When you’re married to the boss of the festival, pulling out of it for a West End revival is hard to do, the soprano admits to Julia Llewellyn Smith
The soprano Danielle de Niese — born in Australia, bred in Los Angeles — is telling me about her first visit to Glyndebourne for an audition in 2004, when she was 25. Having missed her original flight from Paris to London, she arrived at the stage door with only minutes to spare.
“All I knew was Glyndebourne was a super-prestigious opera festival, so [my agency] were like, ‘You want to go there to work.’ But I didn’t know it was in the countryside, I didn’t know anything about its history. When I finally arrived it was raining. It looked like that Ang Lee movie Sense and Sensibility,” she says in her strong Californian accent. “They said, ‘Do you want to go the long or the short way?’ I said the short way and they were like, ‘OK!’”