Richard Morrison

Can Martyn Brabbins do wonders at ENO?

The last time I saw Martyn Brabbins was in June, at London’s St John’s, Smith Square. He was sitting quietly behind me during the interval of a London Sinfonietta concert, and we had a pleasant chat about the musical world. Which would have been entirely unremarkable, except for one thing. The concert contained four fiendishly demanding premieres, it was being broadcast on Radio 3 and Brabbins was not only conducting but presenting it as well.

I remember thinking then what an unsung hero he is. Unassuming, unpretentious, unflappable, genial and a complete professional, he also does a rather nice line in irony. ‘I thought all British conductors went to private schools and Cambridge,’ he once quipped to me. ‘I grew up in a council house in Leicester and went to Goldsmiths College in south London.’

At 57, he must have conducted more difficult premieres and resuscitated more problematic rarities than any other conductor alive. Yet he has seen batonwagglers with half his talent and a tenth of his experience landing the big appointments, while he seemed doomed to be labelled forever with that most damning of compliments: ‘safe pair of hands’.

Well, he’s unsung no longer. In October he was appointed music director of English National Opera, with immediate effect.

It’s by far the biggest challenge of his career – and that’s saying something, because this is a man who has conducted Havergal Brian’s mammoth Gothic Symphony at the BBC Proms. Yet if I saw him tomorrow I’m not sure whether I would congratulate him on this belated recognition of his talents, or commiserate with him for joining an opera company that, over the past few years, has had a wretched record of managerial comings and goings, plus a punitive £5 million reduction in its annual Arts Council grant and the consequent imposition of reduced contracts on its chorus.

Brabbins’s immediate predecessor, Mark Wigglesworth, lasted six months before deciding that he disagreed so fundamentally with the strategy set by Cressida Pollock, the chief executive, that he felt compelled to resign. The newly appointed artistic director, an American maverick called Daniel Kramer, has a track record for staging ‘provocative’ productions that alienate as many punters as they convince. The company still has desperate financial problems, and its workforce is (by all accounts) seriously disenchanted. ‘At least Martyn will be a steady hand on the tiller,’ a colleague said. True, but would a steady hand on the tiller have helped the Titanic after it collided with the iceberg?

Well, let’s adopt a slightly more optimistic stance, and assume that ENO can be rescued and turned once more into a vibrant, viable operatic ‘powerhouse’ – to use a word that will evoke memories of its glory days back in the 1980s. It’s the music director who must be the true driving force in an opera house, whatever the managerial hierarchy. Does Brabbins have what it takes to lead such a dramatic revival? And if so, what must he do to achieve such a miracle?

The first question is more easily and happily answered than the second. When Brabbins was appointed, eyebrows were raised because he has conducted comparatively little opera in this country (his excellent championing of Vaughan Williams’s A Pilgrim’s Progress at ENO in 2012 is usually cited) – but that merely shows how parochial the British media can be. Abroad, he has bags of operatic experience, and in some exalted places, too. Having studied with the great Ilya Musin in St Petersburg, he became Valery Gergiev’s assistant and was the first Englishman to conduct at the Mariinsky Opera in half a century. He also works at Deutsche Oper in Berlin and at Frankfurt Oper, where a few years ago he conducted Ildebrando Pizzetti’s complex operatic version of TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral – a work he longs to bring to the UK, though I’m not sure that ENO could afford to stage it any time soon.

So he has plenty of operas under his belt. But he also knows the orchestral world inside out. Indeed, he started his career as a freelance trombone and euphonium player (I first met him 37 years ago, when he was playing in my dad’s brass band). That hard-won practical experience, working his way up from the grass roots, will be important when it comes to convincing the ENO orchestra and chorus that he is on their side.

That’s one of his two main tasks, because ensembles with poor morale rarely produce consistently thrilling performances, and if ENO doesn’t do that it is doomed. But Brabbins’s other essential priority will be to use what resources ENO still has with maximum imagination to produce compelling events, rather than whingeing about the resources it doesn’t have. The latter tactic was the downfall of his predecessor.

I think he is an inspired appointment. He achieves excellence, but is pragmatic, too. If anyone can pull ENO from the slough of despond, he can.

Ensembles with poor morale rarely produce consistently thrilling performances

Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times