Chinese classic going strong as opera

He says San Francisco Opera prefers his company to stage a European tour even though it is outside China.

"They know and we also know it would require an incredible fund-raising effort, which would be easier inside China than organized from San Francisco. Both the Chinese Central Opera and the Hangzhou Philharmonic would be very interested in cooperating with us and we hope we might get some government support."

Armstrong was brought up in a musical family in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. His mother was a good amateur pianist and his father played an accordion and had a traditional dance band.
He studied languages at university and went on to be a translator for the Federal Translation Bureau in Ottawa.

"On the third day of the job as a translator I knew it wasn't going to work - just translating what people said with no viewpoint."

In the late 1970s he managed to get the job of assistant manager at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, where he eventually became managing director working alongside musical director Andrew Davis, now best known for his association with the Proms in London.

In the early 1990s, he became managing director of the London operations for the leading US arts management company ICM Artists, where he worked with Isaac Stern, who had made the film Mao to Mozart about classical music returning to China after the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

In 1999, he moved to IMG Artists, where he headed up the key classical music projects at the Beijing Olympics.

He has had a close working relationship with the famous Chinese conductor Yu Long since the late 1990s and was an adviser and consultant to the Beijing Music Festival.

It was when IMG wanted to set up a Beijing office that he decided to go it alone and set up his own agency.

"I had a serious discussion with the head of IMG and decided I wouldn't work for him and that I would work for myself. They wanted me to operate here how the New York office thought and that just wasn't right for China," he says.

Moving to China was a bold move for someone who was already in his late 50s but it has proved successful.