The charge you feel – the one that sets your hairs on end and skin tingling – when you're present for an Austin Lyric Opera production has everything to do with the music coming from the orchestra, and that has everything to do with the maestro leading it. In the decade that he's been wielding the baton for ALO, Richard Buckley has proven to have an innate feel for opera's heightened emotion and high drama – it runs like a current through his veins. And it doesn't matter if the composer is Donizetti or Verdi, Mozart or Glass, he's able to communicate all its beauty, power, tension, lyricism, humor, and heartbreak to the musicians under his command so that they transmit it to our ears in sounds that thrill. Since Buckley's been in the pit, opera has never sounded so ravishing and intense – and electrifying.
