Glimmerglass on a New Course

The changing of the guard at all three New York opera houses — the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera, and Glimmerglass Opera — has coincided with a slump in live audiences for classical music and opera. The old certainties that guided opera production for decades have gone, and there are no quick fixes. As the new general director of Glimmerglass, Michael MacLeod, put it, “The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.”It is no accident, then, that the boards of the opera companies have turned to those with a proven record of aggressively wooing a new generation of fickle patrons. For Mr. MacLeod, whose first season opens in July, Glimmerglass — which is based in Cooperstown, N.Y. — offers an opportunity to display his proven gifts for refreshing the appeal of music and attracting a wider audience.“Entertainment options for opera lovers and symphony goers have increased dramatically in the past 40 years,” he said. “Those who have a love for opera and classical music aren’t just listening to it on record players, they are listening to opera and orchestral music on CDs and watching opera on DVDs in surround sound. People can choose what they want to listen to when they want, and can be up close and personal with opera right in their living rooms.”But this creates a challenge for opera, Mr. MacLeod said, “particularly for companies with larger venues where the performance can be more remote. This is one of the reasons Glimmerglass Opera’s Alice Busch Opera Theater is appreciated so much. One can be intimately involved with the onstage action from any seat in the house.” Mr. MacLeod, a soft-spoken Scot, comes with an impressive pedigree. He is a true cosmopolitan, which, like his new counterparts at the Met and the City Opera, is essential in making the worldwide deals to offset the vast costs of opera production. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia, to peripatetic parents who took him on a grand tour. In Ethiopia, “I had to dodge bullets on my way home from school,” he remembers. Returning to Scotland for high school, he studied at Fettes, one of Edinburgh’s most exclusive schools, “where I came to know the young Tony Blair.”His introduction to America came when he won a scholarship to study European medieval studies and music at Amherst, after which his ambition was curiously modest. “I just wanted to sweep the stage at La Scala. Nice place to work, meet the stars, hear the music,” he said. However, his enthusiasm for music, and his organizing ability, quickly led him into concert management. From 1984 to 1996, he administered John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and discovered a new audience for the early music repertoire.He next ran the City of London festival for five years before joining the New Haven Symphony Orchestra as executive director. His career to date has allowed him to work with some of the greatest names in music, among them Anne Sofie von Otter, Bryn Terfel, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Daniel Barenboim, Bernard Haitink, Sir Neville Marriner, and Claudio Abbado.Glimmerglass may offer more modest talent to work with, but Mr. MacLeod inspiration and ingenuity on his side. Until last summer, under Glimmerglass’s former director Paul Kellogg, the annual suite of four operas offered a wide variety for what Mr. MacLeod has identified as the three distinct Glimmerglass audiences: the Cooperstown locals, who maintain a keen sense of ownership over the program; the seasonal arts audience, who make a summer pilgrimage to theater in the Berkshires and music at Tanglewood and Bard; and the New York City music crowd.Mr. MacLeod has added another element. As well as new productions of a popular opera, a repertory standard, a new commission, and a revival, he is adding an overarching theme. This summer, it is the Orpheus myth.To Offenbach’s perennial favorite “Orpheus in the Underworld,” Mr. MacLeod has added three productions: the Berlioz version of Gluck’s “Orpheo ed Eurydice” — which will offer a contrast to the Met’s dazzling production this month featuring David Daniels — Monteverdi’s “L’Orpheo,” and Philip Glass’s “Orphee.” To reinforce the Orpheus theme, there will be two concert performances of Haydn’s “L’Anima del Filosofo” and screenings of Jean Cocteau’s “Orphee.”Next year, MacLeod is continuing with a thematic festival, presenting four operas linked to Shakespeare: Wagner’s “Das Liebersverbot,” based on “Measure for Measure;” Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” which again will invite comparison to Mr. Daniels’s masterful performance in the main role last month at the Met; Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” based on “Romeo and Juliet,” and, for light relief, Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me Kate,” from “The Taming of the Shrew.” All will share a common set.To finance some of these productions, Mr. MacLeod sought out opera partners in Europe. “L’Orfeo” is co-produced with Opera North, in Leeds, England, and with Norwegian Opera.It all adds up to a new vitality at Glimmerglass, whose worldwide reputation has grown year by year. Rather than see the new blood at the Met and at City Opera as competition, Mr. MacLeod believes dynamism in New York’s opera scene will lift all boats. “Because of Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera and Gérard Mortier at New York City Opera, and I hope because of what we are doing at Glimmerglass, opera is being talked about more and more in New York as a revitalized and attractive art form. Surely this is good for all of us.”

Glimmerglass on a New Course

Glimmerglass on a New Course

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