Englishman Harry Bicket made his name in Handel and early music, and succeeded Trevor Pinnock at the helm of the English Concert. He has quite recently take the top job at Santa Fe Opera and records for the Avie label, among others. He spoke to Classicalite's James Inverne about being stereotyped, and the telling differences between helping to run music organizations in the U.S. and U.K.
JI: You have recently been named as the new chief conductor of Santa Fe Opera. To some, that may seem like a bit of a departure from what you have perhaps been best known for, namely quite early music, whereas Santa Fe has a proud tradition of new operas.
HB: I'm not sure that I ever created that early music role for myself. I started life as a pianist at the Royal College of Music, where I was playing everything: a lot of contemporary music, Romantic repertoire, in fact, not much earlier stuff. Then, I played the organ at Westminster Abbey. And there again I was actually playing Messiaen, Franck, a lot of more modern music. I went to English National Opera for five years and conducted a huge variety of the repertory, but it was only at the end of my time at ENO that I was asked to do the then-new David Alden production of Handel's Ariodante, in the early 1990s. The rationale behind that was that [music director] Mark Elder knew that I had been playing harpsichord a bit in my spare time for John Eliot Gardiner and Trevor Pinnock. At that point, I hadn't even seen many Handel operas! But I loved doing it, and it went well. That led to other things--Glyndebourne and then that led to the Met, and all of a sudden, you wake up one morning and you're recognized as an expert in something without really knowing that you ever were!
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