What is the first name of the person who enabled so many other talents to thrive?
In 1982, at Elder's instigation, Harewood appointed David Pountney director of productions. In 1985 Harewood retired, becoming chairman of ENO's board the following year.  Peter Jonas succeeded Harewood as managing director. The 1980s leadership team of Elder, Pountney and Jonas became known as the "Powerhouse", initiated a new era of "director's opera". The three of them favoured productions described, contrastingly, by Elder as "groundbreaking, risky, probing and theatrically effective", and by the director Nicholas Hytner as "Euro-bollocks that never has to be comprehensible to anybody but the people sitting out there conceiving." Directors who did not, in Harewood's phrase, "want to splash paint in the face of the public" were sidelined. A 1980s audience survey showed that the two things that ENO audiences most disliked were poor diction and the extremes of "director's opera".
In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Barry Millington has described the 'Powerhouse' style as "arresting images of dislocated reality, an inexhaustible repertory of stage contrivances, a determination to explore the social and psychological issues latent in the works, and above all an abundant sense of theatricality." As examples, Millington mentioned Rusalka (1983), with its Edwardian nursery setting and Freudian undertones, and Hansel and Gretel (1987), its dream pantomime peopled by fantasy figures from the children's imagination  ... Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1987) and Wozzeck (1990) exemplified an approach to production in which grotesque caricature jostles with forceful emotional engagement.
Poor average box-office sales led to a financial crisis, exacerbated by backstage industrial relations problems. After 1983, the company ceased touring to other British venues. Assessing the achievements of the 'Powerhouse' years, Tom Sutcliffe wrote in The Musical Times:
ENO is not second best to Covent Garden. It is different, more theatrical, less vocal. ... The ENO now follows a policy like Covent Garden's in the early years after the war, when Peter Brook was scandalising the bourgeoisie with his opera stagings. The last two seasons at the ENO have been difficult, or at any rate sentiment has turned against the outgoing regime over the last nine months. Audience figures are well down. ... The presiding genius of the Elder years has, of course, been David Pountney. Not because his productions were all marvellous. Perhaps only a few were. But because, like Elder, he enabled so many other talents to thrive.
David