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Recession-Proof Opera
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20084 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
1,596 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
British opera in the South of England has been through a bad winter patch. A musicians' strike shut down Covent Garden's Royal Opera House in October and threatened the English National Opera around the corner at the Coliseum. Meanwhile, some of Britain's commercial producers were doing their best to inflate opera into some sort of bloated amphitheatric carnival. A massive production of Tosca at London's Earls Court was aimed at the sort of crowds usually seen at pop concerts; shortly afterward, Aida was staged in Birmingham's National Indoor Arena (the approximate British equivalent of the Astrodome)-a venue so vast that the London Times critic saw the leading lady (Grace Bumbry) as "a tiny blue smudge."
Two hundred miles away from London in Yorkshire and Lancashire, this season's audiences have been luckier, and probably more numerous than the frustrated southern fans. Opera North, touring out of its base in Yorkshire, has reached 160,000 people in the last twelve months with performances that match almost anything London has to offer.
Founded in 1978 as a northern branch of London's English National Opera, Opera North is the youngest major opera company in the United Kingdom. According to the original director, David Lloyd-Jones, it was not meant to work independently. "The whole plan had been sold to the Arts Council on the assumption that there would be six to eight of us in Leeds…and that the whole thing would be run from the [London] Coliseum." But the company soon established its own center of gravity at the Grand Theatre in Leeds. From this intentionally modest beginning as a northern annex to London's English National Opera, Opera North has grown to a permanent company of 160, playing to average 85 percent capacity house, employing major international guest artists, and sponsoring a special community program in northern schools. From Leeds sumptuous productions are taken to major cities in the North and Midlands (Manchester, Hull, Nottingham), to London for performances at the Palladium and the Coliseum, and even (as in the current season) venturing as far south as Glyndebourne's small theater near the channel coast.
After a fortuitous opening scandal at Leeds in 1978 (the female lead in Saint-Saen's Samson and Delila accidentally bared a breast), Opera North has continued through thirteen seasons to astonish and delight audiences with imaginative and often innovative work. It has performed eighty-five different operas by forty-five different composers, and founded its own symphony orchestra, the Northern Philharmonic, which has played nearly three hundred concerts. A limited budget prevents Opera
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