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Welsh National Opera has veered between mediocrity and magnificence. David Pountney will steady the ship

For a man who is directing an opera about the Holocaust, and (possibly an even more harrowing assignment) also in his first week running Welsh National Opera, David Pountney looks surprisingly relaxed. But then, he’s been around the operatic block a few times. Just turned 64 (“I’ve reached Beatledom,” he beams), he was one of the radical wits who passed through Oxbridge in the 1960s and proceeded to take over the arts world.

At 27 he was already director of productions at Scottish Opera. Then came a decade running English National Opera in tandem with Mark Elder and Peter Jonas — the self-styled “Powerhouse” team. (None of them was ever accused of undue modesty.) Pountney directed 20 operas at the Coliseum in that heady decade and managed to create a furore with most of them. “British opera productions had been very genteel and decorative, and I suppose my generation rebelled against that,” he says. “We wanted to apply the lessons we’d learnt from the continentals. But all that’s been done now, hasn’t it? There’s still a hunger for really exciting work, but I don’t think it has to be ideological in the same way.”

Since then Pountney has not only been freelancing round the world, but also running the Bregenz Festival on Lake Constance in Austria — winning much acclaim in the process by championing rarely heard operas. So why has he taken on the daunting mantle of chief executive and artistic director at WNO? It’s a company with a fantastic history. But it also has considerable financial problems — and, in recent seasons, a record of swerving bewilderingly from magnificence (Die Meistersinger with Bryn Terfel) to mediocrity (a disastrous Fidelio two months later).

“Well, by the time I finish I will have done ten years in Bregenz [he still has two summer seasons to supervise] and I felt I’d learnt a lot about running a company,” he says. “And as a freelance director I’ve been going round the world, seeing how badly run other places are. I wanted to put all this experience into doing a real job with a real company.”

But WNO, which has been leaderless since the unlamented John Fisher departed nearly a year ago, is a hell of a challenge — particularly with public subsidy being cut everywhere. “I think they have been very daunted by financial anxiety,” Pountney says, diplomatically. “And I’m assuming that they have chosen me [he was asked to apply for the job] because they think I will lead them more strongly on the artistic front. That’s what the company needs. I started working with WNO in the 1970s, at a very exciting time when the company was being very bold. I want us to get back to that.”

Is that even possible? “Very definitely. I’m working on a lot of options for co-producing with other European opera houses, and thus being able to do more adventurous work without spending more money — because more money is something we ain’t going to have.”

Will they actually have less money? “Thanks to the Welsh Assembly the cuts at WNO are not as drastic as, for example, Opera North has to make,” Pountney says. “I’ve planned to the end of 2014; we’ve budgeted for those plans, and we think we can stick to it.”

So WNO won’t be doing what Scottish Opera has done: dumped its chorus and put its orchestra on part-time contracts? “Certainly not. I started my career at Scottish; watching the decline of that company has been a horror story.”

Pountney says that he won’t direct more than one opera a year. “To do more would be wrong, because the company can afford only three new shows a year.” His first, a real statement of intent, will be Berg’s pervy masterpiece Lulu, in 2013. “Lothar [Koenigs, WNO’s music director] has his eye on the German repertoire, and to balance that I have a very specific plan for part of the Italian repertoire that I’d like to cultivate. And we definitely want to do more modern pieces. Truly modern pieces, I mean — 21st century.”

Does WNO’s audience cry out for that? “I think music went through a horrible period of dogmatic Modernism, and that turned the audience away,” Pountney replies. “But that period has been over for 20 years. There are some wonderful recent pieces around. In the long run we would want to commission a new opera too.”

Has Pountney any plans for WNO to attract new audiences and offer radical new approaches by working occasionally in former industrial spaces, as ENO and others are doing? “Ah, what a friend of mine calls shite-specific work,” he quips. “Well, my wife [Nicola Raab] has just directed Parsifal in a former Soviet shipyard in Tallinn, so I know how fabulous these things can be. And of course Wales, sadly, is full of disused industrial sites. But they are very expensive shows to mount, because you have to bring all the theatrical apparatus with you.” So Pountney needs to find some Welsh billionaires? “I need to find several of those.”

And what about his personal ambitions. After 40 years directing opera, are there any whales that have escaped his net? “Oh yes. The Ring, for example. I’m saving it for my Indian summer. And there’s a pile of Mozart I’ve never done: Così, Figaro, Idomeneo. I’ve done such a lot of out-of-the-way repertoire. That’s why people usually gee me up.”

Which brings us to Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger, the remarkable work that Pountney introduces to English National Opera next week, having first staged it in Bregenz last year. Weinberg, a Polish Jew who was befriended by Shostakovich and composed a vast number of symphonies, string quartets and film scores, knew a thing or two about totalitarian oppression. His parents perished in a Nazi camp and he ended up in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union, where his father-in-law was killed by Stalin’s secret police. In Zofia Posmysz’s novel The Passenger he found his ideal subject-matter. Posmysz, herself an Auschwitz survivor, imagined a chance meeting on a ship after the war between an SS overseer and a former inmate. That triggers extended flashbacks to the concentration camp.

“It was Weinberg’s first opera,” Pountney observes, “yet he seems to know exactly how to set this story to music. By using voices and instruments with incredible sparseness, he creates a sense of timelessness — because in a prison, time just disappears. And he avoids any kind of operatic grandstanding. One feels that both Posmysz and Weinberg are the authentic voices of the Holocaust.

It’s not like so often nowadays, when you have the uncomfortable feeling that authors or directors are ‘quoting’ the Holocaust simply to raise the emotional temperature. In Bregenz the impact on the audience was astounding. Of course, in a German-speaking country there is a very particular resonance. But I think it will have a big impact here too.”

Welsh National Opera opens its season with Don Giovanni tomorrow at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff (029-2063 6464). The Passenger opens at the London Coliseum (0871 9110200) on Monday.

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Beard, Borosini and Fabri are three 18th-century singers who match the character and flourish of our own more familiar Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras, says tenor Ian Bostridge

One of the greatest excitements of the period-performance movement in baroque music has been the rediscovery of arias written for the castrati. These 18th-century singers, who were imported into the London theatre scene at enormous expense, fascinate historians and musicians, and although authenticity, even at its high-water mark, has not managed to recreate the sound that these extraordinary vocal athletes made, the (strictly speaking inauthentic) voice of the countertenor has filled the gap and risen to breathtaking heights of beauty, agility and musicianship. Women, too, have rediscovered this dazzling music: Cecilia Bartoli's last album, Sacrificium, was an exploration of this fashionable and fascinating repertoire, while the 18th-century's battling divas such as Faustina and Cuzzoni, the "rival queens" who dominated London's music scene, have also fired the imaginations of singers and historians alike.

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World premiere, Spitalfields Music Winter Festival
Shoreditch Church, London

17 December (5, 7, 9pm with a 30-min pre-performance experience)
Box office 020 7377 1362; www.spitalfieldsmusic.org.uk (£15, £10)

Step into a magical world of legend and folklore with Streetwise Opera's new commission, 'Fables - A Film Opera', created by some of the country's leading composers and filmmakers working with over 120 Streetwise Opera performers from around England.

Composers Orlando Gough, Mira Calix, Paul Sartin/Andy Mellon (members of the folk band Bellowhead) and Emily Hall have teamed up with film-makers Tom Marshall, Flat-e, Gaëlle Denis, Iain Finlay and director Emma Bernard to produce truly innovative works that span the genres of opera, folk, electronica and film. The teams have created four stunning seven-minute films based on fables from the classic, The Boy who Cried Wolf; the folkloric, the legend of The Hartlepool Monkey ; the literary, Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose and the contemporary Shinishi Hoshi’s Hey! Come on Out! Each film will begin with a live operatic introduction involving Streetwise Opera performers and a professional cast.

For the premiere, Shoreditch Church will be transformed into a magical world of fable; we are creating a 30-minute pre-show experience where audiences can explore the building before the performance. The shows on 17 Dec will be the only fully-staged performances of the work before the films tour.

Grateful thanks to principal funders for the project, Arts Council England and Macquarie Group Foundation. Other funders/supporters: Cruach Trust, Friends of Streetwise Opera, Garfield Weston Foundation, Halo Post Production, Hartlepool Borough Council, Hartlepool Maritime Experience, Hoults Yard, Jerwood Space, Mazars Charitable Trust, Middlesbrough Council, Northern Film & Media, Nottingham City Council, Opera North, PRS for Music Foundation, RVW Trust, Spitalfields Music New Music Commission Fund, Spitalfields Music Patrons, StreetSmart, Stink, The Sage Gateshead, Vernon Ellis Foundation, those who took part in ‘I sang on a West End Stage’, X Foundation and all our core funders

Boris Godunov, starring René Pape in the title role, has its premiere on October 11. Stephen Wadsworth directs the first new production of Mussorgsky's masterpiece at the Met in more than 35 years, with Russian maestro Valery Gergiev conducting. Performance dates: October 11|15|18|23|25|30|March 9|12|17. For bookings contact Opera in Style on 020 7629 5559