Conducting opera is about as complicated as it gets, says Rory Macdonald, a freelance conductor and the assistant conductor at the Hallé Orchestra, Manchester. When playing in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Macdonald was always interested in the ability and role of a conductor to shape a performance. “It was really interesting for me to sit in the violin section . . . I would find myself analysing what [the conductor] was doing to make the orchestra sound better.”

He had the opportunity to turn this interest into practice when he began conducting friends in concerts and took part in a masterclass with Iván Fischer, the music director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. “At that stage I wasn’t absolutely sure that [conducting] was something I wanted to do,” he says. “But I was aware that I was able to do it and I suppose I had quite a lot of self-confidence.”

After graduating in music from the University of Cambridge, Macdonald was invited to audition for Fischer and spent two years as his assistant – “a sort of apprentice” – in Budapest. When he returned to the UK and worked as an assistant conductor at Glyndebourne, he decided to audition for a place on the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, run by the Royal Opera House (ROH), Covent Garden.

“I felt very strongly that there were gaps in my knowledge as far as opera was concerned [and] a lot of people say that the best way to train as a conductor is to start in an opera house.”

The audition to join the programme and become a full-time, salaried member of the company for up to two years learning every aspect of opera, was gruelling.

“We had huge chunks of opera to learn,” he says. “We had to be able to sing, play the piano, conduct and sight read. It was awful.”

The two years that followed were intense but immensely rewarding, he says. “At Covent Garden, the philosophy is to plunge you in at the deep end and to make sure that you know how to do everything.” He assisted the music director, Antonio Pappano, played the piano during rehearsals, coached singers and had intensive language coaching to bring his Italian, German and French up to scratch. He also conducted fully-staged operas in the ROH’s Linbury studio, and was asked to conduct several performances on the main stage of the opera house. “It was incredibly scary, because I was not given any rehearsal with the orchestra, but amazingly exciting.” Macdonald clearly impressed because Pappano asked him to stay on to assist him on Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Almost 18 months later and now freelance, Macdonald has a diary that is filling up. He is scheduled to conduct for the Lyric Opera, Chicago and the English National Opera. “It’s put me on the right path,” he says. “It’s taught me everything I know when it comes to the opera side of things.”

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