study and perform at Glimmerglass. These young artists are chosen annually from hundreds of applicants from throughout the United States. In addition to rehearsing and performing, Young Artists receive musical coaching, attend classes in diction and acting, and are given instruction in such non-performing skills as audition techniques, role preparation, and the business aspects of managing a career. Administrators from many of the world's leading opera houses visit Glimmerglass throughout the summer and hear the Young Artists in performance. In the course of the summer each Young Artist gives a solo song recital at venues in Cooperstown and nearby Cherry Valley, a feature of the Glimmerglass season that has become extremely popular with opera patrons and the local community. Alice Busch Opera Theater The Glimmerglass Festival's Alice Busch Opera Theater, which opened in June 1987, was built on of farmland donated by Tom Goodyear, its first chairman. The 914-seat theater is notable for its pastoral setting, for being the first American opera house built since 1966, and for its sliding walls, closed only while singers are on-stage and in foul weather. The theater was designed by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. The new theater was built to move the performances from a high school auditorium with poor acoustics and sight lines and no orchestra pit to a building with an interior designed specifically for opera performances. The exterior design was inspired by local farm buildings to fit with the surrounding landscape and to promote a less formal and more relaxed atmosphere suitable for a summer theater. For environmental and cost efficiencies, the building was designed to use only natural ventilation, without any mechanical heating or cooling. Recent festival seasons The Festival's 2010 season featured four new productions, including Copland's The Tender Land, and Handel's Tolomeo. During the 2011 season Cherubini's Médée was presented. Also, a double bill featuring the world premiere of A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, with music by Jeanine Tesori set to Tony Kushner's libretto (a story inspired by the life of Eugene O'Neill) along with Later the Same Evening, a one-act opera based on characters in five of Edward Hopper's paintings with a score by John Musto from a libretto by Mark Campbell. In 2012, the festival featured Verdi's Aida, Lully's Armide, Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars and the musical The Music Man. Armide was presented in collaboration with Opera Atelier of Toronto, Canada, and Lost in