Special to the Cooperstown Crier

This summer, the Glimmerglass Opera is marking Paul Kellogg's 25th year at the helm, but the company's artistic director really isn't counting.

"I don't believe in birthdays and celebrations very much," Kellogg says, "and I certainly don't observe them, unless I have to, because life should just keep right on going and getting better, whatever way, if possible."

"Getting better," not marking time, is what Kellogg and his work with the company has always been about. During his tenure - as general manager, then general director for the first 17 years - Glimmerglass has gone from a semiprofessional organization working in a high school auditorium to a world-class company with a theater of its own and productions that make it one of the top three summer opera festivals in the country, along with the Santa Fe Opera and the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

Glimmerglass opens its four-opera 2004 festival season tonight with Giacomo Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West," an opera set in Gold Rush California, and that will be followed tomorrow night by Gilbert & Sullivan's seldom performed "Patience," a send-up of poet Oscar Wilde and what was called the "aesthetic movement."

July 17 will bring Handel's "Imeneo," the last opera the composer wrote before penning "Messiah," and rounding out the season of rotating repertory will be the American professional premiere July 24 of Richard Rodney Bennett's 1965 "The Mines of Sulphur," a suspenseful affair set in a remote 18th-century English country house.

Glimmerglass is often called the "American Glyndebourne" after the celebrated English opera festival, but it's a comparison Kellogg seems to find both flattering and a bit strained.

"I hear the same sort of comparisons made," he says, "and I hear various estimates of where Glimmerglass lies in the whole field of opera and theater, but it's a little hard for me, being so close to the company, to make an objective judgement.

"What I do know is that when artists come here, they're very excited about the work we do; when audiences come, they generally want to come back the next season, and all of that is a real encouragement to go on doing what we're doing."

He doesn't think comparing Glimmerglass to Glyndebourne holds up even though the rural settings of both theaters and the repertory they offer do bear some resemblance. The English festival is about an hour's drive from London, while Glimmerglass is some four hours by car from New York. And while Londoners flock to Glyndebourne in tuxedos and evening gowns, the atmosphere at Glimmerglass is emphatically informal.

"There should be no barriers whatsoever, as far as I'm concerned, to coming into an opera house, so clothing should not present any problem for people. Here the cast and the company move among the audience and create a bond between the audience and the backstage world that's different from most companies that I'm aware of.

"Glimmerglass is also unlike most American opera companies," he continues. "We're more adventurous in the way we approach staging and repertory, and that is a serious and, I think, exciting difference that exists between us and most companies in this country."

For Glimmerglass to get where it is today was a long process, and while Kellogg presided over its rise to prominence, he can't say he foresaw it.

"I had no idea 25 years ago that Glimmerglass was going to become what it has," he admits. "When I came here, I really didn't have any experience in opera; it was a sort of fluke. I had never run a company before, certainly not an arts organization, so I had a great deal to learn, and I learned it on the job."

He had been the assistant headmaster of a private school in New York and had retired young to write and manage his farm in Cooperstown. He first got involved with the opera company a year or two after its founding in 1975, working backstage as a volunteer, running props. Then for reasons that still escape him, the Glimmerglass trustees asked him to become general manager in 1978 and, Jan. 1, 1979, he assumed the post.

He says that in bringing the company forward from year to year he was bringing himself along as well. And though he became a world-class arts administrator in the process - since 1996 he has been general and artistic director of the New York City Opera as well - he credits much of his success to the people who have worked with him over the years.

"This growth has come as the result of the remarkable people who've come to this company and have liked it and have wanted to be associated with it as artists, as people working on our technical staff, as board members, as administrators," he says.

"They bring their own energy into the process, and that energy not only helps the company grow, it has helped me grow as well. So there's been something almost spiritual about this experience, I suppose, to be a little flowery about what it has meant to me."

In Kellogg's discussion of Glimmerglass, words like "excitement," "enthusiasm," "energy" and "experience" crop up again and again. "I think when excitement dies and when the search for innovation and new experience dies, then you really are losing the core of the organization," he says.

To his way of thinking, one of the most important elements of the company is its young artists program, founded in 1988, which brings in a group of enthusiastic young singers each season to be a central part of the organization.

"That youthful energy," his voice trailed off. "I keep referring to 'youthful energy,' but I find it very important in the progress of any institution to have. It's a quality that would be lacking disastrously, really, at this point. It's become that important to our organization."

Earlier on, it was something else that was shaping the company: the decision to build what would be called the "Alice Busch Opera Theater." It's a 900-seat gem of a building that stands on 43 acres overlooking Otsego Lake some eight miles north of Cooperstown.

"Twenty-five years ago I knew we were going to have to leave the high school auditorium where we were performing if the company was ever going to achieve anything like its potential. And that became the first goal, but once we got the theater built in 1987, the full meaning of that theater and what it was going to require of us became clear, and it was terrifying.

"We had not realized the demands the theater would make on us, forcing the company to be worthy of performing in that place. That was a surprise, and also the fact that our budget tripled as the result of all this was something we had foreseen to a degree, but not quite to the extent we might have."

The company was moving from a 600-seat high school auditorium with an audience that was filling most of the seats for nine performances each summer. And while building a theater with 50-percent greater seating capacity seemed radical at the time, Kellogg and the trustees didn't begin to realize that their audience would grow to where today Glimmerglass can sometimes sell out entirely a season of 43 performances.

"What a theater this size does is limit the income that one can get from box office," Kellogg observes. "That is a very serious limitation as costs rise and our ambitions increase. We find that we're really not able to meet the demands on the company through box office and have to raise a tremendous amount of money from contributions. We're managing to keep up, but only just."

Kellogg may regret Glimmerglass didn't opt for an auditorium with greater seating capacity- 1,200 to 1,500 seats, he says - but he has no reservations about the quality of the place.

"What we did build was one of the great theaters in America, at least that's the evaluation that most people give us. It's intimate; it presents a unique theatrical experience and a unique musical experience because the acoustics are so good. People feel viscerally involved when they're sitting in that house. I don't know another theater, frankly, that offers that experience."

Kellogg isn't the only Glimmerglass stalwart reaching a numerical milestone this season. Stewart Robertson, the company's music director since 1987, will be conducting his 300th Glimmerglass performance on opening night, when he takes the soloists and orchestra through a performance of Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West."

Robertson will conduct two operas this summer - "Fanciulla" and Bennett's "The Mines of Sulphur." Puccini's "La Boheme" was the first opera Glimmerglass ever produced and, since then, the company has mounted four other works by the same composer: "Tosca," "Manon Lescaut," "Madama Butterfly" and "Gianni Schicchi."

But this is the first time Glimmerglass or Robertson will be doing "Fanciulla," a piece based on the drama "The Girl of the Golden West" by American playwright David Belasco and premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in December 1910, when Arturo Toscanini conducted a cast headed by Emmy Destinn, Pasquale Amato and Enrico Caruso.

"This is a Puccini opera that one doesn't see as frequently as one should," the Scottish-born conductor says. "I was very keen to conduct 'Fanciulla,' particularly as it's such a big, lush orchestral score, and that's something I'm very attracted to. I love conducting symphonic music, as well as opera.

"The Richard Rodney Bennett piece is an interesting choice for the company. We were to do the world premiere of a new American opera - "Boule de Suif, or, The Good Whore," by Stephen Hartke - but we had to put that off for some future occasion. Now this was coming down in the summer of 2003, and there wasn't time for someone to write something for us, but we thought it would be good to do something contemporary that hadn't been done here before."

As a teen-ager, Robertson had been around when "The Mines of Sulphur" was premiered by the Sadler Wells Opera in London, then taken on a tour of Britain.

"I saw the piece in a performance in Glasgow, my home town, and I remember thinking, 'Gosh, this is a fabulous piece. It's dramatically riveting; it's musically very compelling and lush. It would be really nice to see that come alive again at some point in the future."

The opera was performed all over Europe - Milan, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm - but as contemporary operas so often do, it soon dropped from sight. Then, nearly 40 years later, Robertson was getting the chance to make it "come alive again." He got a copy of the score and a recording of an old BBC broadcast of the opera. He, Kellogg and company general director Joanne Cossa sat around one day and listened to that recording, and they were sold.

"As it was my idea, I thought I'd better stand behind it," he says. "And now I'm really very much excited by the whole prospect of the production of this piece and my involvement in it." Peter Wynne has written for "Opera News," "Stagebill" and newspapers from Washington to Albany and points between.