As a budding opera buff I was lucky enough to live in Islington, London, in the 1960s, so Sadler's Wells was just round the corner. I heard 21 operas conducted by Sir Colin Davis, nearly all at the Wells.
But I was also a member of Chelsea Opera Group and so sang in his concert performances of Benvenuto Cellini and the Trojans, including the first ever complete rendering of it at the Proms in 1968. We were rehearsing Cellini and the women were singing a passage in the role of Roman prostitutes. Maestro kept asking them to try harder to sing like tarts, but they still sounded just too ladylike for his taste. So he insulted them (quite rude, really) and then got them to repeat the passage. They spat the lines back at him, and he said sweetly: "Thank you - that's just what I wanted."