Dan Rothermel, Conductor & Music Director

With the performances of Lakmé, Dan Rothermel returns for his seventh season with ConcertOPERA, Philadelphia. He debuted in 2003 with Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, following it in 2004 with Friedrich von Flotow's Martha, receiving its first Philadelphia performances in over four decades. In 2005 he presided over the coloratura fireworks of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment and, in 2006, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. In 2007 he and COPA returned to the bel canto repertoire with Bellini's elegiac La Sonnambula and last season revived another rarity, Auber's delectable opéra comique, Fra Diavolo.

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 troupe, the oldest in this country. In 2005 Mr. Rothermel celebrated his first quarter century as Savoy's music director. This season he will conduct his third Savoy production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Academy of Music and the Open Air Theatre, Longwood Gardens. An authority on four national schools of light opera, Mr. Rothermel has been a guest lecturer on light opera and on nineteenth century British music at Temple University, the Academy of Vocal Arts, Drexel University, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, and the University of the Arts.

Retired from the School District of Philadelphia after more than forty years of teaching, Mr. Rothermel continues to serve part time on the staff of the Shawmont Academic Music Program which he helped initiate in 1980. Mr. Rothermel currently serves on the board of the Musical Fund Society by chairing its Career Advancement Award committee which financially assists outstanding emerging performing artists.