Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is an opera producer. Music has been with him all his life.

He went to the St John's College Choir School in Cambridge at the age of seven,

eventually to the university itself where he produced several operas and ended up at Scottish Opera in the late 70s as director of productions.

But it was at English National Opera that he made his name, working with Mark Elder, the music director and Peter Jonas as general

director, he set the opera world a light with a string of brilliant

and controversial productions of the works of Janicek, Shostakovich and Vorschak.

Opera, he admits, is an elitist art form, but that doesn't mean it should be suffocatingly genteel, he says.

I believe in making it theatre, and I can't bear to have a stage used as a mantle

shelf. He is David Pountney. Why not David, why can't you just produce Don Giovanni or Tosca exactly as the composer

intended and is exactly as the audience seems to want it? Well because music is the

most intensely imaginative language which we possess as human beings.

And for that very reason it strives, I think, constantly to liberate us and to be liberated from meaning and this is the

permanent tension between music and what people say the text that people speak in an opera and and also what

happens on stage. But why should they discover anything more about Carmen if you set

it in an automobile graveyard than if you leave it

where Bisey put it outside a cigarette factory in Seville?

Oh, because it was devastatingly shocking for the audience of Bise's time to find an opera

which was traditionally about Kings and Queens and and you know such safe subjects to find an opera set in the slums of Seville and with

this dangerously overtly sexual woman parading around the stage was

viscerally dangerous.

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