, , venues, but then SPAC didn't come along until the 1960s after, a lot of the, the great , epic hotels that existed back in the  late 19th century  one by one were knocked down, burned, whatever. There's a couple of vestiges of some of the hotels left, but it changed markedly. So the city, as virtually every city has gone through cycles of, rising from the ashes and then going, you know, going through difficult times. And so in the sixties, some of the region's philanthropists and boosters and whatever decided that there should be a performing arts venue here in the park.

And then Governor Rockefeller was a big supporter of what was going on. And a lot of  key philanthropic families here helped funded what became SPAC. And the origin of SPAC is that they went to the two key with some of the greatest performing arts organizations or entities, literally in the world: the Philadelphia Orchestra, then under the Baton of Eugene Ormandy and New York City Ballet at that time, under the direction of George Balanchine. They created SPAC. So that, that like the dance floor, the floor of the amphitheater is really Balanchine's floor, and the rehearsal rooms and back were the same size and footprint is the actual stage. So that when the dancers were rehearsing, they could be rehearsing in this massive rehearsal room. Exactly what the exact same footprint that they would have when they came down.

Yeah. So people that may not know right. That SPAC is the summer of the Philadelphia Orchestra and then New York city ballet. Yeah. So this is the living room, so it needs to,

It's really incredible. I mean, to think that a city of 30,000, which is what Saratoga is, hosts these two world-class ensembles and except for COVID has done so uninterruptedly since 1966 is astonishing. In addition to SPAC, Caffe Lena, the longest running folk music venue in North America has incredible lineup of folk and hip hop and jazz. And it's an amazing lineup of artists.  The Tang Museum up at Skidmore is an unbelievable world-class museum.  There's the Beekman arts, Beekman arts districts. It's really an incomparable, cultural and arts destination that people don't realize the sheer volume and level of what goes on here.  365 days a year, not just in the summer and the summer season

And in the summer, you have all these musicians and dancers running around to do. They hang out together. Do they like play rugby? They don't play rugby, but did they play lacrosse or something together? Do they play table tennis? I mean do they interact...?

Well, so the Ballet is here in July for a week and then the orchestra come for three weeks, primarily in August. So they're not overlapping. You see the musicians and the dancers when they're here in residence out and about town.  So yeah, they all love coming to SPAC because imagine you're getting out of the city, you're coming up here, you're doing what you love doing, but you've also got a day off here and you 've got a walk in the park. You can go horseback riding. You can drive up to the Adirondacks six million acres of Adirondack parkland are 45 minutes from here. Lake George is 30 minutes from here.

Mat: For me in, in Red Hook, you're about an hour and a half, which isn't far. Catskill, too, I think, would say yeah, from Kingston about an hour and a half. So it's not far. It's within, within an evening or day.

Elizabeth: I've been here now five and a half years. , I can't imagine living anyplace but Saratoga at this point. . I confessed to having tremendous Hudson envy because there definitely things about Hudson that I particularly like , the food scene and just the art scene is very different there.

Mat: And in Saratoga, is there a, is there a term like cidiot that's used for people from the city.

Elizabeth: No, actually, and I think it's, it's one of the charming things about Saratoga is that there's very little cynicism. And maybe because we don't have a lot, a big influx. I mean, we're starting to now, I mean, during COVID a lot of people were buying houses, sight unseen and everything, but I think one of the charming things is there, isn't that sense of like, oh my God, here come the New Yorkers or whatever.  It's just sort of like, oh wow, Hey, welcome to town.        

When I first moved to Saratoga, we didn't have a car in the city, but we did have a car in Miami that we had sent up here. December was the official box office and we'd do like a box office opening and seller hop, holiday packages and stuff like that. And so the very day that I was supposed to do my first official box office opening. It started to snow. And we pulled out of our parking lot, , where we were staying out into a very heavily snowy streets in our car from Miami that had neither all-wheel drive nor snow tires and promptly got stuck.

And six people got out of their cars and my husband was like, "Oh my God, what are they coming to do?" And they all came to like, push us out, you know, push us out of the snow. And my husband was like, "Oh, they're coming to help.".

69.3 PROMO FOR HUDSON RIVER KITCHEN & BATH DESIGN CENTER

69.4 Interview with Elizabeth Sobol – Part II – About SPAC and this Season

Mat: So tell me about this season. What's on over the next couple of months that you're excited about?

Elizabeth: At the very end of June, we've got a Freihofer's Saratoga Jazz Festival, which is the longest continuously running jazz fest in North America. It's been around for 45 years and it's an, it's a major festival it's up there with, you know, Newport and Andre and, you know, the, the big jazz festivals. it's a two-day festival. We have the amphitheater.

Just to tell you a little bit about what SPAC is. We have a 5,200-seat amphitheater and then the lawn seats, another 20,000. Right? So here you feel the expansiveness of being, you know, you're in a park. And you feel nature like just is so palpable. And so during Jazz Fest, people come with their blankets and their coolers, and some of them sit out on the lawn and some people sit in the amphitheater, we have the amphitheater going on, and then we have a second stage on the other side of the field. And so we have the bigger names going on in the amphitheater and we call the discovery stage going on across the field from there. So, a lot of the more up and coming bands.  It's an amazing, amazing weekend because you can just hang from like 11 to 11 and here some of the greatest, greatest jazz. And we, it's not just strict jazz. I mean, we had Latin funk, blues, global beats and everything. So, it's one of my favorites.

Favorite weekends all year. And then in the middle of July is when we welcome New York City Ballet, which is always incredibly exciting. You know, people think, "Oh, ballet company." You don't realize it's like 90 dancers and another 80 or 90 musicians and a crew.  It's like there's 250 people descend on Saratoga that make up the New York city ballet.

We have everything from a program of the masters, like Balanchine, Robbins versus Cunningham, but then we also have a program of some of the up and coming younger choreographers like Justin pack, like, , Jamar Roberts,  Pam Tanowitz. And then of course we've got story ballet with Mid-Summer Night's Dream, which has a big history here at SPAC. We opened our inaugural season - Mid-summer Night's Dream was one of the key pieces.

We have a Culinary Arts at SPAC program that kind of weaves in and out of what we do with our main programming. So on July 11, we have a culinary event called "Choreographer's Feast", which we'll be featuring a meal inspired by recipes that come from all the choreographers whose works are going to be represented on the New York City Ballet

Mat: Wow, so dancers do eat?!?!

Elizabeth: They do. And a lot of them are really good cooks, which we discovered last year. And by the way, Balanchine, last year, we did one of these meals and it was based on Balanchine, but not Balanchine the choreographer Balanchine as the food pioneer. He was a forager, believe it or not. He also loved cooking dishes from his native Georgia. And so, a lot of the herbs and spices that come with Georgian cuisine were not readily available in those years long before we had fresh herbs in grocery stores and that sort of thing. So, when he came to Saratoga in the summer, the people whose farm he stayed on would give him a plot to make a garden in and he would raise all these herbs that he couldn't get otherwise. And so, he's cooking, he loved making bread. He loved making ice creams. And so, this meal was really sort of a culinary love letter to, to, to Balanchine. So we're constantly trying to weave these different themes, into, these culinary events and then, you know, we too are in a very rich farming area. There's so many incredible farmers, like we get a lot of our organic produce and locally sourced produce and, obviously meats and poultry and even fish from local providers. So that's a big, big part of our ethos around culinary arts.

And then, at the end of July. We have the Philadelphia Orchestra coming and it's a very rich and diverse, season. They come for three weeks, they do 12 completely different programs, which is unheard of. They don't do that anywhere else in. Anywhere else, I think in the world to do that many programs, different programs, , per week.  A lot of core classical works like we're finishing the season with Beethoven's ninth symphony, the ode to joy, which is kind of our theme of the whole season. We're back, it's joyous.  Philadelphia Orchestra with its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is a beloved and amazing musician.  and that last week will be very much for people who have core classical tastes.

But then we also have film nights. We have Harry Potter with live orchestra. We have princess bride with live orchestra. We've got the incredible singer Ledisi, doing a tribute to Nina Simone. That is with the Philadelphia orchestra.

Mat: Cool….

Elizabeth: We will also have on July 25th, a culinary event, paying tribute to the orchestra and to its music director Yannick who hails from Canada, from Quebec and Montreal. And so we're bringing down a rising superstar chef named Dominique LaBelle, who is going to cook a really glorious meal, which will actually be served on the massive amphitheater stage, which will be a very, very unique and wonderful experience.

One last thing is that we have Chamber Music Society of Lincoln center in residence at SPAC every summer. And last year we brought them back. We couldn't go inside into the spot, a little theater because of COVID concerns. So we took them out to an amazing place called Pitney Meadows, community farm, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is an incredible farm, and they have this beautiful high tunnel. And we set it up to do concerts in there so that we could offer live music last summer, but in a safe environment where we were socially-distanced, and it was fresh air and all of that. And it was so successful because it's such a gloriously, beautiful location with that exquisite music that people clamored to have it back at Pitney Meadows this year.

Mat: So how do you decide what to, what to put on at SPAC? Are there certain operating principles or themes or what are the guiding things? What, what's very SPAC and what's not?

Elizabeth: So when I came here, I came from the entertainment world and had worked with a lot of artists, across many, many different genres. So I had a lot of ideas about personally about where I wanted to see SPAC going, but I also knew that this was, you know, an organization that had a lot of history, a lot of tradition, and a lot of people who support SPAC both by, , donating because we are a 5 0 1 C3. And we are able to operate because of the tremendous generosity of the community. So preserving and paying homage to our tradition was really, really important. That's always been a guiding principle, so that primarily is the ballet and the orchestra. But also chamber music society of Lincoln center, which is a more recent addition, but, but preserving those traditions is exceedingly important at the same time, as we all know in the classical arts that. In general diminishing, followings for the traditional arts. And so how do you make, how do you take tradition and make it appealing to, , younger audiences, more diverse audiences. And so that is something that we've been doing. So for instance, you know, , bringing Ledisi, see to do this evening and Nina Simone, that like that's a, if you've got the lush Philadelphia orchestra, you're going to have extraordinary charts that sound like the best, , orchestral writing, but you've got this incredible vocalist. Who's what? 14, 18 Grammy nominations. I can't remember how many. Paying homage to one of the greatest American artists of all time. So that's just one little example of how we're trying to take the traditional residencies and obviously Beethoven Ninth. There's nothing more canonic in the classical music repertoire than Beethoven Ninth, but then you've also got led at sea and then you're also doing film nights because let's face it. Like if you think about. Particularly John Williams scores for somebody like that is some of the best. Orchestral writing ever, ever done, like put it up there with like the great con you know, canonically

Mat: I love watching movies with live music. It's so exciting.

Elizabeth: It is so amazing. So we'll have seven, 8,000 people through our gates to watch Harry Potter and, you know, they loved the movie and a lot of times they don't realize that one of the reasons they love it so much is this incredible score. That they feel in a different and more palpable way?

There's so much, there's so much more to be done. We're only, still baby steps in the, in the sort of classics world, but bringing the kind of diversity into the programming, through both the artists, the choreographers, the composers. There's definitely a big shift in SPAC programming for the summer.

And then just thinking about all the different constituents, of like the core classical, the, the, even within the ballet, you know, there's some people who are like, give me more storybook ballet, and I want to bring my kids and my grandkids, and then other people are going, oh my God, what seemed Midsummer? Night's dream like 15 times. Can't you give me something new? So, making sure that we're preserving the tradition, but also promoting the innovation that's happening and that we're providing things for the traditionalist who want to hear the same repertoire. I love seeing hearing the same repertoire repeatedly and the other people who want that burst of, you know, discovery. 

Mat: That's great. 

69.6 Interview with Elizabeth Sobol – Part III – Her Itinerary for all of us visiting Saratoga

Mat: I know you're president of SPAC, but maybe for a second, you could pretend to be mayor of Saratoga. And say I'm coming up. I bought tickets for something on thursday or Friday night, but I'm going to stay overnight somewhere.  What do you think my itinerary should be? What would you have me do to say you're only an hour and a half away? Say I get up there around noon, and I'm not leaving until, you know, the next day, late in the afternoon.

Elizabeth: Well, the first thing I'm going to tell you is you can't just stay 24 hours to come up for a weekend. So, you're coming for a weekend. The first thing I would say is you're going to go up to Skidmore, which is at the north end of the, of the city. And if you feel like doing a little hike, there are fabulous trails right at Skidmore called the North Woods of Skidmore. And you get in there and you you're right on the edge of town, but you feel like you're very remote. So, you can get in a little hike there. And then you're going to walk over to the Tang Museum and see the ridiculously amazing exhibitions they have at the Tang Museum.

And then you'll probably come downtown and walk the streets or, you're going to walk Broadway you're going to go off and around into some of the shops, amazing shops. If you're a book lover, you've got to go to Northshire Books and you've got to go to Lee Lyrical Ballad bookstore. , if you have time, you should walk over to Beekman Street Art District and walk around to the galleries, and little restaurants and stuff like that.

You absolutely need to make an opportunity to go to Caffe Lena for a show. It is a not to miss place to go.  There's also an amazing place called Universal Preservation Hall that's right across Broadway from Caffe Lena and definitely look and see what kind of, they've got a very, very lineup for what they do.

You might check Yaddo, the incredible artists retreat place that goes back a hundred years, Leonard Bernstein was there Aaron Copeland, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath. So, if the gardens at Yaddo are open, you should definitely go. And then you have to make a stop at Saratoga Arts, which is kind of the beating heart of downtown Saratoga. There's always an amazing show or a couple of exhibitions in there. If you've got children and you want to do ride the carousel. That's right behind Saratoga Arts right in Congress Park. It's lovely to take your kids down there and then walk around the park, see all the amazing statues and fountains and everything.

And then if you've gotten all that stuff under your belt, then you can come down to the south end of the city where Spa State Park is. There are golf courses. There are tennis courses. There are two pools, tons of hiking trails, the curative mineral springs,  the historic Roosevelt Spa, where you can take the waters and the original tubs with the curative water's piped in, and then all the other spa treatments that are available.

And then you can end up at SPAC, and you will feel so great. You can eat in the Hall of Springs, which is a beautiful 1935 building with a lot of history to it where there's pre-show dining. If you're here on a SPAC show night, And, if not, you come onto the grounds. There's lots of great food options and you just either spread out a picnic and eat under the stars, sit on the lawn, or come on into the amphitheater for a show. You can also stay in the park. The Gideon Putnam Hotel is right in the park.

Mat: Nice…

Elizabeth…Has great, big    rocking chairs, like you're out under the Pines rocking in your rocking chair, and then you can amble over to SPAC and then amble back.

Mat: You are a good tour guide.

Elizabeth: Hey, I love this place.

Mat: It shows.

69.7 Thanks

Thanks to Elizabeth in Saratoga, performing arts center. Excited to come for performance and the weekend. Reminder to visit city a.com for details on how you can win a complimentary pair to SPAC for the Friday, July 29th performance with the Philadelphia orchestra.

Details on the Episode 69 page. Deadline to enter is Friday, June 24th. 2022. There's also a blog post about visiting Saratoga. Also on the blog is a Cidiot pride listing events across towns in the area. We're deep into pride month so you can see what's still going on.

You can also subscribe to the free Cidiot newsletter, rate and review the show and follow city of Instagram. I'm Mat Zucker and thanks for listening. Come visit.

SFX: THEME MUSIC