By Sebastian Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer

Summer is here, and the opera buff’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of cool, refreshing, music-filled getaways. The most ambitious head for European bastions of the arts like the Salzburg, Glyndebourne and Bayreuth festivals.

But you don’t have to cross the pond. The USA  offers attractive options like the Ravinia and Tanglewood festivals that offer a wide range of operatic and musical choices because they are held in the summer homes of the Chicago and Boston symphony orchestras, respectively.

Not far from Tanglewood and the Berkshires, another opera festival is emerging as an interesting alternative to its older siblings in the American West, including the Santa Fe Opera Festival, an indisputable pole of international attraction, and that splendid Bayreuth by the Pacific that is Seattle, whose opera house is staging the Ring cycle this year. Of course, the name is the Glimmerglass Festival near Cooperstown, on the shores of Lake Otsego in the idyllic Hudson River Valley.

Glimmerglass has been combining opera and musical comedy in a distinctive mix since welcoming new artistic and general director Francesca Zambello three years ago. Its 2013 season runs from July 6 to August 24 and involves a brand-new partnership with the Festival of American Romantics in nearby Cooperstown. Francesca Zambello

In planning for two great bicentennials, the birthdays of Wagner and Verdi, Zambello has left no area of programming untouched. The Italian will be honored with a rare U.S. production of Un giorno di regno, his first comic opera, to be directed by Christian Räth, and the German, with The Flying Dutchman, a new staging by Zambello with Ryan McKinny, Melody Moore and Jay Hunter Morris in the leads. In addition, Christine Goerke, one of the top Wagnerian stars of the moment, will offer a recital with orchestra on Aug. 11. Earlier, Eric Owens, the fantastic Alberich in the latest Ring at the Met, is slated to appear in concert on Aug. 2 as part of the young artists’ program.

American musical comedy (so dear to Zambello that she just premiered her highly praised Showboat at the Washington National Opera, where she is the new Artistic Director) makes an appearance with Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, under the direction of the James Lowe-Gary Griffin team and featuring top opera stars, including David Pittsinger, Andriana Chuchean and baritone Nathan Gunn. On Aug. 18, Gunn and his wife Julie are slated to conclude their stint as artists in residence at the festival’s young artists’ series with a concert appropriately titled Gunns in Concert.

Contemporary opera and early music are also in the lineup, with two one-act plays about love and loss. Zambello will direct The Little Match Girl Passion by Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang, based on Bach’s The Passion According to St. Matthew. This revised version includes a children’s choir to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the apprenticeship program. The evening ends with a performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with countertenor Anthony Roth Constanzo and soprano Nadine Sierra, directed by Speranza Scappuci, set design and choreography by Jessica Lang.

On Aug. 9, a very special event features Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivering a lecture and holding an informal conversation about her “other” passion: opera.

As part of the Festival of American Romantics, Cooperstown’s Fenimore Art Museum will offer a major retrospective of the Hudson River School’s romantic landscapes. “The ideals and ideas of the Romantics underscore our 2013 season repertory,” said Zambello. “We are excited to collaborate with a museum and historic site to highlight the connection of the art, music and literature of the Romantics in our pastoral setting.”

Those will be weeks of feverish activity at the Glimmerglass, a great opera option in the American East, between New York and venerable Tanglewood in the neighboring Berkshires.

For additional information, visit the festival’s webpage, www.glimmerglass.org.