Daniel takes on the Italian job

Four years ago, when Paul Daniel became music director of the demoralised ENO, he dreamt up a grand season of Italian opera. Halfway through its run, he talks to MICHAEL WHITE about the company's successes

HARD hats have never featured prominently in the wardrobe of the well-dressed opera-goer, but they'd fit the current decor of the London Coliseum auditorium very nicely now that it's been turned into a building site. The stalls are flanked by scaffolding and ropes and ladders, and a wooden walkway runs along the front edge of the circle.

None of this is real: it's just a Village People fantasy, designed - according to a sternly worded ENO information sheet - to "reflect the Coliseum's current restoration programme, though it is not part of it".

In other words, it's theatre: an extended set built to embrace the audience and energise the Coliseum's cavernous performing space until December when the whole thing gets dismantled. If you've been to either of the two productions in the ENO season so far, you'll have seen it. And if you go to the new Rossini Turk in Italy, which opens tonight, you'll see it again, slightly adapted as it is for every different show.

Paul Daniel, ENO's music director and chief face to the world, enjoys the odd expression of surprise that everything is fake. "Of course its fake.

When we get real builders in here they bring nice shiny scaffolding, state-of-the-art stuff. What Stefanos Lazaridis, who designed all this, has created is a romantic conceit of hanging paint- pots and sheeting that looks like it must have looked when they built the Duomo in Florence. It's fun."

And so it is. But more than that, it sends a message to the audience about the current season and about the current status of an opera company in transition.

This ENO season has been themed to celebrate 400 years of Italian opera - which wouldn't be so special (since Italian repertory comes as standard in most opera houses) except that ENO's celebration involves no less than seven brand-new productions opening one after the other. No revivals. It's the kind of thing few other companies would dare to contemplate. And its only possible because the shows all use the same designer - Lazaridis and assorted variations on the same building-site set.

The initial idea was Paul Daniel's.

And bizarrely, for something that looks like the operatic equivalent of climbing Everest for England, it began as an economy measure in response to the crisis that hit Daniel when he first arrived at ENO four years ago. He had only been in the job a few weeks when Dennis Marks, the general director, resigned in the wake of revelations about ENO's financial problems, leaving Daniel to sort things out. and fight off a government-supported call for ENO and Covent Garden to be merged.

Daniel sprang to action and fought a successful defence of his own territory. But, as he says now: "I was new, I felt terribly alone, and the whole world was waiting to know what I was going to do."

The only hope lay in a 9 million sta-bilisation grant to secure the company's immediate future. But that grant was dependent on Daniel's ability to come up with some good ideas.

And fast.

"I remember sitting at home with a very empty laptop screen. One of the ideas, as I sat with that laptop, was for a season that would concentrate more on the music, the artists, the ensemble but economise - in the best sense - on how we used the stage. Maybe by having a linked series with all the operas played on the same set. Or maybe - as we finally decided - the same basic set-module, which could be adapted for each opera."

Out of that came the Italian theme, the scaffolding, and (thanks to savings in the design budget) the grand gesture of making every show a new production. "That makes the season special," says Daniel, knowing that it's special anyway with rare works like Dallapiccolas The Prisoner opening on 17 November and a staging of the Verdi Requiem - often called the greatest opera never written - opening as a grand finale on 9 December.

But as he also knows, the season is a milestone in his own career at ENO.

And so far, things are looking good. The company's debts are cleared.

Attendances are up, with record advance bookings worth 1.5 million. Artistic standards are, by common consent, high.

And with a new Ring cycle in the offing, there's a confidence about the future that would have been unthinkable two years ago.

Last month the company even gave a starry concert-opera in Italian which, for an organisation dedicated to English-language performance, looked like a challenge to Covent Garden. But Daniel doesn't want you to make anything of that. He is keen to emphasise that ENO has a distinct identity.

"Someone's always floating crazy merger ideas. Recently there was a plan for some super-efficient central box office for all the opera in London, and no doubt it looked fine on paper. But the day after I heard about I went to our box office and found one of the guys there singing into the phone - because someone had rung and said: 'Am I going to enjoy this? Will I know the tunes?' So there was our guy singing them. Fantastic. Would you get that kind of service anywhere else? I think not."

The Italian season continues at the Coliseum until 16 December. Turk in Italy opens tonight, The Prisoner on 17 November and Verdi's Requiem on 9 December. Box office: 020 7632 8300.

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