He was a leading advocate of the use of original orchestrations and vocal arrangements in studio cast recordings of Broadway musicals, and he made several notable albums exemplifying his philosophy of historical authenticity.
and Misery's Come Round using Karla Burns and members of a Houston Grand Opera production of Show Boat for one of the Jerome Kern Revisited albums on Ben Bagley's Painted Smiles Records.
In the early 1980s McGlinn joined with Houston Grand Opera to work on a revival of Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat, acting as musical editor and restoring its original orchestrations.
From 1987 to 1992 he made best-selling recordings of the complete scores of Show Boat, Anything Goes, Brigadoon, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate and an obscure Jerome Kern musical, Sitting Pretty.
Pinafore and, in 1993, at Juilliard School of Music, he conducted the Poulenc one-act operas La Voix Humaine and Les Mamelles de Tiresias.