Antonio Pappano: Brave new world

This Friday a new era opens at the Royal Opera House when Antonio Pappano conducts his first night as music director. But, as the effervescent London-born Italian-American tells James Naughtie, his new role extends beyond the podium

We will know Antonio as Tony at Covent Garden, that is certain, and it is a nice piece of legerdemain for a man whose identity is fluid and happily unfixed. Italian, but not entirely, an adopted American, but with his European roots intact. A Londoner in childhood, who feels as if he is coming home. He is not a distant Antonio, bearing foreign attitudes and an outsider's sensibility, but a figure who is quickly going to become as familiar as if he had been home-grown from the start.

Pappano carries a natural feel of familiarity about him. Though he has a gentle manner – any bombast will be saved for awkward moments in the rehearsal room – it fizzes with an easy good humour and tactile charm. He is a bustler, a grinner, and an effervescent character. The hair flops, the arms wave, he smiles a lot. His is the air of the enthusiast who has found himself propelled unexpectedly into a spotlight and is determined to savour every minute of it. The knowledge, deep inside, that these will be years of fame at Covent Garden, and years that will have their troubles and disasters as well as their triumphs, is hidden. His face is that of a 42-year-old youngster still anxious to learn, not of a world-weary figure who has reached the peak after a long slog up the rock-face. He's fresh.

The question about Pappano is whether that fizz and sparkle has underneath it a reservoir of talent and determination that will enhance the musical legacy that Bernard Haitink leaves behind at Covent Garden. It was a commonplace of the Eighties and early Nineties that, while the administration was creaking and cracking around him, and pools of bitterness lapped round his feet, Haitink managed to sustain and enrich the music at the Royal Opera House. Pappano's task in his first season is to demonstrate that he isn't a music director who is going to take time to catch that spirit, but can quickly find his rhythm and style.

The youngest music director of the place since Rafael Kubelik in 1955, he won't have the luxury of time to mature. Covent Garden has just finished what is, by common consent, one of its strongest seasons in recent times, so Pappano will be judged quickly. Can he ride the tide of success that, at least for the moment, seems to have swamped the old problems? He must, for otherwise those problems will find a way of crawling out and eating away at him.

The omens are good. They loved him in Brussels, where La Monnaie is half the size of the Royal Opera House but still an important place in the city. It's an intimate theatre with a testing audience and a sharp acoustic, and Pappano enjoyed its glare for about a decade, in the course of which he turned himself from a pianist-turned-conductor into one of those operatic maestri who is thought of as a singer's man. This is not always welcome to orchestras – the Royal Opera House orchestra didn't mind at all when Haitink would avert his gaze from a production he particularly disliked (most notoriously, Richard Jones's Ring cycle) and scarcely raise his eyes from the pit – but the story of Pappano is of a conductor who has come to opera through singers.

When he was a child in London, living in a small flat just off Victoria Street, his father would coach singers in a studio in the West End. Many of them weren't very good. This was a world in which huge effort had to be expended on some voices that were never going to be heard on the great stages. Discipline and hard work were everything. That was Pappano's home life. He began on the piano as soon as he could reach the keyboard. Soon, he started to accompany singers for his father. He first went to Covent Garden when he was seven.

"I remember the gypsies in Trovatore to this day." It was the old Visconti production (rather better than some of its creaky successors there) with Leontyne Price, and as Antonio began to develop as a good pianist, the voices he knew from childhood were never far away.

Indeed, when he speaks about singers, he talks as if he's discussing his own musical technique, with the voice substituting for the piano. "A singer has to get used to the body. It has to do with breathing and rhythm and what you might call muscle memory. Those physical senses are part of the technique. They have to be understood and respected." This sounds less like a conductor, more like a voice coach, as if his father is still standing in the corner.

He talks about singers as if they are more than just actors in his troupe, but his pupils. What do they need from a conductor? "Feedback, of course. They must know immediately what you think, how you feel and what you want. The orchestra and the singer are all of a piece, and the singers need you. They really need you. A clear beat, certainly. But much more, too."

Pappano's history seemed to lead him inexorably towards the opera pit. Music without singing often seemed to him to be incomplete, as if he was nagged by his childhood memories. His family moved to the United States when he was still young, and he was educated there. But, by the early Eighties, he was flying home from Connecticut to Europe – home, because Europe never faded in his mind and he used to say to himself in the States, "I gotta get outta here". He was a répétiteur at opera houses across the Continent, learning the repertoire, listening to the singers, watching the conductors. Daniel Barenboim, who is something of a hero to Pappano, still remembers being struck by him when he worked for him as an assistant conductor on the Bayreuth Tristan of 1986, a scary honour for any young maestro. Within five years, he was in Brussels in charge of a theatre where he was expected to master a wide repertoire and deal with the demands of hard-pressed singers dropping in for a short series of performances while they whizzed round the international circuit. It was very quick.

And this young maestro had a clear attitude to the conductor's craft. He sees in Barenboim the ghost of Furtwängler himself, whom he reveres as the master. It's from that tradition that he has developed his own idea of how you build the "line" of a score, how you persuade an audience that the arch from beginning to end is elegant and unbroken. It has a great deal to do with text – the Covent Garden chorus is going to be spending long, long hours with this man – but also with the way the orchestra moves as a body. "Furtwängler conducted into the sound," he says. "It's hard to describe, but you feel the orchestra seeming to gather at certain moments. There's a feeling of undertow in the music. It often starts in the brass. A climax grows. There's what I think of as a gathering of sound."

Though it's an imprecise image, it rings true. He even speaks of the orchestra not having to play too precisely together at such moments – it's the pulling towards each other that allows the players to find the moment when they can sound as one. He cares about this technique as much as anything, and it propelled him quickly in Brussels into the sights of some of the great opera houses. On disc, it showed through, too. The veteran critic Edward Greenfield told Pappano that when he heard his first recording of La Bohème (and Edward has Bohèmes enough to last us all a lifetime) he said to himself: "This is the real thing."

There's a mixture of delicacy and swagger about Pappano that creates excitement. He isn't an orchestral conductor who has turned to opera, but a man of the opera through and through. Songs and scores have been his life. "You want a Neapolitan song? I can do that, too."

Here is a musical director of the Royal Opera who, 20 years ago, was playing the répétiteur's piano in draughty rehearsal rooms, watching great conductors and looking for a break; the Italian-American, London-born musician, at home in a handful of languages; the easy-going, informal musician who played piano in a bar quite happily, who wanted to reinterpret Furtwängler's lessons in the great opera houses. He's there, and rather sooner than he could have expected.

About Covent Garden's past troubles, and some of its lurking problems, he has – wisely, I'm afraid – little to say. It is thought that he'll turn his mind quickly to the Linbury Studio Theatre, which hasn't become the natural adjunct to the main house that many wanted (and which most singers hate), and he is going to have to work at ballet. He'll conduct some, but it will take time. He is no ballet man, and its devotees are notoriously sensitive to any hint of disdain from the top. And the working relationships in Covent Garden? He and Tony Hall, the executive director who wants to be an executive director and not an amateur impresario, and Elaine Padmore and Peter Katona, who sift and cast the opera repertoire, do seem birds of a feather. That couldn't have been said at any other time in the last 25 years, at least.

On the scarred operatic landscape, with English National Opera going through its own crisis behind the scaffolding and clouds of dust, and regional companies sending out the familiar begging letters, Covent Garden has an air of optimism that is unmistakable, perhaps because it is such a novelty.

But Pappano's starry eyes have a steely quality. He knows that expectations are high. He's learning Wozzeck for his first season – but that won't be enough. Every night will be a test and trial. His friends think that he has the spring in his step to bring energy to a job that has tended to sap it from others who have gone before.

He uses the word privilege a good deal in talking about Covent Garden. Fortunately, I can report, he speaks just as much of having fun. Everyone who cares about Covent Garden should be relieved that everything about Tony Pappano suggests that he means it.

The new season at Covent Garden opens this Friday with 'Ariadne auf Naxos', conducted by Antonio Pappano (020-7304 4000; www.royaloperahouse.org)

This article appears in the September 2002 issue of 'BBC Music Magazine'