A Finely Tuned Machine
When Maestro Patrick Summers assumed leadership of the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra in 1998, the ensemble was still in its formative years. At that time, the majority of mainstage productions at HGO were performed with the Houston Symphony, while the in-house orchestra filled in for the rest of the repertory. But when the Symphony shifted its focus away from opera, Summers was handed a challenge by then-General Director David Gockley: to transform the HGO Orchestra into a world-class ensemble capable of handling everything from new commissions to Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle.
Now approaching the close of his remarkable tenure as Artistic and Music Director—and preparing to become Music Director Emeritus at the end of the 2025-26 season—Summers has led a long arc of development that has brought the orchestra to a level of, in the words of soprano Renée Fleming, “undeniable prestige.” His approach, refined over more than 25 years, has been rooted in methodical progress and unwavering artistic vision.
The score itself is brilliantly realized, orchestrally and vocally, in a cohesive rendition that matches authoritative technique with emotional fervor. Patrick Summers’s muscular conducting sustains strength and taut control, shaping the long lines. The orchestra’s expert playing builds each act into the continuous musical texture Wagner intended.”—The Houston Chronicle, in a 2015 review of Die Walküre at HGO
The first step, he says, was to set clear goals. “I had a set of specific goals each season,” Summers says, “which were sometimes very simple: getting the response time to the baton to be as exact as possible, getting a gradation of dynamics that were consistent and clean, thinking about intonation in a certain way. Slow, methodical work over several years.”
Equally important was cultivating the orchestra’s relationship with singers—an essential distinction between symphonic and operatic playing. “You have to establish the differences between an opera orchestra and a symphonic orchestra, the main one being that you are very attuned and aligned with the singers,” he explains. “You try to both emulate and support them. All great musicmaking aspires to vocalism.” A watershed moment came in 2003, during Renée Fleming’s first performance of La traviata at HGO. “I remember the orchestra responding to her in a way that they had never responded to a singer before,” he says. “That changed everything.”
Conductor Patrick Summers is, in many ways, the star of the show, drawing some unforgettable playing from the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra to rival the best symphony orchestras.”—Classical Voice, in a 2017 review of Götterdämmerung at HGO
Throughout the years, Summers repeatedly turned to Mozart as a foundational tool for growth. “Mozart builds an orchestra better than any other repertoire,” he notes. Comparing the 2005 and 2023 HGO performances of The Marriage of Figaro, he observed a dramatic evolution in the ensemble’s cohesion and expressivity: “They’d done a lot of Mozart in that time. The 2023 Figaro was simply a totally different ensemble.”
Another key to the orchestra’s transformation was patience and strategic restraint. “When I began in 1998, I said, ‘I don’t want the company to program any Wagner or Strauss for 10 years. I think we need 10 years of orchestra building.’ And that’s a hard ask for an opera company.” The first Wagner production under his baton, Lohengrin, finally arrived in 2009. “By then, we had done such a range of styles that it was the right amount of challenge,” he explains. “But I would say the culminating moment of my tenure, in terms of the orchestra, was Siegfried in 2016. That is the moment when I felt we were really at our greatest.”
Perhaps the most lasting achievement of Summers’s leadership, however, has been instilling a deep sense of stylistic understanding across the orchestra. “When you look at a fortissimo in The Elixir of Love, it’s not the same as a fortissimo in Salome,” he says. “The farther you go back into history, the more interpretive choices a conductor has to make. Getting the orchestra to think about and assume a style has been the thing I’m most proud of.”
Ultimately, Summers believes that true success in performance lies in placing the spotlight not on the interpretation, but on the music itself. “My aim for a performance is for an audience to say, ‘Wow, this opera,’ not, ‘Wow, this performance.’ We want the audience’s focus to be on the work itself, not its execution. And so the style has to be effortless.”