ENO suffers touring setback
mainStatement from English National Opera:
Earlier this year the Opera House at the Winter Gardens, Blackpool and Blackpool Council invited us to perform The Mikado in Spring 2017.
They have now asked us to postpone our planned schedule of performances next year with a view that these will take place in 2018.
Given that this is an important collaboration for us we have agreed to postpone our planned performances.
What this means is that ENO has to scramble extra work for its orchestra in Spring 2017, at very short notice.
Scottish Opera/D’Oyly Carte have only just toured an excellent production of The Mikado, mostly in the north of England, so this should have been no surprise! How unimaginative of ENO to want to tour this old war-horse, however innovative it once was. Hopefully, given time, Martin Brabbins may begin to have an impact on this once great company. ENO rarely revives its ‘back catalogue’ – or rather it keeps on reviving the same productions – meaning that it must have a very low opinion of all the others! It needs to look at the innovative, imaginative, touring of companies such as WNO, ETO, ON and GLYNDEBOURNE, all receiving less subsidy and producing uniformly great opera!
I don’t suppose there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of a revival of Rimsky Korsakov’s ‘Christmas Eve’? [I fear it went to landfill many moons ago…:-(]
Now that would be a real Christmas treat – but as you say, landfill long ago I expect! And of course, ENO give hardly any performances in December and January! I have recently received a flyer from Deutche Oper am Rhein, one of Germany’s regional companies, which is performing nearly 80 times in Dec/Jan: presumably because there is a demand for opera this time of the year: a TREAT!!!
This was a flagship development for ENO and their first visit out of London for decades. So what could possibly have gone wrong with this much trumpeted week in Blackpool? If it had been Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, maybe one could understand it being a had sell but surely not The Mikado? Is this yet another example of ENO’s amateur management style. I should KoKo
Surely John Groves’ reply above clarifies the question for you. How many years in a row do you want to see The Mikado? I love it, and have seen it often, but I am not sure that if I were a general audience member I would want to spend my entertainment budget that way — I would probably hope that this year brought Pirates.
On the contrary, the report in today’s Daily Telegraph makes it clear that ENO failed to contract the dates with the venue who have now allocated them elsewhere.
Amateur management – still!!!!
So ENO’s absurd Summer tour to Blackpool with The Mikado is predictably cancelled, leaving a gaping hole in its season, with salaries and cancellation fees to pay with no box office income. The Coliseum will be showing a Meat Loaf musical (!), so ENO is in real trouble now. Summer 2016 Tristan & Isolde, Butterfly and Jenufa. 2017 zilch (just 5 performances in Hackney, of an opera from Philadelphia, without chorus). So tragic to watch a great company now so clueless, lacking any excitement to perform. So far this season I have learned more music in my amateur choir than the sad, undervalued ENO Chorus. Naturally Arts Council implant Cressida Pollock knows what she is doing? The most economic model for an opera company, apparently in her view, is to rent out the building and not perform, the New Right’s arts agenda.
You are so right, Bob! and it’s so sad.
What happened to the plan to perform a ‘staged’ version of The Dream of Gerontius at RFH in 2017? Is it still happening? It does not appear on the RFH website!!