Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the opera director David McVicar. He is hailed as the opera director of his generation and is in such great demand that he's booked up for the next five years. Opera appealed to him when he was still a boy, offering him a means of escape from his lonely and unhappy childhood in Glasgow. He immersed himself in it so much that now, he says, it's pretty well impossible for him to come to an opera fresh, somewhere it will already be in his memory. He says: "I didn't choose to work in opera - opera chose me. But I think opera made the right choice."

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Von Ewiger Liebe by Johannes Brahms