Wendell Castle - The Arts and Cultural Council for Greater Rochester

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An accomplished soprano and the founding executive director of Rochester-based empire State Lyric Theatre, Sue Cotroneo has hosted multiple events designed to introduce opera to a broader audience. 12 FALL 2012 | EmpirE StatE Lyric S Theatre Sue Cotroneo has just come back from Tampa. She is wearing Brings Opera to New Audiences By Sarah E. Lentini an haute couture dress in black jersey that drapes and balloons at the knee in a style that, I realize later that evening as I’m watching a documentary on the history of supermodels, is retro ’60s modern. Her shoes are equally chic, high wedged platform sandals in a butter yellow leather that complements her deep inky purple pedicure and echoes her silky blonde hair. Sue hugs me hello and we walk back to the kitchen to get coffee, where Sue selects an Italian Roast Keurig K-Cup, as I had already known she would, given her similar predilection for all things Italian. As the founding executive director of Rochester’s opera company, Empire State Lyric Theatre, in just a few short years, Susan Cotroneo has formed an exciting new nonprofit organization that is filling an important role in the arts and culture of the greater Rochester/Finger Lakes region. Last year, the company mounted a production of I Pagliacci at the downtown Blue Cross Arena—a venue pretty much unprecedented for the art form in Rochester. Its financial support has come from a variety of sources, including the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester—which has provided the company with multiple grants in partnership with both the New York State Council on the Arts and Rochester Area Community Foundation. In addition to drawing crowds to her company’s large-scale productions, Sue Cotroneo has all along coordinated a series of much more intimate events, aimed at cultivating new opera patrons. Her husband, Anthony Cotroneo, a high power Rochester attorney, and her partner in every sense of the word, has worked alongside her to establish and support the young opera company since the beginning. Originally an outsider to the world of opera, his perspective has been pivotal to her ability to attract and engage new audiences and supporters. The formula has been essentially to throw a party, with all the best elements of what draws anyone to an event: great food and
all Images couRtesy oF sue cotRoneo and emPIRe state lyRIc theatRe, PhotogRaPh by IdRIs salIh (oPPosIte Page) wine, a beautiful setting, a good mix of people, and music. Sue Cotroneo knew that, if she could get her husband’s “non-opera” friends to come and, even more importantly, to enjoy themselves, she would be well-positioned to sustain the company over time. The Cotroneos live in an exquisite home, reminiscent of a Tuscan villa, which Sue painstakingly designed and decorated. She has a marvelous aesthetic sensibility. The house is central to her work as well: it serves as an optimal venue for both intimate and grand affairs, and it houses her business office, enabling her to stay close to their three young children. Susan Delly Cotroneo was raised in Rochester, the oldest of three children and the only girl, in a charming 1920s center Colonial on Seneca Parkway, in the city’s Northwest Quadrant, which her mother kept, “just so—it was always very nice.” Her parents had high expectations for her, she tells me, so that she learned from the beginning that she needed to work hard for the things she wanted. It is something, Sue says, that she has since come to appreciate greatly. Their expectations gave her the self-reliance and the confidence, she explains, that made it possible for her to, among other things, contemplate starting an opera company. When Sue was 11 years old—she tells me this number two or three times as if it is an important point of demarcation—her parents enrolled her in the David Hochstein Memorial School of Music & Dance, where she embarked on ballet and music lessons. “I think they saw this curvy body and thought we need to keep this child active,” she says, with a wry smile. “I had to take a city bus each week, the Dewey 10 to be exact, to get there—I was eleven years old. I wasn’t happy about it. I wanted a ride. My mother said to me, ‘It’s your voice. They’re your voice lessons. If you want them, you need to figure out how to get there.’ And I would say to her, ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t make me take the bus.’ Her response to me was, ‘It’s because we love you— it builds character.’” After a few years of lessons, again in response to her body type, Sue tells me, her mother suggested that it was unlikely she would ever be a ballerina, telling her, “Why don’t you focus on the singing.” Both of her parents worked. Her father owned and ran a contracting business. Her mother was a librarian, who later in life—after Sue was an adult—went back to school and got multiple graduate degrees, ultimately becoming the principal of School 46 in the city, before retiring this year at the age of 65. “A strong and impressive woman,” I say. “Oh yes. Very strong and impressive,” says Sue Cotroneo. “And tough,” I say. “And tough,” she answers. Were your parents just as tough on your brothers?” I ask. “No!” She laments. “They weren’t.” Also when she was eleven years old, Sue was put on an airplane to LaGuardia in New York City to visit her aunt, an accomplished Broadway performer and singer, whose career included touring the country with Robert Preston in The Music Man. “She would take me to the World Trade Center every day and we would buy tickets to whatever show was available.” In the space of two weeks, her aunt took her to 10 Broadway shows. Sue emerged from the two-week experience knowing what she wanted to do with the rest of her life: “I said, ‘I want to do that,’” Sue Cotroneo points with her finger at the Broadway stage of her memory. “I wanted to be on Broadway.” Sue majored in both music and music education, getting her K-12 Sue and Tony Cotroneo in 2004 at the famed Trevi Fountain in Rome, shortly after she had completed a production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore in the near-by region of Abruzzo (top); Sue Cotroneo in italy with world-renowned tenor Gianni Raimondi (now deceased), with whom she studied early in her career. teaching certification. In fact, she tells me, it is the underpinning of the continued interest and passion that she has for teaching as well as music. After an early job working in a West Virginia School District, while attending graduate school at West Virginia University, her aunt connected her to a unique and life-altering singing experience in Italy—on the Italian Riviera—performing with two of Italy’s opera greats: Gianni Raimondi and Giuseppe Taddei. They were shameless old flirts, but they were also marvelous sing- ers who combined with the backdrop and Empire State Lyric Theatre history of Italy to reignite her passion for per- • www.empirestatelyrictheatre.org formance and for opera. When she returned to the US and finished graduate school it was her mother who introduced Susan Delly to Anthony Cotroneo, her future husband, by setting her up on a blind date with him. Her mother had never met Tony but knew of him through a friend. Sue was 27 years old. A former high school and college wrestler, Tony had already graduated from Syracuse Law School and had started working at Rochester law firm Woods Oviatt Gilman, where he would ultimately become a Partner. He is equally smart and affable. And the two share a self-reliance and a drive that makes them a powerful and effective team. a | Fall 2012 13
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