Kenneth Montgomery - The Maestro

“It happened because I’d been working in Toronto with the Canadian opera and met a stage director there called Bliss Hebert who had been working regularly  here [in Santa Fe] and I think it was he who suggested my name for Mignon, an opera by [Ambroise] Tomas. Now I’ve done quite a lot of rare operas. I like to do rare operas and I liked very much doing it in Sante Fe. They seemed to like me also, so two years later I was back for The Secret Marriage [by Cimarosa].”

Mignon was in 1982; Montgomery has been a regular conductor at Santa Fe ever since. And he is happy to be here.
“It’s such a fascinating mixture of cultures. After you’ve been here a bit you begin to feel the Hispanic and the Native American cultures and you begin to realize that the Anglo culture is less important than both of them. It’s kind of mysterious as well. There are all kinds of elements that make it interestingly mysterious,”  he said.

“I’m very, very happy working here, the orchestra is absolutely wonderful, and of course the setting is fantastic. The founder of the company, John Crosby [a New Yorker], was a wonderful organizer and administrator. He really knew how to put things together. He was a conductor as well and a superb musician and so his combination of music and brilliant administration has made this company as good as it is. And it’s a great pleasure to work here because you know everything is going to be organized as well as it possibly can be. As you can imagine opera is a very complicated thing to organize, there’s so many different things that have to go together. This is one of the finest opera companies I know.”

Home Again
Montgomery never lost touch with Belfast. Shortly after our meeting he opened the 2009/10 season at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall with the Ulster Orchestra. Having served as the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, he became its principal conductor in 2008, the first Ulster man to serve in this position.

Sadly, his father had passed away, but his mother gloried in her son’s triumph.

“Unfortunately, my father died when I was 21 or 22 and had been ill quite a bit before so he didn’t see me perform much. But my mother is still alive, 98. In fact when I was appointed principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra I went to see her and as she’s deaf now, I had to write the news of the appointment down for her. She didn’t react for a while and I thought, ‘Can’t she read or what’ and then she banged her arm on the table and said, ‘I told them so.’

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Nster.com