Elaine Padmore: The quiet woman makes her mark

Elaine Padmore, director of opera at the Royal Opera House, has managed to keep out of the perennial controversy embroiling the institution. The eclectic season that starts next week will show where her real passions lie, she tells Cara Chanteau

When the media spotlight roves over the Royal Opera House, it tends to rest on the music director Antonio Pappano, probably because his extrovert style contrasts so markedly with his predecessor, Bernard Haitink. But this is surprising, since in Elaine Padmore - director of opera, with responsibility for the day-to-day running and budgetary control of productions - there is another very significant figure in the new world order at Covent Garden.

Padmore arrived at the House in January 2000 after the worst of its management convulsions were over, but while it was still suffering some much-publicised hiccups as people struggled to master the state-of-the-art stage machinery. She had come straight from an extremely successful seven-year stint as artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, where she had been brought in to make sweeping changes no native could have contemplated. It was, she says, "the perfect preparation. A lot of what I learned there transfers easily here." The two houses share similar problems, in that they have to accommodate both opera and ballet on one stage and with one orchestra.

London got a glimpse of her handiwork when Poul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale was premiered at the ENO in April (it was Padmore who found Ruders' librettist for him). Before that, she ran Ireland's Wexford Festival for 13 years, and transformed it into an event with an international profile, famous for bringing to light obscure and worthwhile works. There, she was asked to take over the running of Opera Ireland, and she also provided a fig leaf of respectability to Harvey Goldsmith's operatic extravaganzas at Earl's Court in the late Nineties. "They may have been spectacular, but they were still very good productions of those operas," she says defiantly.

If Denmark provided her with the skills required to run a large organisation, Wexford provided all the pleasures and lessons of a one-man band. Padmore did everything from first to last: picking dusty scores off the shelf, choosing the operas, planning the rehearsals, auditioning every singer, editing programmes, even playing for rehearsals and standing in for singers. It all provided her with invaluable experience of every part of the jigsaw. For someone who must be a formidable operator, however, she remains remarkably human to talk to - slight, focused, with even the odd flash of fragility.

She was fitted - at least in part - for these things by her early training. From her childhood in Yorkshire, she had always been very musical, demanding piano lessons before going to school, doing all the grades, playing in all the concerts she could. Her parents, she says, were not professional musicians, though her mother taught a little piano, but they were "good natural musicians", always interested in and encouraging of her musical ambitions. She lived in Hull until she was 13, when the family moved to Blackpool, where she went on "doing much the same as before". On then to Birmingham University to read music, where her skill as a pianist enabled her, while still only a student, to accompany top-flight singers such as Janet Baker and Robert Tear, who came to sing Handel opera at the Barber Institute.

While a postgraduate at the Guildhall School of Music - still singing and playing - she was publishing scholarly articles and submitting talks to the BBC. This led first to a job with OUP as editor of music books, and then on to the Beeb, which she joined as a general music producer, rising swiftly to become chief producer of opera. Those of us with incriminatingly long memories still remember her gentle RP tones on Radio 3, what she calls her "scruffy Hull accent" having been erased by stringent elocution lessons.

Though powerfully upbeat about all this, she is candid enough to acknowledge that it wasn't always plain sailing: there were moments when she felt like an outsider, both at Wexford and at Copenhagen. The worst came when her pride and joy, a production of Die Frau ohne Schatten, had to be cancelled to bail out another company - it was "probably my deciding moment in Denmark," she says. Yet, while any one of her careers would have sufficed a normal person, there is obviously a restless curiosity and shining enthusiasm which drives Padmore beyond the safety of the known. It also leaves little time for much outside: "For anyone who works at an opera house, it's absolutely consuming. It's a passion: your life and your work are one." Her four cats at home must be grateful when they see her. Asked which of her many hats she feels most comfortable in, she replies emphatically that she is first and foremost a musician, and always has been.

Now, with the unveiling of the new season at Covent Garden, the first which is truly the creation of the new team - Padmore, Pappano and the casting director Peter Katona - the world can begin to judge the fruits of this new appointment.

It's a cleverly programmed season, with something to titillate all tastes. There is the obligatory sprinkling of Mozart (Don Giovanni), Verdi (Simon Boccanegra, Il Trovatore and a new production of Aida, under Pappano) and, of course, Puccini (Madama Butterfly, and the John Cox-directedTosca. In the latter, American bass Samuel Ramey will take on Scarpia, and a surprise new Chinese tenor, Dai Chaing, who apparently managed to astonish them in audition, will sing Cavaradossi).

Baroque is covered by a new production of Handel's Orlando, and the first visit to the House of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Harry Bicket of Glyndebourne Theodora fame (watch out also for New Zealand-born singer Jonathan Lemalu). The new weighs in with a Thomas Adès world premiere, The Tempest, directed by Tom Cairns in his Royal Opera House debut. This is the third incarnation of Adès's opera, which was not originally based on Shakespeare at all. Padmore has clearly been an active midwife here, too, helping Adès through early blocks with material, and finding him a new librettist, Meredith Oakes. Caliban is to be sung by Ian Bostridge, which is a mindboggling thought to begin with; he also sings Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni.

In the left-field category is another new production, Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, with Thomas Allen in the title role. This is definitely Pappano's baby, who has loved it since his days as a répétiteur. Strauss is well represented by Der Rosenkavalier (with the wonderful Felicity Lott as the Marschallin), Arabella (with Karita Mattila, who made such a memorable Jenufa) and Ariadne auf Naxos.

Meanwhile, in the collector's corner for casting comes a new, all-star production of Gounod's Faust, with Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu (whose joint La Traviata cleared the broadcasting schedules to make way for them), Bryn Terfel and Simon Keenlyside. There's also a Peter Grimes (sung by Canadian Ben Heppner), designed by John Macfarlane, who created an incandescent Duke Bluebeard's Castle last year. Add the new production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the revival of Tarkovsky's famous staging of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, and you would be mean-minded indeed not to concede that this season has a wonderfully strong line-up.

Padmore is happy: it's the kind of season that fulfils all her criteria. Moreover, the House's avowed aim of greater openness and accessibility is, she feels, being achieved - something that's vividly symbolised for her by the internal escalator that brings amphitheatre audiences inside the building and away from the segregated staircases of old. She agrees, however, that the key to accessibility remains prices. They are still managing - just - to cling on to the rule that half the seats at every performance should cost £50 or less, and proud of the fact that nearly 40 per cent of last year's opera audiences were first-timers, 22 per cent were under 35, and 58 per cent had incomes of less than £30,000 a year. It's moved a long way from the Nineties when, Padmore says with a smile: "Me, a grammar-school girl, redbrick university - I wouldn't have felt comfortable here."

The Royal Opera's autumn season starts on 12 September (020-7304 4000; www.royaloperahouse.org)