Exclusive: Reports of a beheading at English Touring Opera
NewsWe hear that the former BBC Wales orchestra manager Michael Garvey has been appointed interim chief executive of English Touring Opera, starting straight after Christmas.
This would appear to indicate the imminent departure of James Conway, the company’s general director for the past 17 years.
Conway has been in the eye of a storm of the past three months, ever since ETO replaced half of its orchestra with ‘more diverse’ musicians. Equivocations by an expensive PR firm have failed to douse the fire.
Good.
When reading ETO’s plans for Spring ‘22 I was struck by the lack of diversity among their opera directors.
James Conway was down to direct each of their offerings. How was that viable after what he had done to the orchestra?
Not a mainstream company by any means, and runs on freelancers on British rules, not US or EU rules. There is another prominent London small opera company whose director I happened to meet at ENO once in the bar. Told me himself they didn’t pay the singers as performing for them was a chance of a showcase to invite agents et al, and yet singers so desperate for perforing experience, queueing up to join them! Unbelievable!
What a hollow argument. I assume the director receives a salary. The entire UK system needs radical change. Time the MU got tough.
I’ve no idea who this supposedly ‘prominent London small opera company’ was, but ETO certainly pay their singers! They receive considerable funding from the Arts Council England, and when I worked with them artists were paid a salary along with a very acceptable touring allowance. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘mainstream’ but their work is highly regarded, and they have won some prestigious awards including an Olivier Award in the “Outstanding Achievement in Opera” category. The company aims ‘to bring high quality opera to areas of England that would not otherwise have ready access to such productions’, and this they unquestionably do. Many young singers, directors and conductors have been nurtured by the company, including Sarah Connolly, Mary Plazas, Nicholas Kraemer, Ivor Bolton, Richard Jones and Robert Carsen. I sincerely hope that once the mess concerning the decision not to rehire some freelance orchestral players (no one was fired as none of these players were on contract) has been sorted out, the company can move on and continue to do what it does well. Clearly some very poor decisions were made, and the resulting furore is of there own making, but that should not tarnish the quality of the work they have been doing up until now.
ETO is in no way associated with this other company you mention. ETO pays its performers properly. Singers sing for ETO because it is good, quality work and because the fees are decent. I should know. My husband has been singing for ETO for the last 20 years. ETO has paid our mortgage off.
And now we should all call on ETO to reinstate the players whom it cruelly hurled overboard in the midst of the pandemic.
I am not sure you understand how opera revivals work. The Boheme is a revival of a very good production from a few years ago, which Conway is clearly not directing. In fact, it is being directed by a self-proclaimed Anglo-Indian director. Also, it seems one of the other shows this season is directed by an upcoming Black-British woman. I can’t think of any other National Portfolio company giving such artists these jobs.
Good news.
The cultural marxism of ‘inclusion’ has become an ‘institutional ideology’ bigger than the individuals within those institutions, most of whom it seems, see it as intellectually bankrupt.
Managers everywhere it seems are too apprehensive about a mob outcry to voice their concerns, effectively choosing the path of least resistance and compromising the merit and future of the organisations they oversee.
The paradoxical divisiveness of ‘inclusion’ seen starkly at ETO will continue until individuals can amass safely enough to voice their concerns and take on institutional ideology.
Conway’s ETO time and his coterie are up . . . & not before time.
What is intriguing in this furore is that presumably changes in the orchestra would have been requested by the recently appointed Music Director. Yet he seems to have escaped pretty much unscathed, with the criticism directed at the General Manager.
It sounds as if they performed a too literal staging of Salome.
Can we not object to the unnecessarily violent image in the headline? This smacks of a personal attack rather than a professional piece of reportage. No serious newspaper would publish such phrasing.
Surely this just looks like ETO have brought in some external talent and experience to bolster their team, either because they are under attack by this website or because they feel that would be for the best.