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‘What is funny is that it is amazing that no The roles that have defined his career include Billy Budd, Pelléas, Eugene Onegin, matter how deeply involved some people are in production for opera houses or in Ulisse and Beckmesser, but it is perhaps as theatre, they still sometimes forget that the seductive, enigmatic, murderous Don the character you are portraying is not who Giovanni – Mozart’s own Don Juan – that you are. People often said about me that he found his signature role. I wasn’t like Don Giovanni. Of course I ‘You have to dig deep, deep, deep inside wasn’t. He was a monster that I plucked you for all the resources that you have to out of the universe.’ play this role,’ he says. ‘You have to find out And in person he is not the least monstrous, what you have in there and then drag it out but charming, personable and, above all, and display it and just be as unpredictable, approachable. For a big man, he does not as dangerous, as fascinating and as hide his big emotions, and he could not interesting as possible. be more proud of being made Chancellor of Durham University.
‘There have been some major things in my life over the last 40 years,’ he says. ‘It’s a journey that leads from the coast of County Durham to one opera house or another, to a small company, a bigger company, to an international company, to several international companies, and along the way I have had honours of one sort of another, but this has overwhelmed me. Since learning I was to be Chancellor, it is extraordinary the pictures that have been running through my mind, remembering the visits we made to Durham as a family, rowing on the river and staring up at the Cathedral, trying not to go over the weir. Becoming Chancellor may be the most thrilling thing I have ever experienced. And one of the beauties of this is that I don’t know what’s involved. Every day is going to be a lovely surprise for me.’