BELFAST says "relax". The city bathed in the liquid light of an Indian summer afternoon, is at its most benevolent. "Whaddya think of them sunglasses, love?" The taxi driver makes me try on the John Travolta shades which have, he says, survived the ravages of 10 grandchildren all summer. People are picnicking in, the park outside City Hall an uilleann piper is busking on one of the pedestrian streets off Donegall Place. And at Grand Opera House, Opera Northern Ireland is gearing itself up for its fist season under its new artistic director, the English conductor Stephen Barlow.
Who, as he sits in the coffee shop of the Europa Hotel calmly sipping a beer, has either caught the benevolence bug or is the very model of a frazzle free maestro. Certainly - he doesn't look like a man - who has this very, morning dashed back to Belfast from the Scottish Highlands, where he and his wife, Ab Fab actress Joanna Lumley, are in the throes of buying a cottage. When the ONI job first came up, they thought about buying a house in the North, but it seemed a bit extravagant to have a house when he's only in Belfast for three months of the year, and intermittently at that and so, he says, with the mixture of delight and dismay familiar to anyone who has renovated a cottage from the skirting boards up, "we're going to spend a great deal of money on this instead".
Born in London and educated at a choir school in Canterbury, Barlow received the kind of wide ranging musical apprenticeship his music loving parents felt they had missed out on. "I started piano when I was five, flute when I was nine, took up the French horn when I was 13 and percussion when I was 14," he says. He was also an organist and, for a period in his late teens, a counter tenor. He began conducting when he was at Cambridge - but never intended to be a conductor, let alone a conductor of opera.
"There are two different types of conductors, I think," he says. "There are young musicians - men and women - who have real ambitions to be a conductor and who won't be satisfied if they don't make it. And there's the other type, people who come up through the ranks and just kind of fall into it." He is, he insists, one of the latter. "The organist at Canterbury said I'd either end up as a secondary school teacher or I'd be a conductor. So I always thought that it was possible, but I never really intended it. I just started - and you know the famous line, I've started, so I'll finish".
His first job was at Glyndebourne. "That's how I fell in love with opera - but not until I was 23 or 24. I hated it before that, I could safely say. I had grown up on church music and symphonic music; I didn't understand what opera was about, the dramatic side of it, and so I found the music itself slightly boring, really - compared with Beethoven and Brahms." Working with directors like Peter Hall and John Cox and conductors like Bernard Haitink and Andrew Davidson at Glyndebourne was, he says, a revelation.
There were revelations to be had, too, at English National Opera, where he worked for three years in the heady days of the early 1980s, when the rush of money into the economy was swiftly followed by a rush of yuppies into the opera houses. "It was exciting, but quite fraught as well, because the Mark Elder regime was quite different from anything they'd known before." The orchestral practices inherited from the Sadler's Wells era needed a major overhaul; and as for the ultra modern, blackleather and lightbulbs style of production for which ENO was to become famous, if not notorious, "I think the old subscribers were put off slightly by a chainsaw Mazeppa," says Stephen Barlow.
The Armani clad audiences have long since departed, leaving opera houses generally - not Just ENO - with the problem of how to keep things ticking over into the new millennium. Stephen Barlow has worked at both ends of the funding spectrum in San Francisco where, recession notwithstanding, money flows freely enough to provide luxurious conditions for the orchestra and top class soloists; and in Albania, where he did Rigoleto last year under the auspices of the British Council.
"It was one of the most moving experiences I've ever had. The players play on ghastly instruments, they have no spare strings, no reeds, no resin; they work in a 1960s opera house which is falling apart, nobody had a decent chair to sit on and the stands were all cobbled - together with Sellotape And they don't have libraries - they've never heard a note of Stravinsky or Copland, they've never heard Elgar. It was a pretty stunning experience."
Things are not, happily, quite so bad at Opera Northern Ireland, where Barlow begins a three year contract this week with an autumn programme featuring a new production, in English, of Beethoven's Fidelio and a new production of Verdi's glamorous tearjerker La traviata.
Still, there's no doubt that funding is in short supply at the moment, and if the company's extensive schools programme is to be maintained and expanded, and especially if productions are to tour outside of Belfast, more money will have to be found. British Lottery money is at present available only for capital projects - "and we need a building like we need a hole in the head" - but arts administrators in the UK are worrying away at a loophole in the Lottery guidelines, hoping to free up money for investment and expansion purposes as well.
"One of the first things we want to do is to be able to tour to the Republic," says Stephen Barlow. "There are so many connections that we can make here that are so extraordinary of Ireland." ONI has a policy of using Irish singers, he points jut, and both its repetiteurs this season, Mairead Hurley and Andrew Synnott, are from Dublin; Barlow himself is keen to promote what you might call cross Border co-"opera"-tion during his artistic directorship and has already had talks with DGOS Opera Ireland in that regard.
"IT doesn't make sense to me to have a company 100 miles down the road doing, completely different things," he says. "But we need direction from our bosses to see how this can actually be done. We really need the arts councils to talk to each other, the politicians to talk to each other, the ministers to talk to each other."
Perhaps the political messages implicit in Fidelio will help get things moving - Gerechtigkeit and Freiheit and all that? Well, but the real messages of Fidelio aren't political ones, says Stephen Barlow.
Fidelio is about human relationships; about people loving each other and making mistakes and laughing and crying. "We're really working on the dialogue, on the humour of the piece," he says. "We want our Fidelio to be real and relevant, not slow and ponderous and political." Dammit, I think there is a political message in there after all.
