Умер режиссер BBC Брайан Лардж, снявший более 800 оперных трансляций

In 1965, Brian Large, who has died aged 89, joined BBC2 as a music and opera director. The network having launched the previous year, everything was new, with colour images replacing black and white from 1967. Its controller, David Attenborough, recalled: “We were all young ... and there wasn’t a question of getting anybody who was experienced in opera production because there weren’t any.” Brian’s first live broadcast for the BBC – “I was scared stiff” – was of Igor Stravinsky conducting his score for The Firebird with the then New Philharmonia Orchestra, in September 1965. It proved to be the first of more than 800 such relays and films. Working with the film-maker Christopher Nupen, Brian directed Double Concerto (1966), built around a performance by Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos. In 1967 John Culshaw, the producer of pioneering recordings of Britten and Wagner for Decca, joined the BBC as head of music. With Britten and his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, Brian directed studio performances of Britten’s The Burning Fiery and Peter Grimes, and Mozart’s Idomeneo. These and other works – La Traviata, Macbeth, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Hansel and Gretel, The Love for Three Oranges and The Flying Dutchman – were recorded using two studios over several days, with the chorus and orchestra in one studio and the set and soloists in the other. The BBC commissioned Britten to write an opera specifically for television, Owen Wingrave (1971), based on a pacifist ghost story by Henry James. It was recorded at the composer’s base at the Maltings, Snape, in Suffolk, with Brian sharing the directing with the opera producer Colin Graham. Brian loved working with composers, blending the music with the new visual opportunities that television had developed. The BBC visual effects team used the new technique of CSO – colour separation overlay – to create different backgrounds and illusions, notably in Hansel and Gretel and The Flying Dutchman, with effects impossible at the time on stage. Recordings from Covent Garden included Grace Bumbry as Amneris in Aida with the Royal Opera (1968), and the star dancers Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev with the Royal Ballet. Live telecasts of outstanding concerts came from the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. In 1974 Brian was invited to the opera house that Richard Wagner built for the realisation of his works at Bayreuth, northern Bavaria, by his grandson Wolfgang. Recordings of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Tannhäuser, Parsifal, Der Fliegender Holländer and Lohengrin followed over the course of a decade for Bavarian Television. For the centenary in 1976 of the first performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Bayreuth mounted a production by Patrice Chéreau with an Industrial Revolution setting, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Brian filmed the production in 1980 in an empty opera house with seats taken out, enabling his cameras to gain much greater freedom and closeness to the singers. It proved to be a milestone in the presentation of classical music on TV, and in 1982 the BBC broadcast the whole Ring in 10 parts on radio and television simultaneously. Declining the opportunity to move into higher management, in 1980 Brian left the BBC to go freelance. He directed telecasts for the Royal Opera, and at Glyndebourne recorded Janáček’s The Makropulos Case (1995) and Rossini’s Le Comte Ory (1997). For the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Brian directed telecasts of the celebrated New Year’s Day concert 18 times (1989-93 and 1997-2009). Much more work followed in mainland Europe with broadcasters and opera houses, and in Japan with NHK. In the US he directed public television broadcasts and relays to cinemas, captured on DVD, of more than 100 works for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and its counterparts in Los Angeles, Houston and San Francisco. Of his projects with the age’s finest singers, none had a greater reach than the Three Tenors concert in Rome at the time of the 1990 football World Cup. It took Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras to a worldwide audience: “We created on that day a monster which could not be tamed.” Also from Rome and seen on 106 television networks was Tosca (1993), set live in the historical locations and times of day of the story. In 1986 came the CBS telecast Horowitz in Moscow, with the Ukrainian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz returning to give a recital in the then Soviet Union. As he played Schumann’s Traumerei as an encore, the camera caught an elderly man with tears running down his cheek. “I saw it, and it was a gift from heaven, and I punched it in. It is something I never regretted,” Brian said. Born in Lambeth, south London, Brian was the son of Ruby (nee Willis), a pianist, and John Large, a violinist. From Selhurst grammar school, Croydon, he went to Royal Academy of Music, London, where he studied the piano with Myra Hess. At the University of London he gained a bachelor’s degree in music (1960), and a PhD (1964). For that he made several visits to what was then Czechoslovakia to collect folksongs in Moravia and Slovakia, and went to the National Theatre in Prague. Later he published biographies of Smetana (1970) and Martinů (1975). He was head of music at the Strand school, south London, when he saw a newspaper advertisement for the BBC2 post. It was an appealing prospect: “Music was my mission in life and here was an opportunity to present music, not simply as a teacher or as a performer, but rather part of a medium able to bring music to the widest possible audience.” His career of half a century ended with videos for the Austrian broadcaster ÖRF, the last being of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (2017) from the Bavarian State Opera. I knew Brian from working on his recordings of Aida, Nabucco and Rigoletto in the Arena at Verona in 1981, and went on to work with him at the BBC, and on the distribution of telecasts from the Metropolitan Opera. His many awards included being named as TV director of the year by the Royal Television Society for both the Ring cycle and the Three Tenors. He wrote At Large: Behind the Camera With Brian Large (1925) in collaboration with the US writer Jane Scovell. In its foreword Renée Fleming highlighted how he deployed his cameras “in the service of the story and the music”. He is survived by his partner of four decades, Jack Mastroianni; they married in 2016.