So for the past four months, while travelling the world singing Bach, Schubert, Britten, Kurt Weill and Mozart, I have had a disorientating and intermittent immersion in more than 100 hours of the Soprano family, their joys (not so many) and woes: Tony, the boss’s murderous mother, Livia (surely named for the Emperor Augustus’s poisoner of a wife); Tony’s sessions with his psychotherapist, Dr Jennifer Melfi; his troubles with the New York family across the bridge from New Jersey; the killings he ­commissions; the punches he throws; the school and college trajectories of his children, Anthony Junior (dropout) and Meadow (high-achieving Columbia undergrad).

The great Swiss tenor, Hugues Cuénod, who sang Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet in New York in the 1920s, Monteverdi madrigals with Nadia Boulanger in the 1930s, created the auctioneer in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, made his Met debut in his ninth decade, and has just turned 106, told me that the paintings I saw, the books I read and, by implication, the films I watched should all feed my imagination as a singer.

All these forms of ­relaxation are also meritorious ­labour, which seemed a nice way to make a living. The Sopranos make an obvious contribution to my singing of Weill’s gangster ballad, Mack the Knife, I suppose. But the theme that has resonated most through my work in the past months has been that of children, parenthood and sacrifice in the context of concert performances of Mozart’s first great ­opera, Idomeneo.

The plot of Idomeneo is simple: Idomeneo saves himself from a storm by promising the life of the first living creature he sees in sacrifice to Neptune. That creature is his own son, Idamante, who is only saved by the love and self-sacrifice of the Trojan, and hence enemy princess, the captive Ilia. Idomeneo abdicates; Idamante and Ilia will rule in his stead. Only Electra, Idamante’s original intended, and Agamemnon’s daughter, is left raging and unreconciled with music of extraordinary ferocity.