Brian Large obituary

Director of opera and music on television behind the Three Tenors concert at the 1990 football World Cup

In 1965, Brian Large, who has died aged 89, joined BBC2 as a music and opera director. The network having launched the previous year, everything was new, with colour images replacing black and white from 1967. Its controller, David Attenborough, recalled: “We were all young … and there wasn’t a question of getting anybody who was experienced in opera production because there weren’t any.”

Brian’s first live broadcast for the BBC – “I was scared stiff” – was of Igor Stravinsky conducting his score for The Firebird with the then New Philharmonia Orchestra, in September 1965. It proved to be the first of more than 800 such relays and films.