Arts Council chief: Opera should focus on playing in pubs, car-parks and social media
NewsThe CEO of Arts Council England, Darren Henley, today offers a defence, of sorts, of the org’s all-out attack on opera funding.
Here are the relevant equivocations:
I know the ENO decision seems stark. I know nothing can take away the pain of the artists, performers, technical teams and audiences who love the company and its home at the Coliseum. But if we consider the future of opera and classical music more generally, it is clear some things must change. There will always be a place for the grand opera currently staged by the ENO, Royal Opera House, Opera North, Glyndebourne and other “country house” opera companies: the swelling overtures, glorious sets, rousing choruses and breathtaking arias create an overwhelming, eternal sense of awe. But the Arts Council also needs to be focused on the future of opera. A new generation of audiences is embracing opera and music theatre presented in new ways: opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet. New ideas may seem heretic to traditionalists, but fresh thinking helps the art form reimagine itself and remain exciting and meaningful to future generations of audiences and artists.
Amid the thunderclaps last week you would be forgiven for missing that, as well as reducing our investment in some grand opera, the Arts Council has increased its support for the grassroots of opera and boosted funding for classical music more generally. For example, we’ve given more money to English Touring Opera and Birmingham Opera Company. We continue to support National Opera Studio and British Youth Opera, and we’ve started to fund some new and exciting organisations for the first time. This includes Brixton-based Pegasus Opera Company, which produces high-quality performances that provide opportunities for artists from African and Asian heritage, and promotes opera among underserved and culturally diverse communities. OperaUpClose, another new joiner, is based in Southampton and offers a groundbreaking programme of work for children, young people and new audiences. More prosaically, we remain committed to funding opera. It will still receive £30m a year from the Arts Council; that’s 40% of our overall music investment. Any further funding for ENO is on top of this.
We believe we’ve put a good proposal on the table for ENO if it wishes to retain public funding…
Since the article is more than two paragraphs long, it is unlikely that Henley wrote it all by himself. And if he prefers opera in open spaces, why slash the funding for Glyndebourne touring? Ay why does he extol the possibilities for opera when his music director has downgraded it to a ‘no-growth area’.
The argument makes less sense with each sucessive iteration.
Car parks and pubs, that will give ENO huge potential for touring. J D Wetherspoon could offer a whole new circuit. It would all be a huge joke if it wasn’t actually meant to be a serious argument from ACE. As they hold the purse strings I guess they are likely to win through but pity the poor orchestra, chorus and everyone else currently employed by ENO. The ENO Board are still acting as though this is all new to them but if they had spent more time “working at the coal face” over the past few years instead of poncing around on first nights, things might have been rather different.
That’s a good idea! I genuinely don’t see what the problem is with this. ENO partnering with a major pub chain is proper community engagement. Lots to work out but potential a great project. What’s the problem here? That it’s beneath the musicians? People who go to Wetherspoons don’t like opera?
Get ready for social media people making ‘hilarious’ sniffy comments about car parks, all while completely missing the point.
It’s obvious ACE weren’t saying all opera has to be in car parks, or this should replace theatres. This is clearly a sound bite-y/headline grabbing example (and it’s worked!). It’s hardly a controversial idea anyway. Classical concerts have been happening there for years (see Peckham and then adopted by the Proms) and people have raving about how good an idea that has been.
Anyone with half an eye on theatre knows ‘immersive’ shows/alternative venues have been big news…for about 15+ years now! Fringe companies have lead the way with ideas that make their way into the main stream.
ACE were probably directly referring to recent successes of larger companies in alternative venues. Didn’t Opera North do something in a Leeds social club car park? Oh and the drive-thru opera by ENO. Imagine that, the ACE might, just might have been saying this was a really good idea and ENO should do much more of that. Out of London!
Opera is highly dependent on opera houses. They need orchestra pits; stage machinery; stage lighting; large workshops for rehearsals, set and costume construction; dressing rooms; a choral room; and large storage facilities for sets. The CEO of ACE is actually calling for classical music to present chamber music theater, a genre that doesn’t exist, or only barely. To solve this problem, money would need to be put into the creation of new, smaller forms of classical music theater, though as a new genre it would take decades to develop into a substantial format. By chance, I’ve devoted my life to this problem. Here is a theory of chamber music theater that I have written:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/theory.htm
That’s a rather stuffy and traditional view. Get with the zeitgeist and accept change.
You’ve missed one rather important sentence in the article “But if we consider the future of opera and classical music more generally, it is clear some things must change.” If I were running a symphony orchestra, I’d be rather worried by this particular turn of phrase.
I was struck by this bit: There will always be a place for the grand opera currently staged by the ENO, Royal Opera House, Opera North, Glyndebourne and other “country house” opera companies: the swelling overtures, glorious sets, rousing choruses and breathtaking arias create an overwhelming, eternal sense of awe.
To follow his ‘logic’, if ‘swelling overtures, glorious sets, rousing choruses and breathtaking arias’ are ‘grand opera’, are car park operas therefore not allowed to have overtures, sets, choruses or arias?
There will be (as there has always been) a place for experimenting with budget productions in small-scale settings, but to suggest that this is an adequate replacement for the experience of watching and hearing opera in a proper opera house is absurd.
How many more cut down versions do we need to justify putting on opera at all? An insult to the composer to rewrite or reorchestrate eg Wagner’s Ring for a small orchestral group and an organ!!
The Ring arranged for solo mouth organ … think of the cost saved …
Contempt drips from the inverted commas around “country house.”
To paraphrase Wilde – Those who can do, those who can’t work for the Arts Council.
Can’t wait for The Wreckers at The Nobody Inn.
“A new generation of audiences is embracing opera and music theatre presented in new ways: opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet.”
The only reason those sorts of performances occurred is because of Covid-related restrictions. They are not the future, simply an unfortunate interval.
That’s not entirely true.
There have been plenty of people present operas in weird places like pubs and outdoors. It’s not exactly unusual or covid specific (carparks probably being the exception.)
The difficulties are this:
A pub is a tiny venue with capacity for a tiny audience. And with an audience who surely is going to expect to spend £10 for a show, not £60.
So, the moment you put more than one or two singers or instrumentalists in such a venue, then you’re either losing money, or you’re not paying your artists. This is why successful pub operas have tended to be put on by students, and not by major international artists.
Secondly, outdoor stagings and concerts are not cheap. They involve expensive sound equipment, the expectation of expensive big screens and multiple cameras etc. Many outdoor things have some other source of subsidy so that they are financially viable – a ticket sale alone often isn’t going to pay for it.
You’d better hope you have a full-time orchestra to draw on that doesn’t need paying, because paying casual rates for a La Boheme orchestra of any quality is going to run into the tens and tens of thousands of ££s.
Who DOES have the expertise, skill, artistic ability to pull off both performances in pubs and outdoors?
Companies like ENO. The skill is right there. They just aren’t really money making ventures or they would be doing them all the time instead of losing money at the Coliseum.
If ACE really wanted more pub operas, why not give additional funding to somewhere like ENO for this express purpose?
Go out, crest a pub series of small opera works, well cast, with a small ensemble: new commissions, chamber arrangements of standard repertoire.
It could be done. ENO has all the boring expensive resources at their fingertips – the things no-one realises actually cost money. For example Library services – if you’re premiering a newly composed work, you’d better be prepared to be spending plenty of £££ on someone who gets the orchestral parts sorted out. Companies like ENO have those resources. Why not invest.
If they actually want ENO to become some sort of touring chamber opera company, then just say so, close ENO, rebrand the company and be done with it. This sort of weird half-measure doesn’t make any sense.
Amazing how Germany can fully fund an orchestra in every town for their 50-odd opera houses and not resort to warehouses and pubs with cut down orchestrations or none but a ‘Joanna’!
There were plenty of thrse reorchestrations in car parks and factories before Covid. Remember some version of Traviata in an East End of London – Bow I think – warehouse with a piano and some kinds cut down sttrings. I just couldn’t face going!
Wozzeck and From The House of the Dead will go down a bundle at the Queen Vic
followed by the Ring cycle
I read that the average attention span for a college student reading a book is 45 seconds. This development needs to be encouraged. Of course, a three minute aria in a car park may even be too much. Can’t we make all operas as Youtube Shorts? Parsifal in 30 seconds and Rigoletto in 12?
“A new generation of audiences is embracing opera and music theatre presented in new ways: opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet. New ideas may seem heretic to traditionalists, but fresh thinking helps the art form reimagine itself and remain exciting and meaningful to future generations of audiences and artists.”
Time for the, er, ‘progressives’ to accept change and not try to fight against it like those pesky conservatives do. Don’t try and hang onto your traditions, let it all hang out!!!!!!!
Hi Ricky
Ludwig here
You know that opera house you wanted to build?
Waste of my mad money tbh.
So no.
But I have got you a night at the station car park in Munich, and a guest spot in the Rose and Crown.
Sounds good to me.
Cheers, Ludders.
So much whining over a wise ACE decision. Harry Brunjes and the pathetic Board have failed this company for 8 years now. They are going because they do average to poor work overall – now the very definition of safe boring English opera. Murphy is a walking disaster, full of NDAs and payouts. The company has become toxic and more poisonous under both men. The money will be better spent anywhere else. When you support such mediocrity masking as talent – the lame Martyn Brabbins as MD for example – you get what you deserve. Congrats Dr. Brunjes and his little toxic tyrant, Murphy. You both get what you deserve.
Acoustically, I can’t think of anywhere worse than car parks with low ceilings.
I would suggest shopping malls. They have space (and therefore resonance), and people with time on their hands. Some of them have an open, central area which would be ideal, probably used for festive music at Christmas.
A few years ago, I heard a small brass ensemble at Bluewater. Interestingly, it was clear from more than a hundred yards away that this was live music, and people seemed intrigued. It’s likely that some of them have never heard acoustic instruments live before.
‘had never’