Dan Rothermel, Conductor & Music Director

With the performances of La Sonnambula, Dan Rothermel returns for his fifth season with ConcertOPERA, Philadelphia. He debuted in 2003 with Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus, following it in 2004 with Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, which received its first Philadelphia performances in four decades. In 2005 he presided over the coloratura fireworks of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment. In a departure for COPA, last season he conducted Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the oldest opera in the English language to retain a place in the standard repertory. Utilizing the authentic modern edition of Thurston Dart, this miniature masterwork was performed with harpsichord and string quartet.

Dan Rothermel is familiar to Philadelphia’s opera and theater public as music director of The Savoy Company, the city’s venerable Gilbert and Sullivan opera company, the oldest in this country, founded in 1901. In 2005, Mr. Rothermel celebrated his first quarter century with Savoy conducting his third production of The Gondoliers. With last season’s production of The Yeomen of the Guard, he completed his second full cycle of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas with Savoy. His work with Savoy has embraced three International Gilbert and Sullivan Festivals, the Company’s centennial concert at the Mann Center for Performing Arts, a full concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and appearances with Peter Nero and The Philly Pops.

Retired from the School District of Philadelphia, where he taught music for more than forty years, Mr. Rothermel continues to serve part time on the staff of the Shawmont Academic Music Program which he helped to initiate in 1980. An authority on four national schools of light opera, he has served as a guest lecturer on light opera and nineteenth-century British music at Temple University, Drexel University, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, the Academy of Vocal Arts, and the University of the Arts. Mr. Rothermel currently serves on the board of the Musical Fund Society by chairing its Career Advancement Award Committee which assists outstanding emerging performing artists.