Of course developing the characters doesn't just take care of itself. It's about looking within each character for ideas which are lying around and waiting to be taken up They're like orphans: they need finding and cherishing. When I start on a staging I like to look for what I call an 'else- when'. There's no evidence, however, of the table / frame as part of Claudia Mayer's set for Broomhill, "No," says Miller, "it wouldn't have worked. I knew we'd have to start again in that department."The result is a staging telling the story of Rodelinda - Queen of Lombardy and the loyal and much put-upon wife of the usurped and banished King Bertarido - in terms at once elliptical and intelligible.

Miller has no qualms about revising the libretto's setting in semi-ancient Lombardy "Plots like this one deal in virtual historical realities It's a notional setting. Seeing all this at the rehearsal, I assumed that it would have disappeared for the performance. In fact it turned out to be part of it.Miller now tells me that the idea related to the psychological concept of "frames" as explored by the American sociologist Erving Goffmann, ie the phenomenon that independent strands of action and behaviour can operate happily in non-associative parallel as long as the "frame" demarcating them is clearly presented. Among them was Kraemer's young son Dominic, who got through a fair number of comics between appearances in the silent role of Rodelinda's son Flavio.

Offsetting the orchestra's presence on the left of the platform was a table at the back and on the right, at which those cast members not currently singing and emoting at heavenly Handelian length were to be seen sitting, reading, inaudibly chatting, and drinking coffee. "But no crazier than the kind of opera-related crises that Handel had to cope with all the time."Miller's Blackheath semi-staging was straight enough apart from one device whose effectiveness, in true Miller style, was at once bizarre and benign. Within a few frenetic days he had helped to engineer an agreement with Virgin Classics to record Rodelinda instead. "Looking back, I suppose it was all fairly unbelievable," he says genially. Channel 4 then suddenly pulled out of the project, and just before the concert performance, Hyperion did the same.Conductor and harpsichordist Nicholas Kraemer, who by this stage was already rehearsing Handel's gorgeous score with the cast and the Raglan Baroque Players, refused to be fazed by this vintage example of Nineties- style artistic planning. That this actually happened at all was the culmination of an intricate operatic plot in its own right. Rodelinda was devised by Miller and impresario Ron Gonsalves in conjunction with Channel 4 television and Hyperion Records.

"There's a lot too much of top-down in opera stagings at the moment. What I prefer to do is to start with the libretto and the score and see what happens."He has had several months to think about this, because the cast first sang Rodelinda in a one-off, semi-staged concert performance at Blackheath Concert Halls in mid-February. "In psychology there's a lot of work being done about the difference between a top-down approach and one that's bottom-up," he says. The difference between him and most of his peers is that he likes these details to emerge spontaneously from clues within the work itself, and from the singers' individual responses as much as his own. "But Herr Doktor, if you do not have your Begriff, then you will have problematics with your praxis."For all that, Miller is very serious in his own way at the afternoon's rehearsal, his concern for movement, gesture, and the exact timing of lighting changes is as meticulous as it's intense.