That approach evidently suits Michael MacLeod, the new artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Opera, which opens its 2007 season Saturday night (7/7 at 8 p.m.) with a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s "Orpheus in the Underworld."

MacLeod’s predecessor, Paul Kellogg, headed the company for nearly 30 years and shepherded what began as a respectable, but minor, regional festival into a major presence in the international opera world. During Kellogg’s tenure, Glimmerglass built a new theater, one of the best in the country; brought in world-class singers, directors and designers, and presented repertory drawn from different traditions and centuries in stylishly up-to-date productions.

You can be sure that little of that is going to change on MacLeod’s watch, and yet this first season that he has planned entirely himself is unlike any other in the company’s history. As usual, four operas will be performed at the Alice Busch Opera Theater on State Highway 80 near Springfield Center, and the four will be offered in rotating repertory that will continue until late August.

But this summer, all four operas at Glimmerglass will be based on the same story: the ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, you may recall, was said to have been the greatest poet and musician of antiquity and, when his young wife, Eurydice, is bitten by a deadly serpent, he goes to the land of the dead and charms the gods of the underworld into giving her back _ sort of. The story doesn’t end happily.

"I think Paul Kellogg did an absolutely superb job at Glimmerglass, but I felt the new director should put down a marker for the new era," MacLeod said recently. "And this just fell into place beautifully because 2007 marks the 400th anniversary of the first performance of what is regarded as the first great opera, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo.’"

"I didn’t want to program repertoire that had been done at Glimmerglass before, and this was a wonderful opportunity to program the Monteverdi. Then I thought, Let’s build an entire season around it.’"

Glimmerglass had done other Monteverdi operas, but "L’Orfeo," which opens July 28, is new to the company, as is every other opera in the repertoire this season. In fact, even one of the composers is entirely new to Glimmerglass.

"Another bit of luck," MacLeod continued, "2007 is also the 70th anniversary of an American composer who has written an opera OrphTe,’ inspired by the Jean Cocteau film of the same name. And that composer’s name, of course, is Philip Glass."

He was referring, to be sure, to Glass’s 70th "birthday," which was Jan. 31, but then MacLeod doesn’t speak the usual American vernacular.

Born in Bogota, Colombia, to Scottish parents, he went to college in Amherst, Mass., and these and all the other places he has lived and worked _ Turkey, Austria, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, England and France among them _ have left their marks on his speech.

Before coming to Glimmerglass in 2005 as the company’s general director, he was executive director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra and, before that, spent five years as executive and artistic director of an annual three-week arts festival in London, where he programmed performances ranging from opera to Shakespeare.

"I used to run the City of London Festival," he said, "and one of the things I’m trying to do here is to create more of a festival atmosphere, which is why in addition to the four staged operas, we’re also showing the Cocteau film and, indeed, in a sense a sequel of it, a film called Black Orpheus,’ which transposes the Orpheus myth to Rio de Janeiro."

The Philip Glass "Orphee" enters the Glimmerglass repertory July 21 and will be presented in its first U.S. staging since its 1993 world premiere in Brooklyn.

The opera uses dialogue from the 1949 Cocteau film and, with a flute solo, even alludes to the film’s soundtrack, which includes the glorious solo flute music from Gluck’s "Orfeo ed Euridice."

The Gluck opera bows at the Alice Busch theater this Sunday afternoon (7/8 at 2 p.m.), but in an unusual edition. Instead of the Italian-language version that’s usually performed and which premiered in Vienna in 1762, Glimmerglass audiences will hear the French "Orphee et Eurydice" that Gluck prepared for Paris a dozen years later. Moreover, the company will perform the opera as it was adapted and reorchestrated in 1859 by Hector Berlioz.

Gluck had written the part of Orfeo for a celebrated castrato, Gaetano Guadagni. However, such surgically modified singers were not particularly popular in France, so for Paris the composer rewrote the part for a high tenor.

Berlioz, in turn, rearranged the role as a tour de force for mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot.

And, in another bit of gender-bending, the Glimmerglass production will feature a male soprano.

Opera, like another celebrated Cooperstown pastime, is intensely conscious of its history, by the way, and real opera buffs can reel off obscure "stats" like any diehard baseball fan.

"Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice’ is a truly great and accessible opera, and so I thought, Let’s do that, but in its slightly more unusual version, which is the Berlioz orchestration,’" MacLeod said. "So we’re doing that, and then there’s a tradition of doing a lighter work at Glimmerglass, and we have in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld’ the perfect complement to the other operas."

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a great literary classic, but MacLeod says he chose the operas he did because they work in the theater. "The Monteverdi is so vibrant and so dramatic and powerful I get the tingle factor’ even thinking about it, and I feel the Gluck falls into that same category."

As for "Orpheus in the Underworld," he notes that the Offenbach operetta, which premiered in Paris in 1858, was so popular in the composer’s day it provided all the income he needed for the rest of his life. And he sees the Glass "Orphee" as something that just has to be seen in the special circumstances offered at Glimmerglass.

"The strength of the Glass is the libretto and the dramatic tension," he says, "and I think it’s a work that people really have to see live.

``And this is one of the reasons why I love Glimmerglass. There are many opera houses in this country that in my opinion are simply too large. You cannot see or hear really well.

"At Glimmerglass, in our beautiful Alice Busch Opera Theater, we’ve got just over 900 seats. You can see and hear beautifully from every seat. You get the real visceral impact of what the performers are doing. This is going to be a very powerful dramatic experience, enhanced by Philip Glass’s unique music."

And if the Glass and Glimmerglass are a perfect match, the same is true of Offenbach’s little charmer.

He wrote his operetta for a theater that cozily seated and still seats about 1,000 patrons, the Theatre Marigny in Paris.

And to put MacLeod’s comment about the size of American opera houses into perspective, just consider that the New York State Theater, the home at Lincoln Center of the New York City Opera, seats 2,755, while the Metropolitan Opera House can accommodate 3,800.

The Alice Busch theater, which is the size of many of the older Broadway theaters, will also be the perfect place for the pieces MacLeod is planning for next year.

In another departure from the usual, the new man in charge has announced the Glimmerglass 2008 season even before this season has opened and, once again, it will be a season unlike any other at the house.

Next summer, all the operas will be somehow linked to the plays of William Shakespeare, with Cole Porter’s "Kiss Me, Kate" in repertory with Wagner’s "Das Liebesverbot," Bellini’s "I Montecchi e i Capuleti" and Handel’s "Giulio Cesare."

Porter’s Broadway classic is based on "The Taming of the Shrew" and Wagner’s early opera _ the second he completed _ on "Measure for Measure." The other two are not literally based on Shakespeare, but Bellini’s opera _ in English it would be "The Capulets and the Montagues" _ covers much the same ground as "Romeo and Juliet," while Handel’s opera roughly parallels "Antony and Cleopatra."

"What we’re going to do in ’08 is to re-create, as close as we can get to it, an Elizabethan theater like the Globe Theater. It will have a roof, however, and the audience will have seats to sit in," MacLeod says. This theater within a theater will be used as the single setting for all four productions. "I think the balance of having Kiss Me, Kate’ and Wagner on one hand and Bellini and Handel on the other is going to sit perfectly in that setting.

"Whenever I say to people we’re doing Kiss Me, Kate’ and treating it more as an operetta than a musical _ in other words, think Lehar, rather than Andrew Lloyd Webber _ and when I say, And it’s going to be at the Globe Theater, so to speak,’ they think, Wow, that’s an interesting idea.’ And we are doing the original orchestration, using the full orchestra and no amplification at all."

MacLeod says he’s excited, even passionate, about offering consecutive seasons that are built around unifying themes, and yet he prefers to think of the two as a pair of wonderful accidents rather than a sign of what’s to come.

"When I ran the City of London Festival, I used to say to someone every week, Never have a theme, because you end up booking second- and third-rate acts just because they fit the theme.’"

And while he has some ideas for 2009 and beyond, he says he’s not ready to talk about them publicly yet.

One thing MacLeod hasn’t settled is who will succeed Stewart Robertson as the company’s music director.

After 20 years on the Glimmerglass podium, Robertson stepped down at the end of the 2006 festival.

"We have decided to have a two-year search whereby we are hiring four different conductors, one for each of the four operas in ’07 and a different four conductors for ’08," MacLeod says. "And at the end of the ’08 season, I hope we’ll have a good sense of which of these eight we think should be the next music director for Glimmerglass Opera."

Operas, of course, can involve a variety of music forces: One may call for a big orchestra and chorus, while another may have no chorus and a just a handful of instruments in the orchestra pit.

To level the playing field, MacLeod has scheduled additional concert performances that will be assigned to the conductors leading the smaller-scale works.

"The Monteverdi L’Orfeo’ has a very small orchestra, as does the Glass, and we’re not using a chorus in the Monteverdi, which would be what Monteverdi would have done. He would have used the principals to sing the choruses, and the Glass has no chorus at all, so how can we argue that the conductors for the Monteverdi and the Glass are music-director contenders when they’ve never conducted the chorus, nor even the full orchestra?’’

Under MacLeod’s scheme, the conductors assigned to the Monteverdi and Glass operas will each conduct half of two concert performances of yet another Orpheus-related opera, Haydn’s "L’Anima del Filosofo," which will be heard Aug. 5 and 19. "L’Anima del Filosofo" has wonderful choruses and arias -- just like Haydn’s two great oratorios, "The Creation" and "The Seasons," he says, and it uses a full orchestra.

"We’re doing the same trick,’ if you want in ’08, because the conductor of the Handel Julius Caesar’ won’t have the full orchestra, nor the chorus, because again the chorus will be sung by the principals, and Kiss Me, Kate’ is from a different musical category.

So those two conductors will be assigned some glorious piece that fits into the Shakespeare scheme of things and is also a severe test for any conductor, something like Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’"

Although he wants to maintain an arts festival atmosphere at Glimmerglass, MacLeod is undecided whether he will augment next season with films and such.

"I don’t want us to be locked into doing the same thing year after year after year," he says. "We’re doing the films in ’07, and they fit perfectly with the operas that we’re doing. We may not do any films in ’08. On the other hand, I may decide to show some of the great Laurence Olivier films, featuring wonderful music by William Walton _ Henry V’ and Hamlet,’ for example, and maybe the Kenneth Branagh films also of Hamlet’ and Henry V,’ and I’ll let people compare two of the greatest Shakespearean actors on film side by side.

"I have no fixed position essentially on anything. In my book, Glimmerglass Opera lives and breathes like the rest of us, and it needs to be flexible, and it needs to adapt, and it needs to be innovative. And I hope it will be innovative under my reign, with each year bringing something new to the community, which I think is good and proper."

Peter Wynne has written for "Opera News" magazine and the playbills handed out at the Metropolitan and New York City Operas, Carnegie and Avery Fisher Halls and the Kennedy Center in Washington.