The English National Opera has seemed to be in a perpetual state of crisis over the past few years. So when Edward Gardner signed on to be the company’s new music director, the question most observers had was why he would have wanted the job. “Is this inexperienced young man – whose biggest job to date has been as music director of Glyndebourne’s touring arm, hardly the white-hot centre of searing controversy – up to the traumas of being a public figure as well as the musical heart of this well-loved but somewhat disaster-prone company?”