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 a conductor. He went to school in Coventry and became a choir boy at the

cathedral there enjoying the everyday life of the musically gifted. He read music of course at

Cambridge and then joined the staff of the English National Opera where he learned his trade.

But it was at Opera North in the early 90s that he came into his own.

Only 31 he galvanized the musical direction of the company

making it daring and exciting. Then last year he took over as music director of

the English National Opera. Within weeks of his arrival his boss had resigned and there was talk of merging with

Covent Garden. The war for ENO's survival has since been won. It's my castaway's job now to help win the

peace. Happily, he's an optimist.

I believe it's worth dreaming, he says,

and often you get half of what you dream.

He is Paul Daniel.

So what you dream of Paul is presumably, you know, what's anybody who runs a big theatre

on which you put on entertainment, which is that you want to have full houses and you want

critical acclaim and you want license to put on more of what you believe

should be on your stage.

What kind of thing is that in your case?

It's all kinds of work that challenge an audience.

Challenge that traditional audience that has come because their fathers and their grandfathers came.

But also challenge people to think of the act of performance as something very fresh.

...