Just a Minute With: Opera chief executive Wasfi Kani

By Barbara Lewis

LONDON (Reuters) - Wasfi Kani has earned a reputation as the Robin Hood of the opera world, robbing from the rich to give to the poor by using her elite country house productions to help finance performances in prisons.

In June and July, the chattering classes will attend her festivals at the stately homes of Grange Park and Nevill Holt in southern and central England.

The events are considered rivals to Britain's most famous summer opera season at Glyndebourne, southern England.

But Kani has never relinquished Pimlico Opera, which she founded in 1987, to stage operas in unusual locations, most notably prisons.

Productions bringing together prisoners and professional opera singers have included "Les Miserables" at Wandsworth prison, London, and "The Marriage of Figaro" at Wormwood Scrubs, also London, near Kani's old grammar school, where she excelled at math and music before reading music at Oxford University.

After Oxford, she spent 10 years working in London's City financial district, but took conducting lessons in her spare time and by 1993, had made music her full-time career.

Her services to the arts and the community have earned her an Order of the British Empire. In May this year, she was also recogniZed by the Asian Women of Achievement Awards, which applaud the contribution of Asian women in Britain to commercial, professional, artistic and humanitarian sectors.

She spoke to Reuters between opera performances.

Q: Why opera?

A: By combining theater and music, opera is for me the most thrilling art form. It assaults the eyes, the ears and the heart.

Q: How difficult was it to make it to the top of an art form that historically has been dominated by white, middle-class men?

A: I often say that I'm an alpha male in a female body. If you want to do something, enough, nothing will get in your way. Anyway, opera has lots of women playing leading roles.

Q: Is it correct you see yourself as a Robin Hood figure -- for example using expensive tickets to Grange Park to help finance the prison performances?

A: It is true that to some extent our festival, which is patronized by some of the UK's most affluent, subsidizes our work in prison.

What has been amazing is that these people, who would otherwise have had no contact with prison, embrace the idea of the need for prison reform and have been very generous towards our prison projects.