Lidiya Yankovskaya rescues the ENO

The Sunday Times

London, UK

It was Martyn Brabbins, English National Opera’s music director, who was supposed to be leading the company into the murky world of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle this spring. But last October Brabbins found the murky world of ENO management too much for him and quit in protests at looming cuts.

English National Opera needed a new conductor to jump into a production of a tricky and disturbing 20th-century masterpiece. Luckily there was an obvious candidate: why not get the conductor who had led another challenging 20th-century masterpiece at ENO — and had a triumph?

So the Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, the conductor of last year’s acclaimed ENO production of Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, stepped in. That work is not an opera but Yankovskaya, 37, says that putting it on stage added a deeper element. “It’s what you want opera to be: enhancing all the individual forms by coming together.”