Cressida Pollock, the former McKinsey management consultant who steered English National Opera through some of its most turbulent times, is to leave her job next summer.

Pollock said she was “greatly saddened to leave this incredible institution”, but did not give a reason for leaving.



She had been the company’s interim chief executive and was given the job full time in 2015, a month after the resignation of artistic director John Berry.

Berry’s resignation came as the company lurched from one crisis to the next, struggling to cope with a £5m a year cut in Arts Council England funding. Before Berry quit, ENO had also lost its chairman, its executive director and its place in the ACE national portfolio.

Pollock’s mission was, in effect, to save ENO – to find a sustainable business plan. That meant cutting the number of productions the company staged at its vast, difficult-to-fill home, the 2,350-seat Coliseum.

That strategy prompted the departure of music director Mark Wigglesworth and the threat of a strike by its chorus.

ENO is on a far more stable footing today. Pollock said: “When I arrived, the ENO was in crisis and the company’s survival was in real doubt. I am delighted that we have brought stability and secured ENO’s future. My successor will be able to focus on ensuring that the ENO continues to produce award-winning work at the heart of the UK opera scene.”

Harry Brunjes, the company’s chairman, said Pollock had “turned around our fortunes to deliver financial security, while keeping us on a solid creative footing.

“Cressida has led the ENO back into the Arts Council England’s national portfolio and brought together a leadership team who the board are confident can continue to help ENO thrive and develop. On behalf of the board it has been a pleasure to observe her courage and positivity in the face of ENO’s immense challenges. We will be sorry to lose her energy and determination to achieve success when she steps down next June.”

The leadership team recruited by Pollock includes the American stage director Daniel Kramer as artistic director and Martyn Brabbins as music director. Both are still too new to make any real assessment.

In an interview with the Guardian, Kramer praised Pollock “for leading with a torch, with a thousand guns aimed at her”.

The ENO had been Pollock’s first experience of running an organisation. Only 32 when she was made interim chief executive, she was young enough to have housemates – revealing them, in the Financial Times, to be the fashion journalist Henry Conway and Lottie Fenby, a milliner.

Before joining ENO Pollock, a Cambridge law and classics graduate who told one interviewer her favourite saying was “life is only linear in retrospect”, worked at McKinsey & Company and was one of the founding employees of Somerset Capital Management, an emerging markets investment fund.

ENO said it would begin the process of appointing a new chief executive later this month.