John McGlinn, conductor, archivist, dies

Broadway conductor John McGlinn, 55, who grew up in Gladwyne and became a major music-theater archivist and EMI recording artist, working with some of the greatest singers of his time, was found dead of a heart attack in his New York City apartment Saturday.

Mr. McGlinn became the talk of the musical-theater world in 1988 by delivering an all-star recording of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II classic Show Boat, with original orchestrations and so many outtakes that the music was spread over three discs. The set was a triumph of scholarship, utilizing materials thought to be long lost, and was performed with top opera stars Frederica von Stade, Jerry Hadley and Teresa Stratas as well as, in a speaking role, then-90-year-old Lillian Gish.

He went on to make numerous other early-Broadway discs, including a complete recording of Kiss Me Kate, often using stars such as Thomas Hampson and Kim Criswell as the charismatic window-dressing for endeavors that sought to rehabilitate shows by Jerome Kurt, Kurt Weill, and others that had been forgotten or dismissed.

Though born in Bryn Mawr and a graduate of the Episcopal Academy, Mr. McGlinn wasn't forthcoming about his past in Philadelphia. His brother, Evan, acknowledged this week that he had been estranged from his family for 25 years, and many standard biographies list no place of birth.

The fact that Mr. McGlinn's past went undiscussed wasn't unusual: Amid New York's free-floating band of musical-theater devotees, always crusading for show revivals, pasts were irrelevant to the current project at hand. Mr. McGlinn surfaced at a time when new recordings of old shows were beginning to sell well, and opera stars were increasingly willing to expand their appeal into more popular genres.

It's not clear where or how he learned to conduct - he earned a degree in music from Northwestern University - but he could deliver the goods when working with powerful stars such as Kiri Te Kanawa, with whom he recorded Kiri Sings Gershwin, and extremely demanding ones such as Stratas, linchpin of his Show Boat cast.

Triggering the archival project was the discovery, for which Mr. McGlinn is often credited, of lost Broadway manuscripts in a Secaucus, N.J., warehouse in the 1980s. Before Rodgers & Hammerstein's blockbusters, most shows were remembered only for a few hit songs, massaged and reorchestrated for radio play. This discovery put flesh on their bones.

And Mr. McGlinn's concert performances in Weill Recital Hall in New York showed that even the most tissue-thin comedies were often fully conceived scores. He believed that an accurate reconstruction of how the shows were done in their own time - including original orchestrations and spoken dialogue in and around any given song - would increase their current relevance.

He was right: Not only were his performances acclaimed, but they were imitated on a larger, more mainstream scale by the Broadway Encores! series at New York's City Center. His research efforts also led to similar finds elsewhere. Often, important, long-sought materials were found safely, though obscurely, housed by a publisher that didn't know what it had.

A unpretentious, cherubic presence, Mr. McGlinn was famously quoted as saying of early Broadway: "It would be fashionable to say that it was a better world back then. Well, it probably wasn't, but at least more people were willing to dream of one."

One of his strategies was to record enough excerpts from, say, Kurt Weill's little-known Firebrand of Florence on various discs devoted to individual stars until only a few extra sessions were needed to complete the score.

However, the 1990s downturn in the recording industry meant the end of his EMI contract, which included some 15 titles. In recent years, he recorded Victor Herbert's Babes in Toyland, but for undisclosed reasons it remains unreleased.

Mr. McGlinn also was deeply interested in Wagner operas, having conducted The Flying Dutchman in Europe and recorded excerpts from Lohengrin with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra.

As in his younger years, he could still be encountered in various havens for music collectors. Only months ago, a chance encounter at New York's Academy Records found the conductor in good spirits, asking if Philadelphia was still its conservative self, and seemingly healthy and slimmed down. However, the autopsy indicated he had suffered one previous heart attack.

Mr. McGlinn has been widely eulogized this week on any number of music and theater blogs. Playwright Albert Innaurato, who knew him both in Philadelphia and in New York, referred to his "inexhaustible tenacity, charm and great talent," adding, "He had the opportunity to realize many of has dreams at the highest level, and you can't ask more than that from real life."

Services are pending.