Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an opera impresario. From his father he inherited a beautiful house,

magnificent grounds and a private theatre which was establishing itself as a place of serious

music making. That was in 1962. Today more than 30 years later he is the

master of one of Europe's most distinguished opera houses, famous not only as a

mainstay of the English social scene, but also as a place of creativity and innovation.

After a season of no productions, this year he welcomed back his audiences to a new building, Britain's latest and much acclaimed opera house, he is the

chairman of Glineborn, Sir George Christie.

In fact, the original Opera House was born in about the same year as you, wasn't it? Sir George.

It was built in the same year, though it was quite a few months afterwards.

I suppose I trod the boards actually because I was conceived by the time

my mother performed Susanna on stage in that first 1934 festival. And you've lived nowhere else but Gleimborn all your life

to the family home and you're still there so you've always had an opera house in the

back garden I mean did this mark you out as a child?

Did other people nudge and say he's the one whose dad built that thing in the back garden?

No, I don't think it made much difference as far as other people. My

contemporaries were concerned at school and that type of thing. My oldest son

went to a Tea Party locally and at the end of the Teaebiad he said to his hostess, thank for a lovely time.

And then he said, could I perhaps just have a look at your opera house, thinking it was kind of the

norm that people automatically have an

opera as attached to their homes. It's the same as they have a garden shed.

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