There’s a certain pleasure in encountering a memoir that’s shaped not by self-mythologising but by sustained attention. At Large – Behind the Camera with Brian Large is one such book: spacious, humane and insightful. Written with Jane Scovell and prefaced by affectionate tributes from Renée Fleming and Mary Lou Falcone, it reads less like a victory lap than an extended meditation on the strange alchemy of transmuting ephemeral performance into something more enduring.

Large begins in the ruins of wartime London, where music – first encountered as the “comforting chime” of Big Ben – offers structure and solace. His childhood recollections, sharpened by the Blitz’s terrors and by a mother’s ingenious musical pedagogy (teaching him notation through animals drawn on endpapers), give the opening pages the flavour of a Dickensian Bildungsroman. The early chapters establish the qualities that would later define Large’s work – resilience, modesty and a sense that music is as much about survival as it is about art.

The book’s middle ‘acts’ carry us through the long apprenticeship: the move from Lambeth to postwar Croydon; the revelatory first encounters with opera at the Davis Theatre; his studies at the Royal Academy of Music; and, finally, the decisive...