Der Ring des Nibelungen

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"Some of his arias are unbelievable," Domingo agrees. "Not just in this piece." And to prove the point he decides to sing, from memory, a real rarity, "Tu solo a me rimani, o poesia" from Leoncavallo's first opera, Chatterton, written in 1876, when the composer was 18. Pappano and I applaud enthusiastically. "You've got a recording on your little machine that you can play your grandchildren," Pappano points out later. Pagliacci is a short opera. Its two acts come in at only around an hour and a quarter, which is why it has so often been performed in a double bill with Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. Not in this production, though. That means that top-price tickets, at £160 each, work out at over £2 a minute. If that rate had applied to the Royal Opera's recent Lohengrin, top prices would have exceeded £460 each. Covent Garden is braced for the inevitable condemnation. "I'm sure there will be a lot of cynicism," Pappano acknowledges. "But Zeffirelli is very very convinced that Pagliacci was not meant to be with Cav. They just happened to be put together. They are operas on their own. This production is conceived on a large scale. And you need an interval merely for that reason." "People asked this question in Los Angeles and in Washington too, when the production was done there," Domingo adds. "However, once you come to the performance, if you don't want to be difficult about it, you get it. You get a show. You leave the theatre satisfied. Leoncavallo wrote it to be performed on its own." Nonetheless, Pagliacci is a gruelling work to rehearse and perform. No one who knows their operatic history should be in any doubt about the difficulties. When Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the premiere in 1892 in Milan, got home after the first performance, he threw himself on his bed fully dressed and slept round the clock. For his famous 1965 recording of the opera, Herbert von Karajan spent days of detailed orchestral rehearsal with the La Scala orchestra tutoring the players to adopt his more musical, less histrionic view of the score. Pappano has been putting himself through something similar before we meet. "Today I was rehearsing with the orchestra, and Placido was sitting with us, and I was rehearsing really some of the most difficult stuff, most technically difficult, most musically difficult. There's no one bar like any other bar. You have to do it over and over again, to find the right way of doing it, to achieve the bowing, why something is not working. "You have to do those things several times. Today, Placido saw me suffer through finding solutions to difficult musical problems, which can very easily unnerve you. It's very important that Placido saw my trials and tribulations. It just deepens your knowledge to work these things through. You learn something." I ask a facetious question that I have been storing up. If Domingo can be a conductor, can Pappano ever be a singer? Both men laugh a lot. "Of course I want to go on the stage and sing. Everybody wants to do that, everybody wants to go and sing. My problem is that I don't have the high notes or the low notes." "Conducting an opera is like being the charioteer in Ben-Hur," Domingo chips in. "It's like holding 10 horses in one hand, and 10 more in the other. You can never predict what is going to happen. I know what I can do, but at this moment it is a relaxation for me that Tony is doing all the difficult work, settling the preparation and the teaching. It is a comfortable thing for me in one way, but I have to come up to his level when it is my turn." "There will be differences, I am certain, but not all that many," says Pappano. "We start from the same feeling about the piece," says Domingo. "And then we just see."

Der Ring des Nibelungen: Tim Albery's highly intelligent and gripping production of Wagner's epic, conducted by Richard Armstrong.

Richard Armstrong is Music Director of Scottish Opera, a position he has held since July 1993. He is established as a leading conductor, both in the symphonic and opera world. He was born in Leicester and was Organ Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before joining the music staff of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1966 where he worked with Solti on the Ring, with Giulini on La traviata and with Klemperer on Fidelio. Richard Armstrong moved from the Royal Opera House to Welsh National Opera, where he was Music Director from 1973 to 1986. His years with the company were a period of remarkable achievement which included many overseas visits and the first visit by a non London based company to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden where they presented two complete Ring Cycles in 1986. He has returned regularly to WNO as a guest conductor including in 1988, a new production of Falstaff with Peter Stein (also televised for the BBC) then taking the production to New York and Milan during the first half of 1989. He also toured Salome and Falstaff in Japan with WNO. In 1982, Richard Armstrong made his debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden with Billy Budd, and has returned since then for Andrea Chenier, Un ballo in maschera and Don Carlos. At English National Opera he has conducted Salome and Aida, and for English National Opera and Scottish Opera, the UK premières of Schnittke's Life with an Idiot. Richard Armstrong conducts a broad operatic repertoire centred around the works of Verdi, Wagner, Strauss and Janácek. In 1978 he won the Janácek Medal in recognition of the pioneering Janácek cycle in collaboration with David Pountney for Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera.