From the pole-dancing, expletive-strewn Anna Nicole to the lung-popping underwater wonders of Wozzeck, the Royal Opera House’s music director relives five sublime shows from 22 rollercoaster years
Deciding on the piece with which to inaugurate my Royal Opera tenure kept me up nights. I chose Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in collaboration with director Christof Loy. It is a chamber opera, thus giving me the opportunity to get to know my first-chair players really well, and it addresses so many issues around creativity, composing, putting on a show, improvisation, the myriad obstacles, sponsorship – all clothed in wondrous-seeming chaos. A comedy and a tragedy, together. My own personal tragi-comedy started on day one of rehearsals when, early on that very morning, I had to have an emergency root canal dental procedure. If you could have seen what I looked like at that first rehearsal …
