Kenneth Montgomery - The Maestro

“I enjoyed that period very much and we managed to get very good reviews from the British press. It was very heartwarming. They would say, ‘You should go to Belfast to see a wonderful production of The Magic Flute.’”

Alas, the North of Ireland was caught up in both economic and political struggles at the time. The Europa Hotel, next door to the Grand Opera House, was bombed constantly, and there were financial troubles as well. It was, he said, “very special that we were well thought of. But it was always a bit of a struggle to make the money work out.”

After Montgomery left the opera company it folded. (In 1991 he was made director of opera studies at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where a chair in opera studies was set up in his name.)  “[The Belfast Opera Company] existed for another two or three years but the people that took over the management were not so canny at making the arts council help us,” he said sadly. “It’s a great pity because I felt very much at that time that a city of roughly half a million people should have an opera company of its own.”

It’s also a great shame, according to Montgomery, that young Irish musicians still have to go abroad to complete their education, as he had to go to London as a young man. “The one thing that we really miss in Ireland is an advanced training course for musicians. You get to a certain level then you have to go somewhere else to reach the final performance level. I would be very keen to see something develop so that people from Ireland don’t have to go abroad,” he said.

New Mexico
His favorite opera is “nearly always the one I’m doing at the time but if I’m really pressed I suppose The Marriage of Figaro. I think it’s got the greatest humanity of any piece I know. The forgiveness at the end, all that comedy you go through . . . Life is a comedy and people have to be big-hearted. I did it here [Santa Fe] last year and it was a wonderful group of artists doing it.”

The Marriage of Figaro aside, Montgomery has an appreciation for the not so commonly performed – perhaps harkening back to the catch-all of music left to him as a child that he would draw on to surprise his music teachers. “I was curious about all kinds of music, sometimes bringing pieces to my music teacher in Belfast and he was horrified, saying, ‘What is this?’”

He still likes to surprise. We meet for lunch between rehearsals for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste with American soprano Christine Brewer in the title role. The opera, which has no sub-plot, and is based on the play Alcestis by Euripides, is a challenge for any conductor. But then Montgomery is the sort who revels in a challenge. In fact, the reason he was invited to Santa Fe was because of his penchant for the unusual.

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