22,000 sign Save ENO petition
NewsThe latest tally on Bryn Terfel’s petition to save English National Opera has topped 22,000.
That’s enough to secure a meeting for ENO’s MD Stuart Murphy with the Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan.
It may ultimately achieve a modest mitigation of the Arts Council verdict but the company is still left drifting without direction.
The bitter irony of this is that if ENO is yet again thrown another lifeline the cost will likely come from cuts to other companies. WNO and Glyndebourne touring to name but 2. But I doubt that the cuts in the last round have met with the same co-ordinated campaign to reverse them as ENO can muster. Onerous to single him out but is Terfel as exercised by what is happening in Cardiff as he is in London?
Trouble is that ENO has lost its way. There was a wondrous time when, whether at S Wells or at the Coliseum, you could hear probably three different operas a week, all in sensible and repeatable productions designed to serve the music.
Following the wasteful refurbishment of its unsuitable theatre ENO predictably lost most of its regular audience. Instead of going out and dragging the audience back it timidly more and more gave up and withdrew from competition.
As a part-time organisation it no longer justifies its place in tthe London theatrical scene and should be replaced.
Find a smaller theatre (but one with an adequate orchestra pit and backstage facilities if tou can find it) and go back to the true Volksoper which it was designed to be.
Bring back Lilian B
Bryn’s Gŵyl y Faenol went tits up, after not a very long or terribly auspicious run.
I doubt whether Bryn, famous, or Welsh or both will have any effect or really credibility on government funding now the chips are down for the UK, and the IMF will be waiting “in the wings” within a couple of years to rescue another UK basket case economy.
35,000 now…