THE D'OYLY CARTE OPERA COMPANY

David Mackie

David Mackie (a.m.d., 1976-82)

[Born Greenock, Scotland 25 Nov 1943]

David Mackie studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and the Universities of Glasgow and Birmingham, before joining the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company as repetiteur in 1975. He was promoted to chorus master and associate musical director in 1976, serving until the closure of the Company in 1982. He has the distinction of conducting the last full performance of a Gilbert & Sullivan opera with the original D'Oyly Carte Opera Company:a matinee performance of H.M.S. Pinafore on February 27, 1982.

Since 1982 he has worked as a freelance accompanist, repetiteur, and conductor. In collaboration with Sir Charles Mackerras he reconstructed Arthur Sullivan's "lost" cello concerto, and in 1989 he wrote and presented 14 interval talks on BBC Radio 2, for the network's series of the complete Gilbert & Sullivan operas.

He has worked with the London Opera Players, the London Savoyards, and New Sadler's Wells Opera, and has been musical director for many concerts, operas, operettas, and pantomimes. In November 2000 he conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and a chorus of 500 in a Royal Albert Hall concert commemorating the centenary of Arthur Sullivan's death.

In 2005, Mackie researched and edited "Arthur Sullivan and The Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain," a volume produced for, and published by, the Royal Society and drawn from the proceedings of the Society's 145th Anniversary Festival Dinner (in 1883) and other papers relating to Sullivan in that organization's archives. More recently, he has chronicled his experiences in the last years of the D'Oyly Carte (1875-82) in a memoir entitled "Nothing Like Work, or Right in the D'Oyly Carte" (Grosvenor House, 2018).

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