Overview: Renowned American conductor, pianist, author, and educator Patrick Summers has announced the arrival of his latest book, a collection of personal essays entitled Tapestries: Connections From an Artistic Life.

Summers’s fifty essays included in the collection weave together a tapestry showcasing opera’s many threads and colors across the centuries into today, with stories encompassing the innermost workings of musical productions to profiles of preeminent opera stars, composers, and teachers past and present.

Verdict: The varied essays of Tapestries draw upon Patrick Summers’s storied career as a conductor who has served as the Artistic and Music Director of Houston Grand Opera for nearly three decades and has led a multitude of live and recorded performances and premieres at companies including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Bregenz Festival in Austria, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and many others.

Having read through this book twice now, almost back-to-back, I can happily report that the essays can be read independently in any order, providing a glimpse into the myriad connections that link together to create the ultimate art form. And what we get is a magnificent overview of some very transformative experiences that made an exceptionally talented boy from Loogootee, Indiana into one of opera’s most brilliant practitioners.

Because this renowned American conductor, pianist, author, and educator, celebrated for his contributions to the world of opera and classical music, and sought-after teacher and lecturer, currently serving as Co-Director of the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program at the Aspen Music Festival alongside Renée Fleming, is, perhaps, one of the best people within this business to have brought such an endearing accolade of prose to the fore.

Inclusive of an endearing foreword by Summers’s frequent collaborator, the aforementioned renowned soprano Renée Fleming, Tapestries is divided into four sections: Part 1. Weaving Our Days: Diverse Connections; Part 2. Brilliant Stitches: Operas That Reach Across Time; Part 3. The Diorama: Houston as More Than Commerce; and Part 4. The Loom: Great Artists, Teachers, Humans.

Excerpt from the Foreword by Renée Fleming: “How rewarding it is to have a buffet of operatic remembrances and insights served up by Patrick Summers! His passion for the subject is irresistible. No matter which chapter you sample first, you will appreciate his erudition, his bracing wit, and his openhearted embrace of opera’s most profound challenges and rewards.”

Essay subjects span Disney’s film Fantasia to Gilbert and Sullivan to contemporary composers like Matthew Aucoin and Joel Thompson to the financial impact of coronavirus on the arts, to operas like The Marriage of Figaro, Turandot, Porgy and Bess, and Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appétit.

“These writings align with the various passions of my heart, as anyone’s personal essays would,” writes Summers in his introduction. “In rereading some of these writings for this collection, while they fairly represent a microcosm of any arts audience, I realized they also form a multilayered tapestry, illustrative of what every day of working in the arts is like. This book, though, isn’t really ‘about’ opera. It is about the connections we make to the things we love.”

About the Author - Patrick Summers is Artistic and Music Director of Houston Grand Opera, co-director with Renée Fleming of Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS at the Aspen Music Festival, and Distinguished Guest Lecturer in Opera Studies at the Shepherd School at Rice University. He is also a guest conductor of many opera companies and orchestras, a professional pianist, writer, and teacher.

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