You can’t think what else anyone could have done with it all, it’s too far gone But for a summer season of opera, it’s perfect. In just one year she has established an annual opera season in the most stylish and unusual venue. She negotiated the restoration and use of this falling-down classical house of 1800, and of a series of other buildings where the roofs haven’t actually fallen in but look as if they would if they weren’t held up by netting. But Grange Park Opera is her latest thing, and it’s typical of her energy and vision.

She’s off to Ireland soon, I believe, to set up some performances in Dublin and Cork prisons. And it’s enormously significant for them to discover that they can do something disciplined and sensible, and enjoy it.The prison connection for Wasfi is ongoing. These are people who’ve never felt good in their lives, who’ve never done anything useful. For the performers, on the other hand, there is enormous satisfaction that they can turn their humble experiences into something creative. well, I’ve now seen it done several times under Wasfi’s direction in various prisons, and it works every time You come out positively tearful. It’s not just a clever and funny song, the lyrics go into what gives rise to violent behaviour, and to hear them delivered by a man with a history of violence …

But in Sweeney Todd, and even more so in West Side Story, the prisoners found a world they could really relate to.For me, hearing the song “Officer Krupkey” performed by an inmate at Wandsworth was one of the greatest moments in prison history, as well as music history. Arts education – writing, painting and so on – is an extremely good way of doing these things, but there’s nothing quite as galvanising as theatre I don’t think Mozart opera would have been much good. But it’s not a question of feather-bedding the prisoners or of showing them a good time. It’s desperately important with young men who commit serious crime that they should learn a bit of self-esteem, that they should learn self-discipline, that they should learn how to relate to other people in an honest and open way, in order to be able to come out and not commit more crime.

There’s simply professionalism, and that’s the key.I know there are people within the prison service and among the public who disapprove of this sort of activity in prisons. To have this slim, rather slight person, and what’s more a young woman, waving a baton and giving out crisp, direct orders which they were jolly well going to obey, was clearly one of the galvanising experiences of their lives There’s no patronage, no condescension in her attitude. The prisoners couldn’t believe what was happening to them, you could see that. I walked in to a rehearsal one day, quietly from behind, and found that she was controlling the cast in the most extraordinary way. I’d heard about her as a conductor of opera before that time, because my wife is a great opera-lover, but I hadn’t known about her as a prison person.
When I next saw her, at Wandsworth Prison doing West Side Story a few years later, she was still technically only conducting, but in effect she was organising the whole thing. Most of them had been up to a great deal of violence, and you felt they themselves would have handled a razor pretty well She was the musical director of this show. She was conducting the musical Sweeney Todd, with the majority of the cast made up of prisoners doing life sentences It was extraordinary and it was marvellous.

She had professional singers in the main parts, prisoners playing smaller solo parts and the chorus. This year she launched Grange Park Opera in the dilapidated orangery of Lord Ashburton’s Hampshire estate

STEPHEN TUMIM: I first met Wasfi, as I met most of my friends, in Wormwood Scrubs in about 1990. Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, for the last two years, he is President of the Royal Literary Fund and is also writing a book about William Blake He lives with his wife in London. The conductor Wasfi Kani, 42, was born in London of Indian parents. She read music at Oxford, then worked in the City for 10 years. In 1988 she founded Pimlico Opera, a company whose work has included music-theatre in prisons, as well as professional opera at Garsington.