Conductor Joseph Marcheso is most recognized for his affiliation with Opera San José, where he has led the company in over 25 productions. Since his appointment as Music Director in 2014, Mo. Marcheso has focused his career on raising the company's artistic stature and reputation. Together with General Director and longtime principal collaborator Khori Dastoor, and now with OSJ’s new General Director Shawna Lucey, Marcheso has prioritized company premieres, debuting and supporting diverse emerging talent and engaging internationally celebrated conductors, singers and composers.
Mo. Marcheso's musical leadership has been a vital element in elevating Opera San José to a nationally recognized company through a series of high-profile, critically acclaimed productions, among them the world premiere of Mark Weiser's Where Angels Fear to Tread, the West Coast premiere of Puts' and Campbell's Silent Night and a new co-production of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's Moby-Dick. This continued through the pandemic with a digital production of Wolf-Ferrari's Il Segreto di Susanna. In the Fall of ‘21, he led the return to in-person performances at the California Theatre with an acclaimed new production of Dido & Aeneas, and followed it with Carmen as well as the long awaited return of the Irene Dalis Vocal Competition. This season Mo. Marcheso returns to lead Romeo & Juliet, Barbiere and the Bay Area premiere of Florencia en el Amazonas.
Upon becoming Music Director, Marcheso has concentrated on bringing the orchestra to the highest levels through ambitious goal setting, maximizing rehearsal time and pursuing the recruitment of top players in the area. The indisputable enrichment and finesse that the orchestra has achieved during his tenure can be heard nightly at the California Theatre, on Medici.tv and on the Sony Classical blu-ray release of OSJ's production of Alma Deutscher's Cinderella.
Mr. Marcheso's commitment to education and expansion of opportunity – as well as to the originating mission of Opera San José– led to his creation of the position of Resident Conductor. This initiative, which gives emerging professionals the opportunity to rehearse and conduct subscription performances of the full season while working alongside a variety of conductors and artists, has become one of the most comprehensive professional opera conducting programs in the United States.
Mr. Marcheso has also been a member of the conducting staff at the San Francisco Opera, and has collaborated with many of the world's leading conductors and singers on works that are their specialty. He has covered and rehearsed among other operas, Walkure, Gotterdammerung and Les Troyens (Runnicles) Die Meistersinger (Elder), Elektra (Nanasi), Billy Budd and Nixon in China (Renes) Fliegende Hollander and It’s a Wonderful Life (Summers) and Jenufa (Belohlavek) as well as the world premieres of Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (M. Christie), Tobias Picker’s Dolores Claiborne, Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber (Manahan) and John Adams’ Girls of the Golden West (Gershon)
Mo. Marcheso's extensive repertoire of over 60 operas is partially due to his first formative musical experiences where he spent 8 seasons at the Amato Opera, a community theater in the Bowery in his hometown of New York City. There, performers of all backgrounds, races, ethnicities, ages and abilities came together for over 70 fully staged orchestral performances of 6 operas a year. From these experiences, Marcheso honed not only his conducting skills, but chorus assembly and preparation, prompting, light board operation, set striking, and the art of non-singing cameos culminating in a memorable turn as Robespierre in Andrea Chenier.
Mr. Marcheso is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a resident of Berkeley, California where he lives with his beloved husband and 4 year old son. Special subjects include Curious George, roly polies and the Real Housewives of OC, Beverly Hills and Atlanta.