Look back in wonder

10 April 2012

My almost six years as opera critic of the Evening Standard have been a fascinating and fraught time for opera in Britain, especially in London. The meltdown at the Royal Opera and the disastrous suggestion that the capital's two companies might merge could have led to a severe reduction in the quantity of decent performances.

But things now look distinctly promising, even if levels of subsidy and/or sponsorship are ridiculously low by international standards and the Arts Council of England is still squeezing investment in new productions at English National Opera.

Very few mainstream new productions at the ENO have looked worth reviving. The gems in its repertoire - the Mikado, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Ariodante are still largely what ENO has inherited from the era when Peter Jonas ran the show.

Last year's low point of visual excellence included a disastrous Trovatore by Verdi and a feckless new Figaro. If Calixto Bieito s Masked Ball had been created in London it might have been a tighter, more creative show, more widely approved and more popular (ticket sales at 55 per cent capacity are depressing even if Bieito s stagings do bring more young people new to opera to the ENO, as the company claims). Bieito s latest got better reviews than his controversial cocaine-snorting Don Giovanni. ENO needs to make its own hits and export them. That s how it can afford to spend £500,000 on a new staging of Prokofiev s War and Peace, sharing the investment with two other foreign opera companies, or £275,000 on Richard Jones s new Lulu, shared with Tel Aviv and Frankfurt. It s not somewhere that can possibly rely on imports, of which there are too many in the current Royal Opera season.

The arrival of Tony Pappano as artistic director of the ROH in August will bring a transformation there. Not since Georg Solti arrived in 1961 has there been such a theatre animal in charge of the music. Pappano takes full part in the preparation of his new productions, is involved in early discussions with director and designer and is present for every rehearsal. He understands singing like very

few other opera conductors. Although he is American, he was raised in Pimlico. He is a man of the people, lacking in pretentious social airs people associate with the Royal Opera, but charming and utterly professional. I predict - whether the shows are successful or not - the next five years will be exciting at Covent Garden.

We may have lost the adventurous little Covent Garden Festival, which presented a "gay" Handel cantata at the nightclub Heaven last May, but thank goodness we have Holland Park Opera, which is now supported by Lord Cadogan. Standards in that unlikely alfresco venue, this year offering five operas in June and July, including two rarities, Adriana Lecouvreur and La Rondine, have consistently improved and the venture deserves more financial support from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Within reach of London, Glyndebourne is riding high with Vladimir Jurowski, one of the most talented young opera conductors in the world, as music director, and an unusually generous total of three new productions this summer, with three of the most talented directors in the world - two of them British (Richard Jones and David McVicar).

At Grange Park in Hampshire, the same distance from London as Glyndebourne, the extraordinary Wasfi Kani has built her new intimate opera house alongside a listed pile owned by the Baring family. And she's done it in record time and for remarkably little money. At Garsington, near Oxford, Leonard Ingrams continues to score successes with the eclectic original-language programming of his opera festival under canvas. Ingrams presents challengingly modern productions. The taste for opera among London's well-off is at an all-time high.

Things are good for the less rich too, with Raymond Gubbay's seasons of Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savoy (the current offering, Iolanthe, a delight) and the prospect of extra seasons of grand opera at the Royal Albert Hall. In the suburbs and around London you can catch the migrating seasonal English Touring Opera. At the tiny Bridewell Theatre in EC4, a programme of newly composed mini-operas is selling out. Almeida Opera in the summer continues to take care of modern and avant-garde works. And at Battersea Arts Centre opera or music-theatre is hugely popular whenever they can put it on.

One odd fact of London's operatic life, though, is that the Royal Opera and ENO have never been both on a high at the same time. It's a fixed rule that London's two opera companies alternate in public favour. When Peter Jonas's ENO regime was being praised (and occasionally damned) in the late 1980s for theatrically adventurous work, the Royal Opera was written off as dull. When Nicholas Payne broadened the Royal's repertoire with lively Young Turks, and Jeremy Isaacs's regime was well regarded (before the financial crises associated with the ROH rebuilding), Dennis Marks's ENO was struggling. Now the Royal Opera is smart and cool and all is lovely in the Garden. But ENO is being pelted with rotten veg.

Is ENO in crisis? There's talk of redundancies and retrenchment, with £700,000 lopped off the budget over the next two years while the Coliseum is being restored and improved. According to Payne, because of periodic closures, it will do fewer performances, earn less money at the box office and need fewer personnel. But, equally, ENO has almost succeeded in funding its £41 million refurbishment, which scarcely sounds like a disaster.

The company has certainly been disappointing artistically since the high-risk but stimulating work-out of its Italian season in autumn 2000. The barely sustainable schedule then of seven new productions in three months showed ENO could still be livelier than the Royal Opera.

Unfortunately, ENO's daring programme was not as popular as it should have been. The season ended with a £271,000 deficit, which might have been absorbed but for 11 September and the inevitable downturn in bookings for what was, anyway, a fill-in two months at the start of the current season. Payne's original plan was for the Coliseum to be closed until November. The safe shows he chose to fill the programme, when it became clear there had to be one, were not exciting enough.

ENO got £9.2 million in the "Stabil-isation" process, including £2.5 million to wipe out its long-term accumulated deficit. The Arts Council has agreed that its current £13.3 million annual grant needs to be higher. But it won't get this extra money - needed for productions and singers - until after 2004, when the restoration is finished. Recently, too many productions have seemed disposable. Imagination is what counts but there is a limit to how cheap things can get without looking boring. Dressing shows in modern clothes and updating for economic reasons is not always satisfying.

Even after all the inquiries when the ROH rebuilding nearly led to dis-aster, there is too little understanding on the part of the paymasters (the Arts Council and politicians) that performing-arts institutions cannot go on making bricks out of straw. Productions must be regularly renewed. It's vital to involve new creative teams and discover the designers and directors of tomorrow. ENO has had a good record recently with new operas too, and more commissions are shortly to be announced. It's also a crucial nursery for new British opera stars. What an extraordinary acknowledgment it is by the German-Austrian opera world of British operatic quality, that the director David Pountney should be appointed boss of the Bregenz Festival and that Sir Peter Jonas should be leading the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. Both were formerly at ENO. But ENO must also create a portfolio of productions of standard works that can last for years and be worth reviving frequently. Which means spending money to build to last.

The Lottery has been wonderful for buildings. But it has not been much applied to investment in the actual art of making opera and theatre. That has to be done by companies of human beings.

Life for those who are doing good things in the performing arts is never plain sailing. Creativity means taking gambles, welcoming the new - and nurturing the public taste for novelty. But things can easily go wrong. Harold Macmillan memorably warned what happens to politicians' best-laid plans - "events, my boy!".

The ENO has been enduring some "events". At least Nicholas Payne has learned his lesson about closure from what happened at the Royal Opera House. The Coliseum will continue to offer performances throughout the rebuilding period (don't be put off by the scaffolding). It is the largest theatre in London, designed by our greatest theatre architect, Frank Matcham, and a superb home for opera in English.

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