One of Gioachino Rossini's lesser-known operas is called "La Cenerentola," based on the story of "Cinderella." Boston Midsummer Opera's music director Susan Davenny-Wyner will conduct the company's performance of "La Cenerentola" this weekend. Davenny-Wyner got her start as an opera singer, but turned to conducting after tragedy changed her life — a hit and run accident left her with damaged vocal chords, robbing her of the ability to sing. Susan Davenny-Wyner spoke with WGBH News' Arun Rath.

Susan Davenny-Wyner: The singing voice for me was the most personal and direct expression of music-making, so after the hit and run accident, when I could not reconstruct it, I thought it would not be possible to make music again. Instead, I found that through the conducting, I could be a vehicle for other people and bring them into the process of making music.

Arun Rath: It's just amazing. I can't think of a more terrible thing to happen to a singer, and the way that you were still able to make music and share it with us.

Davenny-Wyner: I realized that I was lucky to be an optimist, and I had been a dancer when I was young, so some of that came naturally.

Rath: In using your body to communicate to the orchestra?

Davenny-Wyner: Yes.

Davenny-Wyner: So having been an extremely talented, very high-level singer yourself, I want to talk now about the Boston Midsummer Orchestra. It's been 12 years that you've been involved?

Davenny-Wyner: Yes. It's a marvelous, small opera company. Our goal was to bring great young singers to work together and to present opera at the highest level in an intimate setting.

Rath: This opera that you're putting on now, "La Cenerentola," the nice thing is that it doesn't require a plot synopsis — it's Rossini's retelling of "Cinderella." What's interesting is that it's "Cinderella" without any of the magic.

Davenny-Wyner: Yes, and he puts the magic in the character, and gives her a kind of directness and warmth and simplicity and goodness. But she's also got spunk.

Rath: What's a scene for you that really gives a sense of our Cinderella here?

Davenny-Wyner: That very last aria. It starts beautifully and sweetly, and then suddenly explodes into this cascading series of notes.

Rath: I have to think that conducting an opera is like running a marathon.

Davenny-Wyner: It is, because one is shaping the whole piece. One is being sensitive to the singers and the nuances of what they need for their voices. But I love the danger of live performance, having an audience and communicating our love for what we're doing. The range and the motion and sparkle of the music in a situation when we feel people listening is extraordinary. For me, that excitement of living it and taking what's happening and forming it is magical. And as a little girl, I used to confuse the word musician with magician.

Rath: It sounds like the magic's still there for you.

Davenny-Wyner: It is. Always will be.