Ah......Tehran.

 All this noise from Iran makes me think of my friend Bijan Ahsef.

When I first arrived to work in Munich at the Bayerische Staatsoper I had to sing the exposed role of the Kammersanger in Manon Lescaut, a vast and grand production created as a vehicle for Domingo in which to open the season. 

The Director was Giancarlo del Monaco, son of the great tenor Mario, but when he wasn't there his highly capable regie-assistent was an unusually literate, brilliantly capable and multi-lingual man with a funny name....a little older than the norm for that position. He seemed overqualified and I couldn't work it out, but he was endlessly patient and kind to me as a newcomer.

 Bijan held us and The Book all together, as temperatures rose and Placido didn't materialise until AFTER the final dress rehearsal, but the experience of taking bows for almost an hour, holding Placido's hand - just four singers - as that great house fell in, never left me. Bijan was of course holding the curtain, directing us through our various solo calls....."Tutti Frutti" he would shout against the fantastic din of the front of house.

He guided me precisely and carefully through weeks of solitary rehearsal for the next piece Rossini's Cenerentola, as he put me into another glorious production made by Ponnelle for La Scala which I sang 26 times in Munich, each one sold out. He possessed not only great knowledge and experience but intuition, recreating the original and getting inside the Director, Composer and the music, but only then did I finally solve the puzzle.

Bijan had been Sovrintendente, the Director of the Tehran Opera, but with the last revolution he was warned that even his beautiful production of Carmen would not be acceptable and so reluctantly gathering up his American wife, two small daughters and his carpets left just in time, for Vienna.

"We ate our rugs" he told me with a smile.

This is the dress for the ballroom entrance in Cenerentola. The corset alone took 3 full afternoons just to pin on me...arms suspended in tapes above my head, then back to rehearsal.

Ah....... fittings!