Edward Gardner Leaving English National Opera, Mark Wigglesworth Arriving

Well, this isn't business as usual at English National Opera. Traditionally, the ENO music directorship has been one of the most hotly debated in the U.K. When it is announced that the hunt is on for a new one, pundits opine, polls are drawn up and the chattering classes, well, chatter. And once an MD is appointed, there tends to be gossip before they go. So, the news that Edward Gardner is stepping down after only seven years is almost as much of a shock as the simultaneous announcement that Mark Wigglesworth will follow him.

Let's start with the first part. Founding music director Charles Corri was there for 37 years. Mark Elder, the most successful MD there in recent history, was there for 14. OK, others were in situ for much shorter periods, Paul Daniel for eight, Sian Edwards for only two (but she was deemed a failure, though I liked her). But Gardner has been such an ostentatious success story, not least as a protégé of Elder's, and the match of job to man seemed so ideal that we all expected him to be another Elder, in tenure length as well as in popularity.

So, what is really going on? Tom Service in The Guardian speculates that Gardner may have secretly already been tapped for the vacant City of Birmingham Symphony job. Could be. Though that would leave him with two orchestral jobs (he also is taking on the Bergen Philharmonic) and no opera house, which would be a somewhat unusual balance, and we'd miss his electric talents in the opera house. It takes a special kind of person to MD an opera company, and Gardener has the right attributes.

As has Wigglesworth, I'd imagine. He has long been the should-have-been man of the U.K. music scene--an electric conductor whom a major music directorship had so far eluded. There were rumors that orchestras found him too pushy to want him as more than a visiting genius. But orchestras often say that, and conducting is a difficult job. You try man-managing dozens of virtuoso musicians! Wigglesworth is older and wiser now and is every bit as fine an interpreter as Gardner. So, the era of Wigglesworth begins. Long live the music director.