Jet-setter with mission to get opera on song

Albery’s home is in Canada, although you’d never guess it if hockey matches, cell phones, line-ups and other such North Americanisms didn’t creep into his English-accented conversation. His wife and three Steiner-educated children must hardly ever see him.

Yet if the workload is taking a toll on this tall, friendly Englishman, he’s not letting it show. The fresh-faced 52-year-old looks energetic and youthful, despite his thinning grey hair and glasses.

Aware that he rarely gives interviews, I’d expected him to be reticent or difficult. He’s quite the opposite, talking animatedly and passionately with the kind of intelligence and political world view you’d expect from his productions. Scottish Opera has promised me 30 minutes with him. We fill a generous and genial hour and it’s only because of the afternoon rehearsal that he stops talking at all.

Such generosity of spirit is just what Scottish Opera needs. It might possibly have come to your attention that the company has been going through a rough patch. Faced with a 3.2m deficit and a Scottish Executive unwilling to provide another bail-out or an increase in its 7.5m annual grant, the company has gone through a sorry period of cuts and redundancies.

To begin the 2006 season with a clean financial slate, it has sold the Theatre Royal to a commercial management and laid off 88 staff, including its full-time chorus. Chief executive Christopher Barron is bailing out to take up a similar post at Birmingham Royal Ballet, and Sir Richard Armstrong, the company’s music director of 12 years, is also stepping down, although he will continue as a guest conductor and adviser.

With all this going on, Albery looks like a man single-handedly rescuing Scottish Opera from oblivion. It was he who staged the celebrated Ring Cycle: 15 hours of Wagner put together between the Edinburgh International Festivals of 2000 and 2003.

It is he who is mounting the company’s penultimate production - a revival of his 1994 Fidelio - before its enforced seven-month hiatus; and it is he who’ll be back with a Don Giovanni for the company next year.

Despite the public battering Scottish Opera has taken, its artistic reputation has survived intact - something for which Albery can claim considerable credit. The survival of the company as a whole, however, will surely depend on a shift in the government’s pounds-shillings-and-pence values.

Unable to discuss the slippery subject of art, it can only judge things in terms of "social inclusion" - as if getting people in was more important than making something good.

The confused debate about "accessibility" that has attached itself to the Scottish Opera saga makes Albery recoil. It is, he says, a politician’s term that forces discussion about the arts up a blind alley. "What the hell does ‘accessible’ mean?" he asks. "It’s a cultural bureaucrat’s word, because what is accessible to you isn’t necessarily accessible to me."

The cinema, he says, has "much less nervousness" about elitism. He cites the example of the arthouse Der Untergang (Downfall) playing alongside the latest blockbuster at your local UGC. "We think nothing of someone coming out and saying they didn’t like it," Albery says.

"We don’t talk about an ‘accessible’ film, we say, ‘I didn’t like it’ or ‘I did like it.’ Whereas when we get to the other supposedly high art forms - because cinema is both a high and low art form - it becomes much more about, ‘Oh, well, ordinary people wouldn’t understand it.’

"That’s crap. I can speak as a father of three children. They came to The Ring Cycle because I happened to do it. They had absolutely no other motivation - they’re not classical music kids. It didn’t faze them at all. They had no idea that it was this great masterpiece by Wagner; that doesn’t interest them. They just come along, see it at face value and have things to say afterwards about what they liked and didn’t. But they don’t go, ‘That was difficult and demanding,’ because nobody’s told them to think that."

"My point is that ‘accessible’ is a series of scary layers that have been built up over the years and that people get panicked by. The imaginative process of watching and connecting with a piece of live performance is something that anyone can do."

These are principles Albery carries with him from his early days on the London theatre scene, when co-operatives and egalitarianism were all the rage. As funding got tight in the early 1980s for the kind of fringe theatre he was involved in, he was increasingly drawn to opera, and today directs little else. The idea that he might be doing something elitist simply doesn’t occur to him.

"Elitism is tricky," he says. "A lot of it seems to be to do with marketing and pricing. We know that when they rip out the stalls at Covent Garden and have promenade 5-a-night performances, as they used to do, it is packed. Yes, some of them are people who would have paid more, but some of them aren’t. A lot of it is to do with education, with music in schools, all sorts of reasons. Also there is something probably intrinsically true that a lot of people do seem to come to opera later in their lives. I’m not going to lament that, it’s just the way it is."

On its first appearance in 1994, Albery’s Fidelio was hailed in The Scotsman as "a great and difficult opera made brilliantly simple". It played in the Edinburgh International Festival and has been on the company’s list of possible revivals for the past 11 years. The only opera written by Beethoven, it’s the story of Leonore who cross-dresses as the male Fidelio to get a job at the prison where her husband, Florestan, has been unjustly imprisoned by the tyrannous governor Pizarro. Her eventual success is a triumph for the values of loyalty, liberation and justice.

By setting it in a modern world, Albery demonstrates that Beethoven’s themes are as pertinent today as they were in early-19th century Vienna. He pulled off a similar trick in his Ring Cycle, where we came across Rhinemaidens who looked like barmaids, once mythical scenes taking place in factories and, towards the end, a flash of a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Likewise in Fidelio, he sees the liberation of Florestan through the lens of today. "I was trying to suggest the feeling of the ‘disappeared’ in South America - those women who stood outside prisons for years and refused to be sent away. Florestan is a classic example of one of the disappeared: there’s been no due process, no trial, he’s just vanished."

In Albery’s hands these modern resonances are not gimmicks, but ways of keeping alive the drama that made the operas great in the first place. "It seems to me that those more mythical pieces aren’t helped by being set in some kind of hyper-real past," he says. "The danger there is you get into the pretty frock syndrome. People say, ‘Oh the costumes were wonderful,’ which means it’s rather beautiful to watch fantastic 19th-century dresses or 18th-century frock coats, but the piece gets lost in this decorative nothingness."

He believes opera audiences have "changed enormously" and are well used to directors making creative contributions - although he has experienced managements in the USA who have panicked when he failed to deliver a "lovely, pretty production". As he sees it, artists cannot do anything other than respond to an old classic in a modern way.

"The point about live performance is that it is happening now. There’s no way round that: it’s now. Directors and designers respond to a piece and go, ‘How does that piece emerge for us?’ We can’t do anything else. These pieces are classics. They will be there long after we have gone.

"We are a tiny blip on the screen of Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute. They’re not going to get dented or damaged or have the corners knocked off them by whatever lunacy I throw at them. They’re merely going to become more complicated and difficult to grasp than before because there’s yet another way of looking at them."

Fidelio, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, May 25, 28, June 1, 4 (mat), 7 and 10; Edinburgh Festival Theatre, June 15, 18, 12, 23 and 25