David Pountney

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the opera producer David Pountney. Alongside Mark Elder and Peter Jonas at the ENO, he tried to make opera more attractive to a wider audience. The opera stage, he says, shouldn't be treated like a mantle shelf filled with fragile objects. It's a versatile and robust art form which needn't be stuck in the past. So he staged Carmen in an automobile graveyard, with a pink Cadillac and a giant billboard, while his Hansel and Gretel was set in a 1950s housing project.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: String Quartet No 2 'Intimate Letters' by Leos Janáček Book: Anthology: The English Year by Geoffrey Grigson Luxury: Croquet lawn