You’ve heard plentiful variations of this story already…

2020 was set to be a spectacular year in the career of young Miles Mykkanen. Wrapping up eight years of vocal study at Juilliard School in New York City, the native of Bessemer, Michigan, had landed a full-time gig with the Metropolitan Opera. Yes, the legendary Met—a kid from the Upper Peninsula—it’s like the plot of a Broadway fairy tale.

Enter the villain: COVID-19. On-stage performances folded up for the year, and Miles decided the best thing was to come home.

If you think that’s a sad tale, you don’t know Miles, you don’t know the U.P., and you didn’t figure in Lake Superior. One might say the Lake was already calling him.

“My first year in New York, I was just so glad to be in civilization,” Miles remembers with a bit of bemusement. He grew up in a U.P. town of nearly—but not quite—2,000 folks and appreciated the north woods, the close community, deer camps, and especially the wild moods of the world’s most expansive freshwater lake. Both of his parents taught music. His mom’s from Bessemer, his dad from Republic; they met on the marching band field at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. Miles and his sister grew up surrounded by music, and Miles had stage aspirations—the kind that looked toward Broadway.

In his senior year of high school, he signed up for the Interlochen Arts Academy in Traverse City. The kid had talent; his instructors encouraged him to apply to Juilliard. He applied to major in vocal arts, and the school said yes.

Then, like a rogue wave on the Big Lake, opera splashed over him.

He had only dipped a toe into the genre in his younger years. “My first opera was at the Pine Mountain Music Festival; it was La Bohème. I had not seen much opera.” (He later joined the “UPstarts” under the festival’s program.)

At first, he wasn’t looking to the Metropolitan Opera for inspiration. “I wanted to be 20 blocks south, on Broadway.”

Learning the fundamentals of voice at Juilliard, he began exploring the world of opera. “The operatic emotions are so big, they’re so over the top, you can’t help but be affected by the music. On top of that, there are real-world emotions being sung at you… and it’s all acoustic.”

The power of operatic voices impressed him. “There’s a 100-piece orchestra, and somehow that singer is using their body to sing over the brass and percussion and strings… Sitting in the theater, you felt the music.”

His passion for the stage grew to encompass opera. “It was a surprise for all of us. My parents are, of course, very proud. I really lucked out with the most supportive family,” Miles says, recalling his dad driving him the 220-mile round trip from Bessemer to Superior, Wisconsin, for voice lessons.

Miles felt encouragement coming from home. “This community was just there for me. People didn’t know exactly what I was doing, but they have always been incredibly supportive.”

Meanwhile, in New York, the city fascinated him with its overdose of arts and culture, its constant human motion, and its seemingly endless options. But by his second year in the Big Apple, he noticed a longing. “It was honestly about six weeks into my second year, it hit me: ‘Where are the trees? I’m living in a concrete jungle… It hit me very hard.”

Even looking down on the 1.4 square miles of Central Park as he rode an elevator up in a building on Columbus Circle didn’t cut it.

He already appreciated that his roots from the U.P. served him well in the harder aspects of honing a powerful tenor voice and an operatic vocabulary.

“Sisu,” he credits his Finnish tenacity with a smile. “It was that kind of Yooper grit and sisu that got me through German diction at Juilliard… The characteristics of the people from the U.P. live in me every time I step on stage.”

Miles has stepped on a lot of stages. He was a 2019 winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has performed on stages from Europe to Canada, from the East Coast to the Gulf Coast to the West Coast. He’s done plenty in the middle, too, including Detroit and the Minnesota Opera. His 2020-21 performance season, or so it was planned, would have taken him from France to Lithuania to Seattle, to NYC’s Carnegie Hall, and, of course, to the Met to perform as The Novice in a production of Billy Budd.

When COVID started bringing down the curtains on stages around the world, Miles decided it was a great time to visit those trees and the Big Lake in the U.P. “I was thinking it would be maybe a month,” he says, “then slowly I saw the next year and a half of my performances evaporate.” A month became most of 2020, and Miles remains in the U.P. for now, awaiting the reopening of performances on the East Coast.

Still, reconnecting with home has been a boon for Miles and his home region. He’s already agreed this year to perform in the annual Pine Mountain Music Festival and has helped create the Emberlight Festival with art, film, and performances. He has pitched in as a choir director for the Bessemer High School.

The idea for Emberlight came to Miles during a long weekend last year as he pondered how to connect his U.P. life with his big-city one. “I was camping and being the Yooper last summer—playing tourist—and I looked around and thought, ‘This could be a much bigger dream.’”

His city friends already wondered about the “wilderness” of his youth. “People always talked about wanting to visit this area,” Miles says. He decided, “Let’s create that reason. I just hit the ground running. I have the most incredible board of directors.”

Emberlight is his mission to create world-class performances and life-transforming experiences for U.P. residents and for those who come to visit. “Performers from the Broadway production of Wicked, Carnegie Hall, and the Met will be Emberlight’s 2021 guest artists,” he says.

They will dazzle the local audiences, he hopes, and he plans a few dazzling moments for the guests, like tasting a pasty and enjoying a sauna (with a side explanation of how to properly pronounce it).

And for his pièce de résistance? We are absolutely going to hike the Black River waterfalls and climb Copper Peak,” promises Miles, “for the greatest view of Lake Superior.”