The new Lebrecht Interviews: Itzhak, Mirga and the Janacek cyclist

Over the holidays this week, BBC Radio 3 is running three new Lebrecht Interviews with leading figures in the music world. Two are notoriously elusive.

This is, I am told, the first programme-length interview Itzhak Perlman has ever given.

Likewise Mirga Grazinte-Tyla, a sought-after conductor who only conducts when she pleases.

We open on the 26th with David Pountney, the opera director who gave the first full cycle of Janacek operas anywhere on earth (except, perhaps, Brno). Pountney has transformed opera in every corner of the British Isles. He has also run the Bregenz Festival, where he exhumed Weinberg’s opera The Passenger and put it on the world circuit.

Listen to the Pountney interview here.

The others will follow on.