The Full Score
British conductor appointed music director of English National Opera with immediate effect
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English National Opera has announced Martyn Brabbins as its new music director. The popular English conductor, 57, has taken up the role with immediate effect, filling a gap that was created by the sudden and unexpected resignation of Mark Wigglesworth in March. With a contract that keeps him at the Coliseum until at least 2020, Brabbins will now get to work with ENO artistic director Daniel Kramer in planning future seasons. He is also pencilled in to conduct a production next year. The ENO faithful, meanwhile, will be hoping that his appointment marks the beginning of a period of stability for the much-loved but beleaguered company.
Brabbins is no stranger to English National Opera, having first conducted there in 2012 in a production of Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress that met with warm praise from the press. He has also guest-conducted at many other opera houses around Europe, not least Grange Park Opera, where his handling of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde this summer went down a storm. His previous posts outside opera include that of artistic director of the Cheltenham Music Festival, where his three years in charge from 2005-7 saw him introduce innovative ideas such as performances of the complete Tchaikovsky and Beethoven symphonies in one day.
With recent cuts made to ENO’S budget and ongoing scepticism over the management’s plans for its future, Brabbins’s job is seen by many as something as a poisoned chalice, and he himself admits that he joins the company ‘in a tough financial climate’. However, even during this most turbulent of periods, standards on stage have remained impressively high. ‘With an orchestra and chorus of such exceptional calibre and a musical legacy nurtured by the finest British conductors,’ he says, ‘I feel incredibly honoured to have been invited to become a part of this treasured British musical company. I am determined that ENO will continue to produce stimulating operatic performances of the highest musical quality at the London Coliseum.’