MY VERSION OF EVENTS....

Among the major producing companies, very few beyond Opera Holland Park explore the repertoire of the late 19th or early 20th century and it is a period from which some quite astonishing music emerged. Anoraks will no doubt be able to produce a list of companies and productions who do dabble, but that won’t change the reality that we are just about the most regular producers of such ‘enjoyable tosh’ (as one esteemed critic calls them) possibly in Europe.  Since OHP was born in 1996 we have produced operas by Mascagni, Cilea, Giordano, Ponchielli, Montemezzi, Zandonai, Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari, Menotti and Catalani. The common thread that joins most of these composers is that they were all part of a movement known as the  giovane scuola  (young school) and then in time, as the modern world took over, they came to represent what Allan Mallach called the Autumn of Italian opera; the last great flowering of Italian operatic invention and one that was looking northwards towards Wagne

A new report on the working class relationship with culture has been doing the rounds recently. Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries (which you can find here ( http://createlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Panic-Social-Class-Taste-and-Inequalities-in-the-Creative-Industries1.pdf ) comes at the issue from the point of view of the working class and their opportunities to find careers in the cultural sector. I usually concern myself most with the audience aspects of this debate but this report does touch on matters that relate to that, too. The general issue was also recently making waves with respect to entrants into Oxbridge and with Owen Jones's huge Twitter spat about the class of those in the media.  The Panic! report takes data from various sources and draws conclusions from it. Some of the conclusions are based on what appear to me to be oddly skewed impressions and some of the report sounds like an argument looking for a validation, rath

In early 2017, I was asked to go and speak to the sixth form of Archbishop Tenison's school in the Oval, south London about my book 'Noisy at the wrong times' in which I tell the story of my own school, Woolverstone Hall, and its role in lifting me, psychologically at least, out of the inner city. The chair of governors had read it and felt my experience and background might chime with the students. Facing a room full of clearly unimpressed 17 and 18 year olds turned out to be more daunting than standing on a stage speaking to a thousand patrons; writ large on what felt like every face was the question 'why are we listening to a bloke who works for an opera company?' I don't think one student looked at me as I began to speak, and they did what I would have done at their age, showing their suspicion and doubt by looking at the ceiling or at each other. It was only when I got to the part about my brother's death and my own myriad misdemeanours that they began