Breaking: Manchester to be new home of English National Opera
OperaThe company announced this morning that it is working with local organisations to make its new base in Greater Macnhester from 2029.
Arts Council England had ordered ENO to leave London. Manchester and Liverpool were both mooted as regional locations. Greater Manchester won.
UPDATE: What’ll happen to the musicians
Statement by ENO:
ENO is delighted to confirm the start of our new partnership with Greater Manchester from today. As we continue to transition through significant change, today’s announcement marks an important and defining moment for our remarkable company. This future direction will see us continue to expand our role as a national institution – supporting our mission to create work with and for even more audiences across the country, alongside our annual season at the London Coliseum.
Throughout our discussions with partners and stakeholders in Greater Manchester, we have been struck by an emerging vision for the future of ENO and operatic work in the city-region, defined by a shared ambition to open up new possibilities for opera in people’s lives. We look forward to embarking on new adventures with partners, artists and audiences across Greater Manchester as we create a range of operatic repertoire at a local, national and international scale, inspired by the extraordinary cultural vibrancy of Greater Manchester and its communities.
Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said: ‘The ENO is one of the most exciting cultural institutions in the country, and we’re immensely proud to be able to bring them to a new home here in Greater Manchester.
“We’ve worked closely with them to set out a shared vision for a future in our city-region, where they can continue making groundbreaking opera, foster new collaborations with artists across the North, and bring their award-winning learning and wellbeing programmes to communities here.’
I’ll eat my hat if anything permanent emerges from this. Perhaps a couple of community projects; a token transferred production or two per season for three or four years. At best. Before the whole thing is quietly allowed to fade back to the status quo. If the ACE was serious about relocating a national company it would be doubling its funding, not slashing it.
Also getting rather boring that Manchester is the only regional city that Londoners can conceive of as having a cultural life. Profoundly illogical to go into direct competition with Opera North.
Statement from Opera North next?
There’s been one, saying « welcome ». What else could they say, really.
See their website – all there, full of enthusiasm, and ENO joining in with educational projects – lol! ENO never came to the east end of London where I come and where I lived until 2012. It wasn’t their thing. They were into proscenium, world-class productions with world class British singers like Heather Harper, Janet Baker, Valerie Masterson, Neil Howlett, and the likes who all believed in bringing opera in the language of the audience, like it or not – certainly until the mid 2000s until they started bringing in Americans who could sing in American English, aka The Pearl Fishers – but still at a price that was and is affordable. As a season ticket holder in the balcony for Opera North, and even more affordable, they are certainly struggling with audiences in Leeds and Manchester.
Hell’s teeth! This is like a parody of PR waffle. Obviously written by a committee.
AI could do better than this …
AI could do a better job of the whole strategy
Manchester, a city of c.600,000, has the Hallé, BBC Phil, Manchester Camerata, Manchester Collective, Opera North (sort of) and now ENO. Are there enough audiences for this, even including the wider metropolitan area? Also, ominously no mention of the orchestra etc. in their press release.
Good point. I can’t comment on the ease with which people can travel into Manchester and get home again after the performance but I’m sure that more than 600,000 people will have access.
However, London attracts 16m international visitors per year (21m pre Covid) in addition to having a large number of commuters (this is why the arts subsidy per attendance is quite low compared with other parts of the country). The extent to which Manchester can match this is open to question.
This decision seems to be largely political and it is not clear whether the future of the Excellent Opera North has been taken into account.
They do have Opera North, and did have the Welsh and Glyndebourne touring in my day.
I have no problem with ENO performing in Manchester if it is increasing its current pathetically low number of performances to embrace both Manchester and London. But the company is not expanding. There is no increase in the Arts Council grsjt and musicians are currently being threatened with redundancy and only part-time (60%) contracts. So it will be a diluted presence made possible by less opera in London.
They can call it English National Opera North. Wait a minute…
You might have a point.
1. ENO North takes away Opera North’s audience.
2. Opera North moves from Leeds to the London Coliseum and calls itself English National Opera.
Problem solved.
Think you missed the point, maybe.
In 1977, English National Opera branched out to Leeds and called that branch English National Opera North!
The specific intention of this was to deliver high-quality opera to the northern areas of England.
Where will they play? The Palace or the theatre that hosted Phantom? Another venue? I’m not being sarky, I’m genuinely curious.
Hard to know who to feel more sorry for… Manchester or ENO!
Both for two different reasons.
More news: the email sent to ENO Friends from Jenny Mollica (Interim Chief Executive) refers to loyal old Bob Holland as Acting Artistic Director. So one can reasonably presume that Annilese Miskimmon has now also resigned from her post as Artistic Director alongside former Music Director Martyn Brabbins. So none of the senior postholders at ENO are permanent in their current roles.
No,she’s on leave
It must be long-term for an acting Director to be designated. But then the company cannot really plan any new productions just now.
I’m sure Mancunians will be delighted with the image you’ve used to portray their city.
Looks like a bit of an L.S. Lowry to me – of whom Mancunians are very proud, as the Lowry gallery shows.
It’s not about portraying Manchester where I lived for 12 years as a London, but the portrayal of ENO, Opera North, and the Arts Council of England. At the end of the day, as Manchester people will tell you, Salford is not Manchester no more than Bury is. But the south love to bracket it all as Manchester or ‘oop north!’ which can be anything from London to Glasgow and north of Watford.
Cologne is renovating it’s opera house at an expected cost of over 900 million euros. I hope the ACE will spend at least as much to provide a suitable venue for the ENO in Manchester.
Will it similarly go over project timescale by about ten years and triple the budget? I think when the current GMD in Cologne started (around 2014?), he was supposed to open the newly refurbished opera house. He leaves this season and will probably never even appear there!
The Lowry is a relatively new theatre stuck out in Salford, not central Manchester. The Palace was not only the home of Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Kent Opera, and then Opera North used to perform. That Palace Theatre was renovated and extended in order for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden to come up. They came up only once in 1982 or 1983, and it was decided that it was far cheaper to bus everyone down from Manchester to London than for them to come up with their lavish productions and their star international singers, and pay everyone as a touring company. When I was in Scottish Opera, we toured to the Dominion or Sadlers Wells in London, the Opera House in Belfast, the Liverpool Playhouse – a barn of a place compared to the London Coliseum – and particularly the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, so not confined to Scotland. Now they can’t do anything like that but stay in Scotland as Welsh can’t go out of Wales either because of funding cuts.
Mmm. Burnham’s changed his tune then. Not so long ago he was saying “If you can’t come willingly, don’t come at all”. I wonder if he’s even seen/heard an ENO production. As for Manchester, media-wise it’s quickly becoming synonymous with “The North”, ignoring the rest of the north, which includes the largest county – North Yorkshire (there are also South and West Yorks and East Riding to add – forming the entirety of Yorkshire), Northumberland, Durham, Cumbria. I bet even Liverpool feels left out.
Andrew Burnham is in fact an opera and theatre fan, as is Jeremy Corbin is in London, and Angela Rayner too. Don’t estimate the working classes and the Labour Party. It’s not a public schools, or Tory, Party or middle class occupation as many would believe it is. Yes, Yorkshire is the biggest county in England and with a population of about 5.5 million, and I now live in West Yorkshire as a Londoner.
As Victoria Wood once said in a sketch – a TV continuity announcer filling time between programmes (cast your mind back) – “and just time for a special announcement for all you viewers in the north – gosh it must be awful for you.”
When there the Palace was refurbished in the early 1980s (at the expense of the closed down Opera House, this supposedly shining pleasure dome of culture, the northern home for ENO, Royal Opera, Royal Ballet, NT, Glyndebourne ….never attracted sufficient audiences. Part of the problem was the funding conflict between city and county councils – but the bigger issue was that Manchester folk wouldn’t pay the ticket prices being charged.
Yes, and I was one of the local soloists who had just moved back to Sale from being in Scottish Opera who sang the Poulenc Gloria for the Royal Ballet to dance, and it was the BBC Northern Singers, who had to change their name from that to the Stephen Wilkinson Chorale, as the ROH weren’t prepared to use their own singers. I was there – 1982, and I still have the programme!
2029?
Annoyed at this. Manchester’s well-served for classical music already. Why not somewhere in the North East or the East Midlands? Nottingham (another name that was on the longlist) would have been a fantastic choice given its great existing music scene that also has scope for growth, and Leicester, Derby and Sheffield could have benefited too, covering a good proportion of the population.
Manchester’s been the main name mentioned since the start – did they even bother considering the other places on their supposed list properly?
But Nottingham is bankrupt now. Like Birmingham, who I heard were frontrunners before announcing council were bankrupt.
What a time we live in!
Opera North already goes to Nottingham x 3 a year. Just digging into and eroding Opera North’s financial path again. Audiences not there.
“city-region” – is this a translation from the German or the Italian? “Greater Manchester” – like Ilford or Croydon is in Greater London? So do they mean somewhere actually outside Manchester?
We’re back to Salford v Manchester again. Everything gets called ‘Manchester’ if you live in the south, or more so London – and I speak as a Londoner not a northerner.
The AD disappears on maternity leave to adopt a baby – (though she does have time to direct an opera in Hamburg this Jan/Feb). She conveniently comes back days after terminations are to be announced. Classy. Greater Manchester – because they are not taking up residence in a grand opera house. The ROH proved they could not sell such a venue in Manchester many years ago. Read between the lines. They are planning on “exciting” collaborations in car parks and fringe venues and no doubt serving MIF as a local cash source for it’s trying-too-hard festival. Many wise comments above name the gross irony of Manchester: this is already Opera North’s stomping ground. And almost ALL venues in Manchester fail to sell tickets. Just look at the financial vacuum that is MIF and their new Factory – a venue everyone already knows they will struggle to sell, as they struggle with Palace programming, just as the Lowry struggles. Touring operas often empty the Lowry. A city with no nearby opera company would have made total sense – Liverpool, Newcastle…. But in reality, this is ENO with very little resource, and almost all productions will be reduced “innovative” co-productions to make ends meet. The best we can hope for are community outreach and education projects for youth with no exposure to classical music – those such as Natasha Freedman used to run at ENO Baylis (yet another great employee that Stuart Murphy fired once he realized her expertise easily withstood his ignorance and bullying.). Why not give Opera North all of ENO’s money and let them flourish? Or give MIF ENO’s FULL orchestra and chorus and force them to produce and tour 5 big operas et al across the year? Call it what it is: a part time company with no venue. Their intended London visits are also a decoy: behind closed doors all admit that eventually a huge commercial hit show like Hamilton will overtake the Coliseum. It’s a slow motion death meant to slowly disperse the rage of we, the public, who loved an ENO which our children will now only read about in the archives. Sad, but then again, why is no one holding Harry Brunjes accountable for this humiliating, unnecessary failure of the past 10 years. The man should be forced to resign. Enuf is enuf.
Opera North is flourishing and with great artistic achievement, but the population don’t like opera – end of!
Royal Opera House had full audiences in Manchester in 1982 as i was there, plus one of their soloists for the Poulenc Gloria when the Ballet came as well, but touring just wasn’t cost-effective – and it never is for any company.
“Royal Opera House had full audiences in Manchester in 1982”
Not for all performaces it didn’t. I was also there.
When even the BBC News at Ten on 5 Dec shows the exterior of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden when talking about the move, is there any wonder some people think it’s the Royal Opera moving? Basic ignorance even in the London News Room. OK, so the interior shot was of the London Coliseum, but too late to reduce my increased blood pressure.
We are a nation of footballers not opera singers!