Arizona Opera on Thursday named Joseph Specter president and general director, effective July 1.
Specter replaces Ryan Taylor, who left Arizona Opera this month to lead Minnesota Opera. He had led Arizona for three years, rescuing the company from the brink of financial disaster and leading efforts to erase $3.2 million in debt that he inherited when he took over the company in spring 2013.
Specter, a former opera singer, inherited a similar financial mess when he took over Austin Opera in 2012. The company had only $14,000 in cash on a $4.4 million budget, and was on the brink of insolvency.
Specter said Austin took many of the same steps that Taylor and the Arizona company took, including dramatic fundraising efforts and a reset of its artistic mission.
“What we’ve done here in Austin has been substantially the same as far as getting a company that was in a really, really tough financial spot into a position of not just financial stability … but artistic vitality,” Specter said during a phone call Thursday from Austin. “You can’t do this right if the art doesn’t get it right. And you can’t do the art right if you’re only doing the most beloved titles every season, because there just aren’t enough of them.”
Austin Opera has three staged productions this season, including American composer Carlisle Floyd’s “Of Mice and Men.” The company next season will do a semi-staged version of Kevin Puts’ “The Manchurian Candidate.”
During his Austin tenure, Specter led an effort to raise more than $1.6 million for a multiyear and project-specific effort similar to Taylor’s Arizona Bold initiative with Arizona Opera.
It is this footnote on his resume that was particularly attractive for the Arizona Opera Board of Directors, which narrowed its two-month national search launched in late January from 22 candidates down to three.
Board Chairman Bob Tancer of Phoenix said it was one of several similarities in philosophy between Specter and Taylor that impressed the board.
“We are halfway through Arizona Bold, and the fact that he had a consistent vision for the artistic side which is consistent with Ryan Taylor’s was one of the many parallels that we immediately felt very comfortable with,” Tancer said.
The cornerstone of Arizona Bold is to present regionally significant programs, including the mariachi opera “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon)” in 2014 and “Arizona Lady” in 2015. This season, the company will present the world premiere of Arizona Opera’s first-ever commission “Riders of the Purple Sage” in February.
Before going to Austin, Specter, who grew up in Miami, Florida, was the Metropolitan Opera’s director of institutional relations, raising $5 million a year from corporate sponsorships and grants. He also worked at one time in wealth management for a large investment firm.
Specter and his wife Kate have two daughters, Sophie, 8, and Charlotte, 4.
Arizona Opera kicks off its 2016-17 season — its 45th — with a gala concert in October before performing the company premiere of Dvorák’s “Rusalka” in November.
See azopera.org for the complete schedule and tickets.
