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Showing posts from December, 2017

Audiences will decide the future of opera

I have news: the audience will decide the future of opera. When our season at Opera Holland Park comes to an end, I pore over spreadsheets trying to find reasons why our audience have behaved in the way that they have, and the most concentrated analysis tends to come after seasons during which our house has been full. The theory is this; if we have underperformed, we are programmed to find solutions, but if we have performed well, we are less likely to look for the gremlins that might lose us that ever-capricious audience in a trice – you are never more vulnerable than when you are successful.  Sometimes, though, one can miss the obvious, or perhaps ignore it. In nearly three decades in opera, I have experienced one "boom" in the art form but an almost perpetual "crisis" of confidence, an alarmed perma-reflection on whether we remain relevant as an art form. This introspective brew is spiced by the occasional real crisis, like that recently at ENO, but we never real

Bridging the divide and opera’s Holy Grail

I'm not fully subscribed to the notion that opera has an age problem, inasmuch as I don't find loyal audiences in the autumn of their lives to be problematic. It isn't rocket science to understand that any obsession with new audiences puts you at risk of marginalising the one you have, and in the process of trying to shape it to suit, the very authenticity of the art form you wish to convert new followers to. In opera, our focus is on young people and the New Generation. At this point, to save me wasting time on it, you may go off and Google the myriad reports, studies and initiatives that attempt to address the matter. In essence, Opera Holland Park has accommodated the desire we share with our peers to develop new youthful converts by giving away thousands of free tickets to young people, with work in schools and by providing a family show each summer but until the classical arts become ingrained as a compulsory subject in our primary and secondary schools, the paradig