Huge break up at Opera Australia
OperaJo Davies has departed as artistic director after 18 months in the job, and a few days before she was to announce the next season. Insiders say she had a fractious meeting with OA chief executive Fiona Allan.
OA said Davies’ departure followed ‘differences of opinion about how Opera Australia should successfully balance artistic innovation, audience development and commercial imperatives.’
The company has been a hive of bad working relationships and harrassment allegations going back a decade and more.
Davies’ appointment was greeted with some scepticism as she had never held an artistic director post before.
Surprised it has taken this long. Her Yeoman of The Guard at ENO was a travesty (particularly the WW2 setting and ruining Sullivan’s best overture with that disrespectful amplified black and white news film footage over the Overture) and the start of the downfall of ENO standards of production in an miscalculated effort to update the piece from the 16c setting simply in order (or so it was thought) to get younger bums on seats.
This was disasterous and disrespectful to both creators G&S and their audience (Not to mention the orchestra having to compete with the disruptive news footage over their skilled playing!)
I agree with all of that but the real travesty was casting an actor who couldn’t sing as Jack Point. You might get away with that in a West End musical but not in an Opera House!
“The company has been a hive of bad working relationships and harassment allegations going back a decade and more.”
Not while Craigo Hassall was there it wasn’t.
hear hear. Thank you for pointing this out.
Thanks for your support, Raymond.
And in other surprising news….the sun came out this morning.
Really, so much genuine trouble facing the industry from external conditions and they still find themselves able to inflict these dreadful wounds of their own. People at OA knew she was gone within 2 weeks of her joining.
How/why did they know this? I don’t mean to be casting doubt on your statement, but one can’t help but wonder what exactly people at OA saw which told them so quickly that Jo Davies wouldn’t last.
I think missing the first batch of auditions – for which singers were flying in from ‘000s of miles – and thinking it OK that the Head of Music and Joanne Goodman sat in instead – wasn’t a good start.
Yes, that makes sense.
Endless miscasting revealed two things 1) Jo Davies has no idea how to cast an opera and 2) the senior artistic management who will now once again lead the ship, also cannot cast an opera.
Tammo is right. Everyone knew from week 2 it was not a match. And I think everyone was also shocked by her appointment. She has never been a major player in the opera or theatre world. It felt like a gender hire, given the sexual harassment cases wracked up by the former leader whose name doesn’t deserve more print time. But sadly it was simply never a match. It’s a sad day for the health of opera in Australia, already struggling before this misguided hire.
One wonders how she lasted nearly 80 weeks if the mismatch was apparent after only 2.
No doubt firing a new leader after 80 weeks is very embarrassing for a Board, and they absolutely tried every backflip possible to make it work for the last 80 weeks. But finally Miss Davies simply didn’t understand the financial restrictions of the company she agreed to lead, and was simply not present too many times. She had no experience in a job that needed a person of great experience at this crisis point for the company (post Pandemic). There was also embarrassing tension as she tried to insist her partner was hired to conduct at OA: clearly a conflict of interest. I remain baffled how a person with no leadership experience was given one of our leading institutions in crisis. While I have never seen her directing work either, her CV is hardly top notch international directing, either. There was a struggle from day one for the head-hunter to find a woman of high profile and experience for the job. And let us not ignore that her stadium TOSCA was a humiliating box office flop that could have been avoided, and her Sunset Blvd remains one of the most glorious musical theatre failures Australia has seen. A true leader would have seen Miss Brightman’s ineptitude to even sing the role from day one and made the hard choice to replace her early on, not after disastrous reviews and sales on which OA was dependent. And now we have four musicals this season? The Board tried again and again to balance the situation but finally Miss Davies seems to have no understanding of how serious the finances were, never mind her need to be present 8 (18!) hours a day in the job. While I can respect her wish to import great singers at great cost, the priority to rebuild up legacy, finances and audience was utterly lacking. The woman had no idea what she was doing. And finally it became clear that she was utterly out of her depth. Any such decisions in two weeks would have been rash by any board. They took their time to try and make things work. They did not work. We are all glad she is gone now.
It struck me at the time as a poor choice but I’m also wondering if it reflects on Fiona Allan’s leadership. Any inside knowledge?
You are on the money here.
This strikes me as another Birmingham Symphony/Melbourne Symphony mess created by Boards appointing people unsuited to their jobs in those companies. Why are Boards allowed to get away with this?
Without wanting to deny the obvious managerial issues during Davies’ tenure at OA (summarised in some of the other comments, some entirely valid observations, but also some sexism/ignorance on display), this has got more to do with her programming ambitions for the company, her commitment new operatic writing, and her strategy for developing audience taste in Australia. Davies’ first season was critically fantastically well received, and was a statement of intent: Puccini, Mozart (great), but also Brett Dean’s ‘Hamlet’ in Sydney and Missy Mazzoli’s ‘Breaking the Waves’ in Melbourne, two major critical successes for the company, two operas of enormous international significance and renown, and yet two box office flops in Australia. One has to wonder: is it that those pieces are bad, uninteresting, unengaging, unmoving, overly provocative, ugly, intellectually elitist or whatever criticism could be levelled at them, or is it that the company doesn’t know how to share them with an Australian audience that has been undernourished, and abandoned by real artistic leadership as the art form continues to develop elsewhere.
Perhaps Davies went too hard too fast, but unfortunately there are loud voices in Australia that fundamentally disagree with the entire project on the grounds of either funding or an absence of ambition to be a part of the development of the art form. Opera in Australia is dreadfully funded by international standards, and unfortunately the company is expected to wash its own face in a way that few national companies are expected to do: in Europe there is major state funding, and in the US there is a highly developed philanthropic model. In Australia, contributions from those sources are modest, and so ticket sales are expected to fund the company. The catch is that tickets rightly have to remain affordable, and so there is a model which involves staging musicals to make money with which to fund the (much more expensive) operatic work – a policy which pre-dates Davies. But gradually it seems the creative ambitions of the operatic work are being eroded in order to run the company as a whole as a commercial enterprise. The question is, what does Australia want its national company to do? Perform 30,000 shows of a clapped-out production of La Boheme for tourists off a cruise ship parked up outside the Sydney Opera House that will never come back, or bring perhaps the most internationally-significant Australian opera ever written to Sydney for home audiences to experience. The reality is that as an outsider, Davies’ understands and believes in the power, significance and value of the latter to Australian culture, but very few within the company actually do. She even planned to present ‘Hamlet’ to Melbourne audiences, but that was quickly put to bed. Where’s the ambition for Australian culture, pride in Australian artists, belief in the value and necessity of opera? I was in Sydney to see Hamlet and was genuinely saddened to see the flags around Circular Quay alternating Cosi/Tosca/Cosi/Tosca, not a single invitation to see Hamlet. Were the marketing department embarrassed to be doing it!? If you don’t believe in opera, get another job.
So personally, for all her faults, I think it’s a great pity she’s gone. And I think it’s very important that Australian artists understand that this is the conversation that is happening within OA, not only about new works but about any opera which is not profitable. Time to participate in this conversation if you care about the future of the art form.
That’s always been the problem with Hamlet, “To see or not to see, that is the question”.
The fact is ticket prices are not affordable for many already. I agree better support from Government is needed, but OA does price itself out of higher attendances, and so then becomes more reliant on happy clapper shows for tourists and the like.
It is a hard enough genre for new listeners to get into (in relative terms compared to other genres) – but pricing themselves out of the market for younger people doesn’t help, and that’s before one thinks about the questions of repertoire.