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Peter Gelb’s career has followed a singular arc that began with his teenage years as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera and led to his appointment as General Manager of the 123-year-old company 35 years later. In August 2006, the 52-year-old producer and former recording company executive succeeded Joseph Volpe, who retired after sixteen years in the top post.
Mr. Gelb’s extensive and varied experience in the field of classical music has prepared him for the considerable challenge of overseeing both the artistic and the administrative aspects of one of the largest performing arts institutions in the world. An award-winning producer of films, recordings, radio broadcasts, telecasts, concert events, operas, and festivals, he has collaborated with the world's leading artists, many of whom will be featured at the Met during his tenure, including John Corigliano, Plácido Domingo, Tan Dun, Renée Fleming, Osvaldo Golijov, Robert Lepage, Wynton Marsalis, Anthony Minghella, Rachel Portman, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Julie Taymor.
His close association with the Met’s music director, James Levine, extends back two decades and spans recordings and film (Fantasia 2000).
In 1992, Mr. Gelb produced both the stage and film versions of Ms. Taymor’s first opera production, Oedipus Rex, for Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival. In 1994 also for the Saito Kinen Festival he commissioned an early opera staging by Robert Lepage, La Damnation de Faust (which will be produced at the Met in 2008-09).
As president of CAMI Video, a division of Columbia Artists Management that Mr. Gelb founded in 1982, he served as executive producer of the Met’s television series, The Metropolitan Opera Presents for six years. In all, he produced 25 televised productions for the Met, including the 1990 telecast of Richard Wagner’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by Levine. The seventeen-hour program was broadcast over four consecutive nights on PBS (and subsequently released on DVD), making history for monolithic programming of opera on television. While at CAMI, he produced and occasionally directed over 50 programs featuring such artists as Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Claudio Abbado. His television productions earned 13 Primetime Emmy Awards.
Among Gelb’s Emmy Award-winning films are Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia and Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic, both with Maysles Films. Mr. Gelb received a Peabody Award for his four-part television series Marsalis on Music (1995), in which jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis introduces young audiences to the full experience of classical music and jazz. In 2001, he co-directed and produced a 90-minute documentary entitled Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks, about the making of the hit Broadway show’s cast album. The film was awarded a Grammy in 2002.
Since 1995 until joining the Met, Mr. Gelb was president of Sony Classical, one of the largest international classical record labels. He led the company through a period of notable growth and creativity, expanding the focus of recording projects to include best-selling film scores, including the Academy Award-winning scores for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Tan Dun, The Red Violin by John Corigliano, and Titanic by James Horner, while preserving the label’s tradition of recording Broadway musicals and maintaining an extensive catalogue of classical works by many of the best known artists in the world. He also initiated Sony Classical’s broad program of commissioning new music, something no other classical label had attempted in recent years.
Mr. Gelb’s career in classical music began when, at the age of 17, he went to work as an office boy for Sol Hurok. Training from an early age under the legendary impresario may have instilled in him a kind of entrepreneurship and creative acumen that has since distinguished his work, from managing the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s historic 1979 tour to China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which made headlines around the world; to reviving Vladimir Horowitz’s concert career in 1980 and producing the famed pianist’s historic return to Russia in 1986; to the Tan Dun premiere, Symphony 1997, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, which Mr. Gelb commissioned in partnership with the Chinese government to be performed at the handover of Hong Kong to China.
Mr. Gelb is the son of Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of The New York Times, and writer Barbara Gelb. He is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and has two sons.
The announcement of Mr. Gelb’s appointment to the Met was made in October 2004. He joined the Met in January 2005 and has worked closely with Mr. Volpe and Mr. Levine, as well as with the board of directors, staff, and administration, to plan for the Met’s future. |
