During her visit to the Capital Region last month we shared lunch at Jack’s Oyster House in downtown Albany.  I thought the conversation would be  about opera repertoire and casting (and wondered if I’d be out of my league).  In an unexpected role reversal, I was the one being peppered with questions. Zambello wanted to hear about the local economic and culture scene and to learn where else she should go and who else she should talk to in order to build support for Glimmerglass.

“I’m the artistic director but also the associate development director,” she joked.

Beyond fundraising, another priority is building ties to other cultural and civic organizations with the goal of reaching new audiences. For this coming summer, Zambello is setting in place collaborations with regional groups as diverse as the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum and the Ommegang Brewery, all in Cooperstown, as well as the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute in Utica and even the local penitentiary (with the notion of getting inmates to help spruce up the grounds).

Opera also came up, of course, but Zambello didn’t give any hint as to what’s in store for future seasons. She said that the programming decisions for her entire three-year contract are in place and that more big name artists can be expected.  The headliner for this coming summer, of course, is Deborah Voigt in “Annie Get Your Gun.” Zambello’s close associations was such major artists was one of the reasons she got the job.

Though Zambello never suggested that the Cooperstown-based company is exactly on the ropes, she conveyed a palpable urgency and determination.  Tight finances, she said, are common throughout the field. “As a director,” she said, “at every company I work at, the question is how to do things better but for less money.”

You can hear more of Zambello’s history and plans for Glimmerglass at the company’s website, which has an audio recording of a talk she gave this summer in Cooperstown.

Photos courtesy Glimmerglass Opera.

First is Baltimore, where in September she begins her second year as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her 2005 appointment to the post she became the first female leader of a major American orchestra.  And there’s Santa Cruz, California, where she’s completing her 16th summer directing the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

Alsop also recently ascended to the post of conductor emeritus with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England, after completing a six-year tenure and a series of acclaimed recordings there.  And she maintains a home in Denver, where she’s music director laureate of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and where her companion teaches horn and plays in the orchestra.

Alsop, 51, says she got the conducting bug at around age 9 at a Young People’s Concert with Leonard Bernstein, who later became her mentor.  But she probably first developed a taste – or tolerance – for a conductor’s peripatetic life even earlier because of annual July visits with her parents to Saratoga Springs.  Her dad, violinist LaMar Alsop, was concertmaster of the New York City Ballet Orchestra for 30 years and her mom Ruth remains a member of its cello section.

“(Saratoga) was a very idyllic experience as a kid,” Alsop said during an interview in the late spring.  “I remember attending rehearsals, and lying on the SPAC lawn listening to music. There’s nothing like that.”

She’s continued to visit over the years, staying at her folks place and enjoying some of the local sights. “My mom especially likes the horse racing and is friendly with the trainers. That’s a nice contrast to the music part for all of us,” she says.

But the Alsops never stray far from music.

“Growing up as the only child of professional musicians, there’s not a lot of discussion about what you’re going do,” says Alsop, who began piano studies at age 2 and violin three years later. “I had a brief detour as an undergrad at Yale and was thinking about mathematics but ended up transferring to Juilliard for violin performance. My parents are very passionate and led wonderfully fulfilling lives and they wanted me to have the same kind of life experience.”

Alsop and her family will spend the better part of this week in Saratoga. She and her partner of 18 years Kristin Jurkscheit have a five-year-old son, Auden Alsop, and this will be his second time to the area. “He remembers (the last visit) a bit because of pictures but this will be more poignant and memorable,” she says.

Naturally, the boy is already studying music.

“I vowed I’d never do to my kid what mine did to me, but we’re forcing him to play the violin,” says Alsop, adding that he’s recently gotten beyond variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle.”

Although Alsop hasn’t made a judgment yet on his musical promise, she says her son – who bears the same name as the British poet – shows remarkable gifts for language. “You’d know what I mean if you had a conversation with him,” she says.

Alsop has a musical history with Saratoga that’s more than just familial. Before turning to conducting, she was a freelance violinist who gigged with a variety of orchestras, great and small, including the New York Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra, as well as in the pit at some Broadway shows and alongside her folks in the New York City Ballet Orchestra. The latter included some summers in Spa City.

Her conducting debut at SPAC came on Sunday July 5, 1992, leading the Ballet Orchestra – sans dancers – in its first ever performance on the SPAC stage. The program included Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy, Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite,” and an encore of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Alsop’s relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra dates back even further. She made her debut on a subscription program at age 33. “I was pretty doggone scared,” says Alsop. “They’re one of the great orchestras of the world. They know that and they’re proud.”

But Alsop has returned to lead the Philly on a regular basis and watched its membership take on more musicians her age and younger.

“I feel that the orchestra’s evolving and it has a little bit of a different perspective, though they’re still very established and steeped in tradition,” she says. “Now it’s just fun with a lot of friends, a reunion in a way. I love guest conducting these great orchestras. It’s a dream come true.”

While racking up the frequent flyer miles, Alsop has also received important honors in recent years. In 2005, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called a genius award. And this spring she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in a “2008 class” that includes Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, filmmakers the Coen Brothers and jazz musician B.B. King among others.

Then there’s that ongoing thing about being “the first woman” to do this or that in the field of conducting.

“I am shocked by the fact that in the 21st century there can still be ‘firsts’ for women,” she’s said, ever keeping the focus on the music.

Yet the firsts keep happening. In Milan this past April, Alsop was the first woman to conduct in the 230-year history of La Scala. In the midst of the experience, she wrote the following for her on-line journal:

“The musicians seemed curious and slightly bemused for a few minutes at our first rehearsal and then we quickly got down to the business of making music together and the woman issue was a non starter!”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, August 10, 2008.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

Zambello is an opera director. In other words, she’s fearless.

Dealing with powerful impresarios, delicate singers and bossy conductors comes with the territory. But Zambello puts it simply, saying, “I’m a storyteller.”

Sometimes her challenge isn’t who she’s working with but what she’s given to dramatize.  Take her latest piece, Shostakovich’s rarely performed 1928 opera “The Nose,” which opens at Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson on Friday.

In the opera, a man’s proboscis is accidentally cut off at the barbershop. It runs out the door and takes on a grand new life of its own. And a cast of 27 principals and 24 chorus members sing about it in Russian for about two hours.

“It’s a rather bizarre, quirky, zany wonderful story,” says Zambello. “The nose looks like a big nose a 5-foot nose. And as he grows in self-importance, he grows from being a regular-size nose to a supernose.”

If anyone is up to the task of the supernose, it’s Francesca Zambello.

“She’s at the top of her form and the top of her field,” says Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, who will conduct the American Symphony Orchestra in “The Nose.”

Botstein engaged Zambello for the production about a year ago, which is relatively short lead time in the world of opera, especially with a director as in demand as Zambello, who regularly works in the major opera houses of Europe, including the Paris Opera and London’s Covent Garden.

Zambello’s renown has come, at least in part, for her faithfulness to operatic tradition. This stands in sharp contrast to directors like Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars, who find fame by making themselves and their vision such an obvious, sometimes intrusive, part of what’s on stage.

“I’m a populist,” says Zambello when asked to describe her style, during a recent discussion between rehearsals at Bard. “I’m interested in getting opera out there to the widest number of people through means that make it as accessible as possible.”

Staging a piece in the 3,800-seat Met certainly means reaching audiences. But Zambello also points to a production early this year of “La Boheme” at the 5,000-seat Royal Albert Hall in London. “Seventy-five thousand people saw that,” she says.

Zambello approached “The Nose” as she does every opera – with months of historical research, long discussions with the production team and a gut instinct about what works on stage and can speak to contemporary audiences. “It’s a satire from the 1920s, based on (the short story) by Gogol, which was written in the 1830s,” she says. “It’s about class climbing, and that’s something that’s endemic all the time. (It’s also) about everyman versus bureaucracy, and anybody could relate to that.”

Composed when Shostakovich was 21 years old, the music has an optimism that became increasingly rare in his music, as he struggled to be an artist under Soviet rule. “It shows brilliant virtuosity and tremendous influence of Stravinsky,” Botstein says of the score. Zambello sees in the opera’s quick pacing Shostakovich’s interest in film. “It moves forward in real time, almost a cinematic time,” she says.

Along with a multinational cast that includes six Russians, Bard’s “Nose” team features as set designer the Latin American, New York City-based architect Rafael Vinoly. Follows in the footsteps of Frank Ghery, who designed the Fisher Center as well as the sets for last year’s production of Janacek’s opera “Osud,” Vinoly is planning a new science building for the Bard campus and in the meantime takes a stab at opera.

Says Zambello, “When you collaborate with someone from outside the theatrical realm … it’s always stimulating intellectual dialogue, and eventually you have to find a way to get it on the stage, and we’re getting there.”

After recent summers spent in France, Austria, Japan and Seattle, Zambello is enjoying the summer at Bard since she has a home less than an hour away in Gardner, near New Paltz.

“It’s wonderful to be able to work and sleep in your own bed. It boils down to something so simple,” she says. Zambello shares her country home and a Manhattan apartment with her companion of 15 years, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Manuela Hoelterhoff, and their three beagles.

Hoelterhoff has written on opera and music for the Wall Street Journal and has an upcoming book on Hitler and Wagner. Recently she was named to a new post overseeing cultural reporting for Bloomberg Media. The new job will make it even harder for Hoelterhoff to travel with Zambello, who says, “It’s not good to have your partner with you when there’s so much work.”

The couple did collaborate on one opera, “Modern Painters,” based on the life of John Ruskin. Zambello’s production premiered at the Sante Fe Opera in 1995. The libretto was by Hoelterhoff and music by David Lang. “I’m sure we’ll end up collaborating on something else,” says Zambello.  “We both have our thoughts on each other’s work. It’s great to have artistic discussions with her. She’s a keen thinker.”

As a leading American figure in opera, Zambello is often approached by composers eager to write for the stage. “I try to be as helpful, positive and nurturing as possible, because that’s a very isolated world,” she says.

Though it’s not often Zambello does direct a new piece, her track record with them is good. An operatic take on the classic French book “The Little Prince” premiered last year at the Houston Grand Opera with music by the Academy Award-winning composer Rachel Portman (“The Piano”). Six other companies have since lined up to remount the piece, including the New York City Opera.

Also in the 2005-06 season, the Metropolitan Opera will present Zambello’s staging of the premiere of Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,” based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser. It’s her third collaboration with the composer, who lives near Rhinebeck. “It’s truly an upstate (New York) opera. Most of it takes place in the Adirondacks,” Zambello says. Picker admires Zambello’s abilities as a director, having seen her in operation both in and out of the opera house.

“She’s a real director,” he says. “You go to her house and two people are sitting near each other and she tells them to talk to each other or look out the window. She’s always directing. … I love going out to eat with her. You get good service.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, July 25, 2004.

Also appears in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.