Exclusive: ENO starts to slash its orchestra
NewsHours after a 5-minute standing ovation for the last performance of Peter Grimes, ENO informed its orchestra that ‘a consultation process has been started’ to cut the size and makeup of the orchestra.
The management email, leaked to slippeddisc.com, contains proposals to ‘reduce orchestra size from 69 to 50’ (there are currently 48 on the payroll), ‘reduce contract to a 26 week period and 60% of current annual hours… salary to be 60% of current levels.’
Formal collective consultation, it says, will begin next week.
In effect, those musicians who remain at ENO will have their pay slashed to below a London living wage.
Meanwhile, the email continues, ‘We appreciate that this is a difficult message to receive and should you need any support at this time please reach out to [redaccted], the People Team or Myself’.
The “People Team”?? Sounds slightly Orwellian…
How about sacking the “People Team” and saving the orchestra?
The primary task of The People Team is to reduce the number of people…
As a friend of mine used to refer to it, the Inhuman Resorces Dept.
Doubleplusgood comment. ‘The Unpeople Team’ sounds more appropriate.
To beg on your hands and knees for us not to can you, please reach out to the People People!
Indeed! Yet the People Team, whose only music they make is the sound of the ax hitting the block, keep their jobs.
could be worse-could be the brain police. gets coat.
The evolution of euphemisms for employee is really stupid: Personnel became human resources became talent services devolved to people team and the latest “associates.” Who are you fooling? You are still a proletariat working for the capitalist boss!
It is the latest fancy name for Human Resources, and you can understand why HR is the most hated department in EVERY organisation (I speak as an ex HR Manager) because as one group of managers once said to me “the problem with HR is that they make you do things you don’t want to, and stop you doing things you do want to”…………and in many cases they were right!
It’s what HR has rebranded to in these days of wokery
I thought at first it said “reach out to Cash…”
But the Management shall retain their jobs. Disgusting. ENO is a truly innovative company with its outstanding musicians.
They won’t have their pay slashed to below living wage. That is clickbait nonsense. If anything it is a pay rise to work 50% of the contract for 60% of the salary.
It is very sad and very worrying for all the people affected and their families, to lose this chunk of work and income.
But it is also 50% more work than if the whole company went under, which would very quickly happen if they paid people to do nothing for 6months if the year. So I’m not quite sure what you expect ENO to do.
It’s in no way a Payrise Getagrip, and I speak as the spouse of one of the orchestra members. What’s also not mentioned here is that – like the ROH – the ENO orchestra also took a paycut during Covid which was never restored to them, so they’re effectively now going to be paid half their original salary for six months of the year. This is therefore close to a reduction to a quarter of their income, which I imagine would hurt significantly for anybody.
In the past I’ve been the first to point out to my husband and our ENO friends that a pay cut is better than the company going under, but in this case I’m afraid we’re into the fantasy realms of paying experienced musicians as if they work as junior McDonalds employees. It’s WAY beyond acceptable.
The answer is as it always should have been. Management should be employing professional level fundraisers (rather than the cheap university graduates which ENO seems to target) and thereby significantly reducing their dependence on the increasingly destructive ACE. If you look at the size of the ROH team and their annual fundraising yield versus the equivalent at ENO you will see instantly where the problem lies. Paying peanuts to many inexperienced fundraisers in this instance is leading ENO to treat their precious orchestra as performing monkeys. A redistribution of expenditure to ensure proper salaries for only 3 or 4 professional level fundraisers would go an awfully long way to solving ENO’s problems. Do the management have the cojones to make a business case for that to the board though? Very doubtful….
That sound more like a reduction in contracted paid work by 60% rather than a 60% pay cut. The difference being, in theory, players could go work elsewhere to make up the difference.
‘Go work elsewhere to make up the difference’… where, for one of the several other companies currently busy laying off THEIR musicians perhaps!? At this rate nobody in their right mind will bother training for a career in music and we will become ‘a nation without music’. Impoverishment. We are in headlong cultural decline it seems to me.
Always the poor musicians. I bet The People Team will be just fine.
The beginning of the end!
Time for ENO’s award-winning orchestra to go on strike??
‘Reach out’ says it all. A horrible phrase indicating a thoughtless & careless attitude towards the humans in the orchestra. Cath, Denise and the manager should be supporting the musicians.
Cath is a Saint and going above and beyond to support the orchestra. The rest of them on the other hand…
It’s the beginning of the slimming down process before they move ‘oop north’ (Liverpool the favoured current location – yes, barmy with Opera North nearby in Leeds and performing (just) in Manchester.
A smaller company in a smaller venue (Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre the suggested venue -former home of Liverpool Grand Opera Company and visiting companies performing opera back in the day) has a smaller pit and needs a smaller accompanying orchestra.
Maybe the new ENO should do more Gilbert & Sullivan with the reduced orchestrations?
A sad day and usual crass management timing to those affected
Leeds is “nearby” Liverpool? You’re kidding, right?
No, not kidding, the distance between these 2 cities is 65 miles with Manchester inbetween.
In terms of the catchment area of attracting bums on seats 65 miles shared between 2 opera companies is highly relevant and will affect ticket sales.
Worth bearing in mind, Opera North (based in Leeds but touring as far down country as Nottingham) was originally created as a northern offshoot of ENO in London..
The most sensible solution of this fiasco to move ENO out of London would be to relocate them to the operatically underserved West of England to somewhere like Bristol which has some fine suitable theatres and opera hungry audiences (as WNO have found).
But then, ‘suits’ don’t have a clue or care about such obvious relocations, as long as they can remain in the smoke themselves.
You have no idea about the north. Don’t speak about things you don’t know about.
And that’s pretty much 2 hours by public transport (and not much quicker to drive).
Bristol, as you say, is already well-served by WNO.
Liverpool, of course, used to be welcome WNO on tour and GTO, but now all we now have is Ellen Kent for one night only. Shameful.
Unbelievable. Tragic. Criminal.
…and what of the Chorus; are they to be affected similarly, do you know?
(Unless they’re to sing a capella outside of these 26 weeks, of course…?)
The chorus will also be affected as neither they or the orchestra are relocating to the other (as yet unannounced, but already decided?) location. So it appears they will be getting a very slimmed down ENO, or ENOLite…
As the chorus are currently on a 9 month contract, and the proposal is for 6 months, one can only assume that large scale opera requiring both orchestra and chorus will only take place at the Coliseum, in what will be a very limited season.
It is possible the chorus will stay on their 9-month contract as they take a lot more rehearsing than an orchestra [staging a show, learning rep etc]. Certainly sounds like the plan is to do a part time season in london with proper opera forces & do a very light touch approach elsewhere, with an emphasis possibly on all things ‘Let’sCreate’- the arts council strategy- which is about moving away from professional to amateur/ arts and crafts type work [branded as education / community / social work esque] type work- essentially less expensive as it involves the community having a good sing song or whatever.
As will the Technical departments.
“..should you need any support at this time..”
Err yes, please support me paying my mortgage and buying children’s shoes
Bean counting pricks. Employed by the arts council emperor. To ensure we get the right amount of culture. Sack the useless management straight back to Oxbridge whence they came and dissolve the arts council. It should never be an arm of government but sadly this govt has it in for the arts and is happy for the arts council to be an extended arm of our extreme right wing fasicst anti culture anti equality government.
Stuart Murphy could’t understand what Human Resources meant so he changed the name to his accommodate his stupidity: a reflection of his entire relationship to opera.
Eventual goal: The English National Octet, all rotating freelancers (re-branded “The Brit8.”)
Downsizing opera was always going to be painful. It’s happening worldwide, as the period of opera’s artistic prime recedes year by year and fewer people are drawn to attend. From that p.o.v., the question is not whether the reduced salary is “below a living London wage,” but whether the players can make up for it during their newly free time.
Another question is whether better repertory choices and better performances (especially, better singing) might reverse audience declines. There’s not a sure answer to that, but we can’t know if it isn’t tried.
Great timing for the notification; wait until the end of a great performance!
All these comments indicate just how very interested the opera-loving public is in ENO’s activities… not
That’s more than a bit unfair. Bashing or making fun of the current management does not denigrate the singers and musicians who ARE the company nor the ENO’s artistic past achievements.
It’s sad really, the writing has been on the wall for this company for a long time and bit by bit it gets diminished.