Conductor Michael C. Haigler is thrilled to return to the Winter Harbor Festival! Mr. Haigler has conducted full productions of La Serva Padrona, The Impresario, and Die Fledermaus with Winter Harbor (ME); Hansel and Gretel, Albert Herring, La gazza ladra, and Fra Diavolo with Bronx Opera (NYC); The Marriage of Figaro and Menotti’s The Medium with Opera Company of Brooklyn (NYC); Carmen, Don Giovanni, Elixir of Love, and Merry Wives of Windsor with Cartersville Opera (GA); Amahl and the Night Visitors at Christ Church (NY); Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at U.T. Knoxville (TN); and youth operas The Second Hurricane (Copland), and The Black Spider (Judith Wier) with Sarasota Opera (FL). He has also conducted more than two dozen musicals, including Pirates of Penzance, The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Brigadoon, Chicago, Kiss Me Kate, Oklahoma, Once Upon a Mattress, She Loves Me, Anything Goes, Little Shop of Horrors, Lucky Stiff, The Full Monty, and his own musicals The Business of Passion and Card-Bored, composed with fellow thespian Dexter Brigham.
 
Outside of opera and theater, Mr. Haigler has been featured conductor with the National Chorale (at Lincoln Center), the New York Symphonic Arts Ensemble (NYC), the Midland Center for the Arts (MI), Lehman Stages Drama (NYC-Bronx), the Sarasota Pops Orchestra (FL), the Seniors Orchestral Society of New York (NYC), the Larchmont Symphonia (NY), the Westchester Chorale (NY), and the Hudson Valley Chorale (NY), among others. He has premiered more than a dozen new works, including the world premieres of Larchmont Woods (for violin and orchestra) by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, highlights of Micha Dutka’s holocaust-centered opera Liebovar, and most recently the anthem The Windows by English composer Grayston Ives.
 
Mr. Haigler is an Associate (AAGO) of the American Guild of Organists, and has served as Music Director at Christ Church Episcopal in Oyster Bay, Long Island since 2005. There he founded the Christ Church Festival Orchestra with which he has conducted requiems by Mozart, Fauré, Brahms, and Rutter, and symphonies including Mendelssohn’s Italian, Beethoven’s Ninth, and Mahler’s Resurrection (complete). In 2018 he had the honor of conducting Daniel Hyde and the boy choir of St. Thomas Fifth Avenue in a collaborative performance with the Treble and Adult choirs of Christ Church Oyster Bay. Mr. Haigler also holds positions as Music Director of the Long Island Choral Society, Assistant Conductor and Chorus Master at the Bronx Opera, and co-director of Pianos on the Point, a summer workshop at Point Counterpoint in Vermont.
 
In 2001 Mr. Haigler was a North American finalist in Lorin Maazel’s international conducting competition for young conductors, and has also won several awards as a pianist and composer, including the Atlanta Steinway Society competition.
 
Mr. Haigler was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and now lives in New York City with his wife, pianist Arielle Levioff, and their infant son Noah.   For more information, see www.ConductorMichael.com