Lead role

Banks and firms of lawyers and accountants tend to be the sort of people who can afford to support the arts with major sums of money, but, Try as they may, there is no way that companies like the Welsh National Opera can balance the books by relying on Arts Council grants and ticket sales alone. But look down the list of sponsors, and you will also see a goodly number of charitable foundations offering support, among them the Peter Moores Foundation.

The foundation was established in 1964 by Sir Peter Moores, son of Sir John Moores, founder of the Littlewoods chain store, mail order and football pools empire. You have only to meet Sir Peter for a few seconds to discover that, 40 years on, his enthusiasm for his foundation and its philanthropic work remains undimmed it positively radiates across his desk towards you.

His first interest, he told me, was in opera.

"It started very early. My dad was very keen on opera, and spent his spare money on 78s. He had an enormous, and not very tidy, cupboard full of them. It was mostly operatic music in nice, short bits don't you think Puccini must have known about the short length of 78rpm record sides?

"So when I was taken to see Faust, aged 12, I already knew an enormous amount of the opera from dad's records. It was absolutely painless, and I liked it. This was during the Second World War, and in Liverpool we got Sadler's Wells at the Royal Court and Carl Rosa at the Empire."

While still up at Christ Church, Oxford, Sir Peter landed a holiday job at Glyndebourne.

"I had been at school with George Christie?, so while at the Edinburgh Festival I went to the best hotel, and asked for his room number in those days they would give you the number.

"I went up and knocked on his bedroom door, and a voice said Sir Peter produces a loud, booming voice COME IN'. The room was in complete darkness, and I said here Sir Peter changes to a very small, squeaky voice: I'm looking for George Christie.' The voice in the darkness turned out to belong to Sir John Christie the legendary founder of Glyndebourne. He's out,' boomed Sir John, but he got out of bed and took me to lunch. So I got jobs at Glyndebourne in 1952 and 1953."

From Glyndebourne, Peter Moores went on to become an unpaid production assistant at the Vienna State Opera for three years. Did he by now nurture a desire to actually appear on stage as a professional opera singer?

"I don't think so, but I did have singing lessons in Vienna. I think I thought that I needed to know how singers worked, but having been in the auxiliary chapel choir at school, I knew that I made a very loud, unpleasant noise. Nobody ever said: You should have your voice trained'."

But what of Littlewoods? Was there any pressure to join the family business?

"At the end of three years in Vienna, I got to the point where I would have had to go and work in opera, and that would probably have meant Wuppertal, or somewhere like that. At that point, probably very cleverly selected by my father, he wrote and suggested that I should come back to Littlewoods, and if I didn't want to do that, perhaps he might buy my shares. And I thought, if he's offering that, the shares must be worth a lot, I'd better go and look at this."

But no golden spoon job was offered when he got there.

"I started work on the baler, baling the rubbish. I went through the whole of the chain store business, and was then put in charge of a very small store, followed by a larger store. Eventually I went into the buying office. It was all enormously good: one thing I learnt, which still stays with me, is what we called clean as you go'. Don't make a mess, then tidy it up. In a shop, you can't make a mess while it's open. If you're re-laying the counter, it's got to look relatively tidy all the time. So now, when I've finished cooking, the kitchen is tidy."

At this point, Sir Peter bounds forth from behind his desk.

"I just saw something happen, " he explains. A large photograph, pinned to the office wall, has fallen on to the floor. "That's Bailey, and that is his baby."

Bailey is opera singer Simon Bailey and Sir Peter reprises his career so far, concluding: "He's done very well". Simon Bailey is one of the many singers another is Oxfordshire's Mary Plazas who have been supported at crucial, early stages in their careers by scholarships given by the Peter Moores Foundation.

As Sir Peter describes it: "They get fencing lessons, enunciation lessons, and acting lessons and very impolite notes from me saying you're singing flat,' and so forth. You don't give them sweets for not doing their homework."

"And," Sir Peter tells me, "You might not only get a note about singing flat, you might also get a note about being too fat. There was one girl, beautiful voice, but a director sitting next to me asked: What can I cast her as?' This was because she'd put on four stone.

"I said to her: We've paid you to lose weight.' I'm certainly very frank. I tend to be very hands-on. It's probably a bad habit, but in Littlewoods you always get taught that you've got to be able to do it yourself, so you can show other people how to do it."

The foundation has so far supported six productions at Garsington Opera, including Rimsky-Korsakov's Mayskaya Noch' this year (review on Page 6). The association began in 1999 with Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri Rossini comes very high in Sir Peter's list of favourite composers.

"L'italiana is a popular piece. So after that I wrote to them and said: 'Why don't you do something a little more interesting?' Then I lured them into doing four more Rossini operas, including La gazza ladra, which then became The Thieving Magpie." The Chandos CD label took over the Garsington production and recorded it in an English translation for their opera in English series (CHAN 3097(2)).

Opera in English is another of Sir Peter's major interests and the foundation is supporting the burgeoning Chandos series. Another combined stage and recording project is to be suggested to Garsington shortly, Sir Peter revealed.

In 1993, the foundation took over the derelict, Grade-I listed Compton Verney House near Stratford-upon-Avon, and restored it. A carefully designed modern extension was added to create an art gallery of international stature. The cost was £64m, a sum that has just increased by the price of two Canaletto paintings, which went on display there earlier this week. What, I wondered, persuaded Sir Peter to undertake this colossal enterprise?

"I think that a very large proportion of the English public taking a day off don't actually know where they're going until they set off. Maybe they'll go to a National Trust house, where they'll get a nice lunch. They know it's going to cost under £10, and they'll be back in time to collect the children from school. That's the way they spend private time together.

"So I thought why not build a museum which contains art that won't bite them? Then make it like a National Trust house, with nice grounds, and a nice caf. The trouble with people who run music and art is that they allow it to become keep out this is sacred art'. For instance, I won't have notices that say XVIIIth century. My dad couldn't do roman numerals, so why don't you say in the 1700s?"

Garsington Opera box office for any available tickets for Mayskaya Noch': 01865 361636. For further information about Compton Verney call 01926 645500.