Opera North: Historical and Dramaturgical Perspectives on Opera Studies 9781783505029, 9781783505012

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OPERA NORTH Historical and Dramaturgical Perspectives on Opera Studies

OPERA NORTH Historical and Dramaturgical Perspectives on Opera Studies By

Kara McKechnie School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK

United Kingdom

North America

Japan

India

Malaysia

China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2014 Copyright r 2014 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78350-501-2

Every effort has been made by Opera North and Emerald to trace the copyright owners for the images included in Opera North: Historical and Dramaturgical Perspectives on Opera Studies. We would encourage those whom we have not managed to contact to get in touch with the Company’s press department, so we can address any queries Opera North

ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001

This book is for everyone at Opera North, past, present and future It is dedicated to three gentlemen of vision and imagination: George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood (1923 2011) Dr Keith Howard David Lloyd-Jones

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr Kara McKechnie is a Lecturer in Dramaturgy at the University of Leeds, where she teaches theatre, opera, adaptation and new writing and supervises PhD students in opera studies. Born in the United Kingdom and educated in Germany, she has worked for many German and UK opera companies. Her PhD at De Montfort University in Leicester led to the monograph Alan Bennett (Manchester University Press, 2007) and she is invited to talk about Bennett’s work regularly. Since 2006, Kara has worked with Opera North and the DARE Partnership on a range of projects involving undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as frequently contributing to events and performance research. The material for this volume has been gathered in archives, basements, rehearsal rooms, interviews, front of house and backstage at Leeds Grand Theatre over four years, and has resulted in a close association with the company and its staff.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgements

xix

Foreword by Richard Mantle

xxiii

Foreword by Keith Howard

xxv

Introduction: Studying an Opera Company Perspective 1: Opera North Perspective 2: Ethnographies

A History from Many Sources Opera North’s Productions in Rehearsal

1 15 215

Perspective 2 Appendix: Don Giovanni Backstage

285

Perspective 3: Opera North’s Productions in Performance

299

Conclusion

345

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013 (Compiled by Stuart Leeks and Stefanie Klinge-Davis)

353

Index

447

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction Illustration 1

Fidelio. Emma Bell (Leonore), Gentlemen of the Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . .

1

Illustration 2

Ruddigore. Heather Shipp (Mad Margaret). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

12

1978/1979 — Samson & Dalila. Katherine Pring (Dalila), Gilbert Py (Samson). Photo: Forbes Henderson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

32

1979/1980 — A Village Romeo and Juliet. Laureen Livingstone (Vreli), Adrian Martin (Sali), Stuart Harling (The Dark Fiddler). Photo: Colin Gordon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

36

1981/1982 — The Bartered Bride. Thomas Lawlor (Kecal), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Asadour Guzelian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42

1980/1981 — Carmen. Ann Howard (Carmen). Photo: Donald Southern/Royal Opera House/ArenaPAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

42

1981/1982 — Madama Butterfly. Elizabeth Vaughan (Cio-Cio San), Kristian Johannsson (Pinkerton). Photo: Asadour Guzelian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

46

1983/1984 — Rebecca. Gillian Sullivan (The Girl), Ann Howard (Mrs Danvers). Photo: Asadour Guzelian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

48

Illustration 7

1984/1985 — Pagliacci. Kate Flowers (Nedda), Angelo Marenzi (Canio). Photo: Asadour Guzelian. . .

51

Illustration 8

1984/1985 — Tamburlaine. Sally Burgess (Andronicus). Photo: John Vere Brown.. . . . . . . . . . . .

55

Perspective 1 Illustration 1 Illustration 2 Illustration 3 Illustration 4 Illustration 5 Illustration 6

xii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 9

1985/1986 — A Midsummer Marriage. Ensemble. Photo: Asadour Guzelian.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

Illustration 10

1986/1987 — The Capture of Troy. Kristine Ciesinski (Cassandra). Photo: Andrew March.. . . . . . . .

67

Illustration 11

1987/1988 — The Trojans at Carthage. Sally Burgess (Dido), Patricia Bardon (Anna). Photo: Andrew March. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71

1988/1989 — Boris Godunov. John Tomlinson (Boris), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

75

Illustration 13

1989/1990 — Masquerade. Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80

Illustration 14

1990/1991 — King Priam. Andrew Shore (Priam). Photo: Robert Workman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

87

Illustration 15

1991/1992 — L’etoile. Pamela Helen Stephen (Lazuli, a pedlar). Photo: Robert Workman. . . . . . . .

89

Illustration 16

La Bohème. Jane Leslie McKenzie (Mimi), William Burden (Rodolfo) in 1993. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Illustration 17

La Bohème. Anita Morris (Mimi), Ji-Min Park (Rodolfo) in 2014. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . 102

Illustration 18

1993/1994 — Playing Away. Ensemble. Photo: Laurie Lewis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Illustration 19

1994/1995 — Pélleas and Mélisande. Joan Rodgers (Mélisande), William Dazeley (Pélleas). Photo: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

Illustration 20

1995/1996 — Medea. Josephine Barstow (Medea). Photo: Stephen Vaughan.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Illustration 21

1996/1997 — Falstaff. Andrew Shore (Falstaff), Frances McCafferty (Mistress Quickly). Photo: Donald Cooper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Illustration 22

1997/1998 — Sweeney Todd. Steven Page (Sweeney Todd), Beverley Klein (Mrs Lovett). Photo: Bill Cooper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Illustration 23

1998/1999 — Carmen. Ruby Philogene (Carmen), Antoni Garfield Henry (Don Jose). Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Illustration 24

1999/2000 — La traviata. Janis Kelly (Violetta), Thomas Randle (Alfredo). Photo: Alastair Muir. . . . . 129

Illustration 25

2000/2001 — Paradise Moscow (Cheryomushki). Ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . 139

Illustration 26

2001/2002 — L’enfant et les sortilèges. Claire Wild (The Child). Ensemble. Photo: Bill Cooper. . . . . . 143

Illustration 12

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xiii

Illustration 27

2002/2003 — Tosca. Susannah Glanville (Tosca). Ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . 145

Illustration 28

2003/2004 — Rusalka. Giselle Allen (Rusalka), Richard Angas (Water Sprite). Photo: Alastair Muir. . . . 150

Illustration 29

2004/2005 — Così fan tutte. Peter Savidge (Don Alfonso), Claire Wild (Despina). Photo: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

Illustration 30

2006/2007 — The Elixir of Love. Ladies of Opera North Chorus. Photo: Richard Moran. . . . . . . . . . 163

Illustration 31

2006/2007 — Dido and Aeneas. James Laing (Spirit). Photo: Bill Cooper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

Illustration 32

2007/2008 — Pinocchio. Ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

Illustration 33

2007/2008 — A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jeni Bern (Tytania), Opera North Children’s Chorus. Photo: Tristram Kenton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

Illustration 34

2009/2010 — Ruddigore. Grant Boyle (Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . 183

Illustration 35

2010/2011 — The Merry Widow. Ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

Illustration 36

2011/2012 — Carousel. Alex Newton (Louise), dance ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . 195

Illustration 37

2012/2013 — Siegfried. Annalena Persson (Brünnhilde), Richard Farnes (conductor), Orchestra of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Illustration 38

The Magic Flute. Helen Williams (Queen of the Night), Mark Coles (Sarastro). Photo: Richard Moran. . 214

Perspective 2 Illustration 1

Entrance to Opera North and the Grand Theatre, New Briggate, Leeds. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Figure 1

The work of Opera North in a typical year. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

Illustration 2

The Grand Theatre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

Illustration 3

The Grand Theatre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustrations 4 7

Harrison Street (Premier House, including lorry lift and footbridge); Bridge between Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera North’s headquarters, Premier House; The Linacre and Harewood rehearsal studios at the back of Premier House, with the scene dock bridge; Leeds Grand Theatre, raised fly tower. Photos: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Illustration 8

Backstage at the Grand Theatre — the space from which an opera performance is operated and populated. Photo: Malcolm Johnson, with kind permission from Leeds Grand Theatre. . . . . . . 225

Illustrations 9 & 10

The Howard Assembly Room. Photos: Malcolm Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

Illustration 11

Opera North Education launch the ‘In Harmony’ Project with children and teachers from Windmill Primary School, Howard Assembly Room, 7 December 2012. Tuba: Brian Kingsley. Photo: Simon Dewhirst. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

Figure 2

The structure of a typical season of productions at Opera North. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Illustration 12

Das Rheingold. Michael Druiett (Wotan), Giselle Allen (Freia), Yvonne Howard (Fricka). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

Illustration 13

Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 1. William Dazeley (Don Giovanni). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . 238

Illustration 14

Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 2. Elizabeth Atherton (Donna Elvira), Alistair Miles (Leporello). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

Illustration 15

Don Giovanni. Rehearsal still, William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), Alistair Miles (Leporello). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

241

Illustration 16

The Don Giovanni set in the rehearsal room, Alessandro Talevi (director), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

Illustration 17

Don Giovanni. Rehearsal still, Finale Act 1. Christopher Turner (Don Ottavio), Claire Wild (Zerlina), Elizabeth Atherton (Donna Elvira). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

Illustration 18

Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 1. William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), Alastair Miles (Leporello). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Illustration 19

Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 1. Claire Wild (Zerlina), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

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xv

Illustrations 20 & 21 Don Giovanni. Rehearsal and performance, Act 2. Michael Druiett (Commendatore), Alastair Miles (Leporello), William Dazeley (Don Giovanni). Photos: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 Illustration 22

Don Giovanni. Performance still, Finale Act 1, Alastair Miles (Leporello), William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Illustration 23

The Portrait. Paul Nilon (Chartkov), Peter Savidge (Journalist). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . 259

Illustration 24

The Portrait. Richard Burkhard (Nikita), Carole Wilson (Noblewoman), Paul Nilon (Chartkov). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260

Illustration 25

Norma. Annemarie Kremer (Norma), James Cresswell (Oroveso), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

Illustration 26

Die Walküre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

Illustration 27

The Turn of the Screw. Elizabeth Atherton (Governess), Benjamin Hulett (Peter Quint). Photo: Bill Cooper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

Illustration 28

The Merry Widow. Stephanie Corley (Hannah Glawari), Gentlemen of the Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

Illustration 29

Carousel. Finale, Gillene Herbert (Julie), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . 274

Illustration 30

Norma. Finale. Annemarie Kremer (Norma), Luis Chapa (Pollione), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

Illustration 31

Pinocchio. Finale Act 1, Victoria Simmonds (Pinocchio), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282

Perspective 2 — Appendix Illustration 1

The backstage area, stage and orchestra pit of Leeds Grand Theatre from the fly floor. With kind permission from Leeds Grand Theatre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

Illustration 2

Don Giovanni. Finale Act 2. William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), Michael Druiett (Commendatore), Ladies of the Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

xvi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Perspective 3 Illustration 1

Julietta. Paul Nilon (Mischa), ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302

Illustration 2

The Seven Deadly Sins. Beate Vollack (Anna 2), Rebecca Caine (Anna 1), ensemble. Photo: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

Illustration 3

La Vida Breve. Mary Plazas (Salud), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . 306

Illustration 4

The Portrait. Act 1, Peter Savidge (Landlady), Richard Angas (General), Paul Nilon (Chartkov). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308

Illustration 5

The Portrait. Act 3, Richard Angas (General), Nicholas Sharrat (Lamplighter). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

Illustration 6

The Portrait. Act 4, Paul Nilon (Chartkov), Hedda-Maria Oosterhoff (Psyche). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

Illustration 7

Gloriana. Act 1, Josephine Barstow (Queen Elizabeth I), ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . 313

Illustration 8

Gloriana. Act 3, Josephine Barstow (Queen Elizabeth I). Photo: Stephen Vaughan. . . . . . . . . . . . 314

Illustration 9

Peter Grimes. First Sea Interlude, ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316

Illustration 10

Peter Grimes. Act 2, ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

Illustration 11

Peter Grimes. Act 3, Jennifer France (Niece), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . 319

Illustration 12

Peter Grimes. Act 2, Fourth Sea Interlude, ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320

Illustration 13

Peter Grimes. Act 3, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Grimes), William Mercer (Apprentice). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

Illustration 14

Peter Grimes. Act 1, ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades …’. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Grimes), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322

Illustration 15

From the House of the Dead. Alan Oke (Skuratov). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

Illustration 16

From the House of the Dead. Robert Hayward (Shishkov), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . 326

Illustration 17

From the House of the Dead. Finale. Ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

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Illustration 18

The Makropulos Case. Act 2, Ylva Kihlberg (Emilia Marty), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . 329

Illustration 19

The Makropulos Case. Act 3, Ylva Kihlberg (Emilia Marty), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . 331

Illustration 20

The Makropulos Case. Act 3, Ylva Kihlberg (Elina Makropulos), Stephanie Corley (Christina). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

Illustration 21

Das Rheingold. Prelude, Orchestra in Leeds Town Hall. Conductor: Richard Farnes. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336

Illustration 22

Das Rheingold. Sarah Castle (Flosshilde), Jeni Bern (Wellgunde), Jennifer Johnston (Woglinde). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337

Illustration 23

Die Walküre. Act 3, Meeta Raval (Ortlinde), Jennifer Johnston (Waltraute), Emma Carrington (Schwertleite), Miriam Murphy (Gerhilde), Katherine Broderick (Helmwige), Madeleine Shaw (Siegrune), Antonia Sotgiu (Grimgerde), Catherine Hopper (Rossweisse). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

Illustration 24

Die Walküre. Act 3, Annalena Persson (Brünnhilde), Béla Perencz (Wotan). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

Illustration 25

Siegfried. Act 1, Richard Roberts (Mime). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

Illustration 26

Siegfried. Act 3, Annalena Persson (Brünnhilde), Mati Turi (Siegfried), Richard Farnes (conductor), Orchestra of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342

Conclusion Illustration 1

Ruddigore. Grant Doyle (Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd), Richard Angas (Adam Goodheart), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

Illustration 2

Norma. Annemarie Kremer (Norma), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. . . . . . . . . 350

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks go to my colleagues at the School of PCI, University of Leeds. I was able to make a start on the research for this book thanks to a semester’s study leave in autumn 2010. Colleagues have shown interest in my research, undergraduate students have contributed perspectives on opera and on its relationship with new audiences. My PhD students (the ‘opera cluster’) have been an inspiration throughout the period of research. Adam Strickson has written libretti for four excellent operas, which he also produced and directed. Jenny Daniel has generated splendid research on the way Opera North represents itself and communicates its work and Jessica Walker has produced and performed new operas of an impressive standard. Thanks also to my co-supervisors on these projects, Prof. Rachel Cowgill, Prof. Jonathan Pitches, Dominic Gray (Opera North Projects) and Richard Farnes, Opera North’s Music Director. In the early stages of the research, material provided on Sadler’s Wells/ENO by Eva Hornstein, London, proved very helpful. Roger Lancaster and Rose Cuthbertson were excellent conversation partners on the cultural landscape of West Yorkshire, Peter Stubbings and David Clayton were my ‘Dewsbury Focus Group’ and it was a joy to see their enthusiasm for opera at Opera North performances. It was very beneficial to share some findings at the 2012 conference of Royal Musical Association in Cardiff, where I also had the opportunity to talk to Paul Atkinson, author of the admired ethnography of WNO, Everyday Arias. Delegates of the Leeds conference, The Business of Opera (2012), gave me many fresh ideas to consider. I can’t thank Opera North enough as a company — I am very grateful to all its staff for their support over the period of work on this study, which has spanned four years. Whether it was through sharing knowledge and recollections, through welcoming me into rehearsals or through adding information, the work has been a joyful process from start to finish. Particular thanks to the Opera North 4th floor community for being wonderful colleagues and to all the production teams and casts I have had the privilege to observe in rehearsal (particularly The Turn of the Screw, Don Giovanni, Das Rheingold, Norma and From the House of the Dead). The help from the Opera North press team, particularly Julia Gregg, Hannah Stockton and Lindsey Porter, has been

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

much appreciated. Stage management welcomed me backstage on several occasions and impressed me with the standard of their work. My interviewees Richard Mantle, Christine Jane Chibnall, Ric Green and Jane Bonner were allies throughout the process, always happy to answer even the most obscure questions about Opera North’s history. Martin Pickard (Head of Music) and Stuart Leeks (Editor) have been a source of constant support and inspiration. Their operatic knowledge is exemplary and their willingness to read draft material has provided encouragement to me and hopefully enhancement to the manuscript. The Silver Book, edited by Stuart Leeks for Opera North’s 25th anniversary, has been a real backbone to the research on company history and documentation. The data forms the basis of the Opera North Chronology at the back of this volume, completed with great attention to detail by Stefanie Klinge-Davis. I would also like to thank the photographers whose excellent images appear in the book: Clive Barda, Bill Cooper, Donald Cooper, Simon Dewhirst, Colin Gordon, Asadour Guzelian, Forbes Henderson, Malcolm Johnson, Tristram Kenton, Laurie Lewis, Andrew March, Richard Moran, Alastair Muir, Donald Southern, Stephen Vaughan, John Vere Brown and Robert Workman. Thanks also to Leeds Grand Theatre for permission to use photos of the auditorium and the outside of the theatre. I was privileged to speak to the late George, 7th Earl of Harewood and Patricia, Countess of Harewood, about Opera North’s history in 2010. Nicholas Payne, the Company’s General Director between 1982 and 1993, contributed a detailed and fascinating interview, as well as reading and commenting on draft chapters. David Lloyd-Jones, founding Artistic and Music Director of Opera North, made a substantial contribution through his entertaining and insightful interview and through his subsequent editorial support on the history section of the book. His interest and enthusiasm for the project have meant a lot to me. The book has been supported in an exemplary way by Emerald Publishing, and I would like to express my gratitude for allowing the book to have such a large number of illustrations. Dr Keith Howard, Emerald’s founder and Opera North benefactor, has taken an interest at every stage of the project. Editors Kim Walker, who saw the project through its commissioning stage and Juliet Harrison and Cristina Irving Turner, who offered excellent support of the project’s complexities in its concluding phases, are owed special thanks, as is Managing Editor Samantha Thompson. It was Richard Mantle who listened to my early ideas for the book and who has been a tireless supporter of the project throughout. I am delighted that this study is published in the year of his 20th anniversary in post as Opera North’s General Director. My opera obsession originates in my upbringing: it is thanks to my parents, Antje and Gordon McKechnie, that my childhood was steeped in opera. They met at Sadler’s Wells in 1967 and (if family history is to be believed), had started stepping out by

Kara McKechnie

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the time the spring tour had reached Leeds Grand Theatre. They have followed every step of the book with interest, and my father has been a solid source of information on the history of UK opera in the 1960s and 1970s. My partner Malcolm Johnson has made an enormous contribution to this study as its principal photographer, and in other ways too numerous to mention. It has been a pleasure to work on the book together, selecting from thousands of excellent images, and to see him develop a love for opera and his new career in live performance photography. Finally, thanks to everyone whose vision and imagination makes opera thrive as an art form and makes it a worthy contender of state funding.

FOREWORD Since its foundation, Opera North has developed a distinctive voice in the art and performance of opera, individual and often adventurous in its approach to the art form. As an opera company we like to think that we do things a little differently. So it is with this book. There have been many volumes written to celebrate or record opera companies but this has a fresh perspective, one which seeks to document the working life of an opera company through academic investigation and interpretation, and thus to provide an enlightened insight into the life and times of Opera North. Thus we hope that this volume will provide a perceptive, enjoyable yet scholarly resource for audiences, academics and students of the art form through a fascinating visual and chronological history of the company, behind-the-scenes observations, and contextual material on some of Opera North’s landmark productions. This book was born out of DARE, a research and practice-based collaborative partnership between Opera North and the University of Leeds, which has provided fertile ground for academics and students to interact with the creative life of a major opera company. Thus this project feels entirely appropriate, even inevitable! At Opera North we have been happy to open our doors and our archives to Kara McKechnie, who has become something of an in-house researcher and a highly-valued member of the extended Opera North family. Her efforts are beautifully realised in this lovely volume which has been generously and expertly supported by Emerald Publishing. Richard Mantle General Director Opera North

FOREWORD Throughout my life I have had an interest in music, but this for many years was at the passing level insofar as opera was concerned. It was in the seventies that my wife persuaded me to attend an opera performance at the Leeds Grand Theatre given by a touring company. From that time I have been addicted! Thus throughout the existence of Opera North, and living in Leeds, I have been in a position to attend the large majority of its performances. As a founder of EMERALD (Electronic Management Research Library Database), a publisher of scholarly journals and books, and for the last decade its sole owner, I have been able to provide support for Opera North, at the same time being privy to its short term strategy. When asked by Richard Mantle if I would be interested in publishing a book about Opera North I had no difficulty in agreeing, without having met the author (Kara McKechnie) or being aware of the key aspects of the planned publication. Rigorous research can take no little time, but having had sight of the pre-publication content I can now understand how it took Kara four years to complete! The structure she adopted, three sections termed ‘perspectives’ (Opera North history, an account of her immersion in process (rehearsals) and an analysis of audience reaction) in addition to being novel, is highly effective. Her aim at the outset, in respect of the second perspective on process, was to be ‘seen but not heard’, but I suspect that through her evident intelligence and insight it would not have been ‘one way traffic’ during the time the company spent in rehearsals, (a measure of ‘action’ research, an activity, in fact, with which I am familiar).

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This is a book of richness and quality which places itself in the ‘should be read’ category for anyone interested in the life and times of an organisation whose ‘raison d’être’ is opera. Keith Howard Owner Emerald Global Publishing Limited Vice President Opera North

INTRODUCTION: STUDYING AN OPERA COMPANY This book proposes three perspectives on the work of an opera company. While the findings should be relatable to opera in general, the book is very specific to Leeds-based company Opera North. Every company has its own processes, timelines and policies in producing creative work in its spaces and this specificity extends to its civic, regional and national relationships. Perspective 1 offers a chronological account of the way Opera North has produced opera since its formation in 1978 — a mapping of the company macrocosm. Perspective 2 examines the microcosms created within the company during a production process. It does so from a ‘backstage’ perspective in order to offer a detailed insight into the company’s creative work, whereas Perspective 3 takes the view from the

Illustration 1. Fidelio. Emma Bell (Leonore), Gentlemen of the Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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auditorium, examining and interpreting selected productions. These are perspectives, not chapters — they do not progress from each other, but present distinctly different angles on opera work, using distinctly different methodologies. Of course the sections form a dialogue and the knowledge from each will benefit the other two, but it is context, not argument that is progressed from one to the next. Daniel Rosenthal’s recently published history of the National Theatre aims to make sense of the company ‘artistically, economically and logistically’ (2013, p. xi); this could also be claimed for Susie Gilbert’s 2009 history of English National Opera. This study attempts a similarly broad view of Opera North, but additionally offers the perspectives of the process from rehearsal to performance and readings of selected productions. The critical and interpretative angles included in this book form an interdisciplinary dialogue with music studies, but also with each other. They draw from fields such as production history and analysis, dramaturgy, ethnography, musicology, adaptation studies, reception studies and cultural industries contexts, meaning the study of a company as an artistic and administrative entity within the economic framework which allows opera to be produced. Company history has been a lively field in recent years, with Gilbert on ENO (2009) and Rosenthal on the National Theatre (2013) as just two examples. There are now histories or celebratory volumes of all UK opera companies, so this study of Opera North completes the portfolio. By also subjecting an opera company to an ethnographic investigation, it follows the acclaimed Everyday Arias by Atkinson (2006) on Welsh National Opera. McAuley’s (2012) rehearsal ethnography of Australian company B is another example, her title Not Magic but Work striking a chord during my enjoyable period of rehearsal observation. These studies are either histories or ethnographies, but this volume incorporates both these angles, in addition to production analysis. While it is by no means a pick-and-mix approach to operatic research, it is recognised that by the inclusion of three distinctive perspectives, one is at risks of compromising the depth of a single-focus research investigation. Each of the three perspectives would have formed an extensive subject for a monograph of their own, but the urge to show operatic work from these angles within the same study, as well as the curiosity whether they would merge into a coherent whole, made me attempt the current format. With its interdisciplinary research agenda, the book aims to cater for audiences beyond the academic sphere, such as long-term Friends, Patrons and audiences of Opera North, experts in their own right, and readers involved in other aspects of the opera industry. There is a certain hybridity to my own position, which combines the academic and the dramaturgical gaze of a former (and to some extent parallel) career, so this remit has suited me well, having had one foot in dramaturgy, and one foot in academia for a long time.

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Perspective 1 tells Opera North’s history. There are many ways of constructing company history — through buildings, by era (general managers or music directors), or, as it has been attempted here, by following documents and accounts from year to year, trying to take buildings, eras, key productions and economic conditions into account along the way. Opera North’s artistic style and its evolution are also important considerations, as well as the circumstances (financial, political, regional, spatial) in which it operates. In short, the section attempts to balance the company’s artistic journey and the administrative complexities that make operatic production possible. It is complemented by the Opera North Chronology, which provides details on all of the company’s productions and a bookmark is added for convenience. This section is a year-by-year account, but it is also possible to split it into eras of musical or administrative leadership, or into phases, such as the company’s formative years (1978 1984), the building of a distinctive artistic identity (1984 1994), artistic stability, juxtaposed by the campaign to improve its working base (1994 2006) and a period where the same artistic stability was challenged by financial adversity (2007 to date). A company exists with the purpose of producing artistic work and the tracking and documenting of the evolution of production work has been one of the greatest pleasures of this process. During the time of my research investigation, I have come to regard the whole of the Opera North Centre as one big archive. This is partly because there is no catalogued archive and printed materials can be found in lots of places — in boxes in the basement library store, in cupboards and in staff offices. The other reason the building is an archive is because it is full of stories, memories, recollections, anecdotes and opinions by Opera North’s articulate and committed staff. It would be impossible to recreate the richness of experience and memory here, but oral accounts have been invaluable in juxtaposition with written sources, contextualising, complementing and providing perspective. Perspective 2 benefits from the context mapped within Perspective 1, but stands alone as a different angle on the work of the company, documenting ways in which its work is done, considering behavioural, spatial and organisational aspects. While this is centred on various Opera North rehearsal processes between 2010 and 2013, the section also includes an account of watching a 2012 performance of Don Giovanni backstage. Different applications of dramaturgy can serve such an approach well: watching people behave is analysed through dramaturgy, as is watching a dramatic text ‘behave’ in rehearsal and performance. Social exchanges and theatrical exchanges (which are, of course, often based on social exchanges) are equal sources of analysis. The method of participant observation meant long stretches of presence in the rehearsal room, trying to blend into the background as much as possible. The demand on the ethnographer to establish an attitude of ‘resolute indifference’

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(Atkinson, 2006, p. xx) and the de-prioritisation of aesthetic preferences quickly gave way to an appreciation of the structured rehearsal process and the level of creative invention witnessed. The co-operation of the company for access was paramount, which has resulted in a strong sense of obligation to represent Opera North with as much attention to detail as possible. My findings are partly determined by pragmatics — dependent on whether access can be gained, on how many rehearsals will be observed, on what constitutes information or unwelcome revelation or gossip and on which methods or processes are specific to Opera North. I also bring a particular pre-conditioning to the process. My previous career as a dramaturg, my academic research and teaching practice in dramaturgy (theatrical and sociological) and my lifelong experience of and interest in the operatic production process are key factors here. In general, I had access to a wide range of productions, which nonetheless had to be negotiated (mainly with directors) on every occasion. There were a few productions where it was not possible to observe any rehearsal room sessions apart from the rehearsal room run (which happens directly before a production transfers to the stage and is attended by many company members, including senior management). This was either because of teaching and other University commitments or because access was restricted by the production team for understandable reasons. In summary, the ethnographic work has been undertaken in order to compare processes and different kinds of professional behaviours and is not an interpretative account of the productions involved. This work is done in Perspective 3, where production analysis is considered. Again, the previous two perspectives equip the reader with Opera North’s history and its way of producing opera, but the final section is enriched, not dependent on this knowledge. Perspective 3 is an attempt to offer analysis of the many layers of operatic expression. While it cannot do all of these things all the time, its semiotic/phenomenological/dramaturgical angles perhaps replicate the constantly changing focus that comes with watching a performance. Just as all perspectives of this book had limitations, this is also true for the final one. The ‘protective enthusiasm’ (see Perspective 2) which develops with the growing closeness between researcher and company, as well as knowledge of the production from its early planning stages affects judgement. So the third perspective is not just concerned with interpreting selective productions, but also addresses the question of how to take the creative process into account when analysing productions.

RESEARCH SOURCES Opera North’s documents can be split into public and internal, into those which accompany performance (e.g. programmes) and ones which document administrative or creative processes (e.g. minutes). Documents generated about Opera North

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include Arts Council documents, reviews, other press items, external reviews or audits and written audience interactions. These documents communicate how the company is seen by various agencies — primarily the Arts Council, opera critics and the public. The archive material housed in the reading rooms of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London includes Opera Northrelated documents, Arts Council memos, correspondence, budgets, minutes, strategic plans and press reactions. There are no Opera North documents available through the V&A beyond 1993, however, some of these gaps have been addressed by the generosity of Opera North, allowing access to nearly all of its documentation. Arts Council material related to opera funding more generally, such as reports and strategy documents, have also been consulted. There is a large amount of material on Opera North’s premises — committee minutes, correspondence, accounts, planning documents (schedules, programming, casting), production documents (sketches, costume figurines, technical plans, performance reports, photographs), programmes and reviews. While a lot of this material is kept in accessible order (i.e. it is possible to look at committee minutes and other administrative documents chronologically), there is no archive as such, and while the company’s scores and parts are catalogued in its library store, the resources for this history are not archived, just stored in various spaces. Some older administrative documents and press material can be found in boxes and cupboards in the basement of the Opera North Centre; minutes on the fourth floor, programmes, newer reviews and planning documents can be found in many different places. Andrew Fairley, founder cellist and company librarian, has created a database of all of Opera North’s performances since its foundation. The publication to celebrate the company’s 25 year anniversary, known as ‘The Silver Book’, edited by Stuart Leeks (2003) has also been very useful in documenting productions and developments. Opera North’s technical department holds a ‘working archive’ of DVD recordings of all productions since the mid-1990s. The way a company sees itself does not emerge from written and media materials alone. Conversations and interviews are an important strand of historiography. They throw light on different areas of activity and different periods or give invaluable, personal overviews. The angle of their narrative is aligned with the interviewees’ profession, the length of their employment, their ‘stake’ in the company and their role within it. Extensive interviews were conducted with (in alphabetical order) Jane Bonner (Company Manager), Christine Jane Chibnall (Casting and Planning Director), Ric Green (Technical and Operations Manager), Lord Harewood (Founder, former Artistic Director of ENO and former Vice-Chairman of the Opera North Board), David LloydJones (Founder Artistic and Musical Director), Richard Mantle (General Director), Nicholas Payne (former General Administrator). These were complemented with many informal conversations with current Opera North employees in response to specific questions or as parts of discussions. Working with this material, the impression forms of a company that has always

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had to charge forward and whose members hardly ever have time to look back and reflect on Opera North’s achievements. While the early hand-to-mouth days are long gone and Opera North now has a healthy infrastructure and some assets, the company always needs to focus on what is ahead — reflecting and ordering its legacy would almost seem a luxury, generating neither artistic achievement nor income to fund such achievement. One of the most important and complex sources of information is also the most ephemeral: production work. There can be no recreation of a performance which has happened, and all attempts at post hoc documentation have to recognise that there is no replacement for the actual event. The red threads of the work, connecting research across the perspectives, are (a) the aim to represent the company in as broad a sense as possible, (b) the unifying dramaturgical gaze and (c) placing operatic production at the centre of the investigation.

APPROACHES TO STUDYING OPERA Like film studies, opera studies is dedicated to the understanding of a particular genre or, more properly, a medium. Except, of course, that it encompasses four times as many years of history and impinges on a larger number of other disciplines — musicology, obviously, but also theater history, art history, and every one of the literature fields in those countries where opera has thrived. (Lindenberger, 2010, p. 253)

Lindenberger (p. 254) problematises the ‘orphan discipline’ of opera studies cut loose from its former home, musicology; which cannot lay to ‘a natural home in any one of the existing humanistic disciplines’. It is now broadly recognised that the study of opera is interdisciplinary. It requires awareness of all of elements mentioned by Lindenberger, even though we might single one area out for emphasis. Following Born, who asserted the changing boundaries of music scholarship in her article ‘For a Relational Musicology’ (2010): […] those efforts […] cannot be confined to the conversations between the music subdisciplines. Instead, they require us to look outside, beyond the archipelago, to the key adjacent disciplines — the next-nearest knowledge continents — that lie beyond musicology: that is, to the sciences of the cultural, social and temporal, which is to say anthropology, sociology and history. (Born, 2010, pp. 209 210)

Georgina Born and others (e.g. Clemens Risi in 2011) demonstrate the multiple possibilities of interdisciplinary musical and performance analysis. The unconventional approach of Herbert Lindenberger, particularly his recent study Situating Opera:

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Period, Genre, Reception (2010), has provided encouragement that ‘seeking to move in a multitude of directions at once’ (p. 3), deploying a variety of perspectives, can resonate with opera’s multi-faceted interdisciplinarity. Lindenberger complements the variety of his critical voices with a variety of styles (his alphabetically ordered exploration of Il trovatore being just one example). This volume is more restrained, but different critical modes as well as the aim of broad accessibility require distinct stylistic registers nonetheless. Lindenberger presents his study as a series of essays, rather than as connected chapters. While the length of this book, particularly that of Perspective 1, does not fit into the form of ‘essay’, there are similarities, in that my sections can be read in isolation. ‘If readers find an argument, it’s that opera, like most aesthetic phenomena, lends itself to a variety of critical voices’ (Lindenberger, 2010, p. 7). My approach is based on the interpretation of available materials (written, oral, material, ephemeral) and methodologies which are distinctive for each of the three perspectives. The research tries to avoid taxonomies. The reception and the study of opera have been plagued by assertions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for a long time. There is no right way of performing an opera, a production in its totality cannot simply be judged on notions of historical veracity or its accurate relationship with the score’s ‘Urtext’. The way a work is performed is determined by many factors, including economic restraints and production trends, just as the decision to programme the work in the first place comes from a complex spider’s web of decisions. Simply put, I am looking at the work an opera company does over a long period, and am interpreting this work. In keeping with McAuley’s title for her production ethnography (2012): Not Magic but Work. In order to provide a research context for all three perspectives, there are some simple questions to be discussed — ‘What is an opera company?’ and ‘What is an opera production, and where is it centred at different times during its genesis?’ In a public talk in 2010, Opera North Music Director Richard Farnes said that the company was ‘“more than an opera company,” that its mission was to develop “artists, art form and audience,” and, with an interesting mixture of imagery, likened the company to a “spider’s web or maybe a teaching hospital”’ (Farnes quoted in Daniel, 2010, p. 24). The spider’s web suggests the image of operatic production being at the centre of the web, with many other activities revolving around it, some closer, some more distant from the centre. The teaching hospital suggests benefits (art as self-improvement?), pedagogy and training, as well as substantial public expense. In 1985, German author and critic Heinz-Josef Herbort reflected on the schizophrenic nature of opera (more precisely: opera as located in an opera house) as an art form — describing the tension between being a museum, which preserves art work from

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different periods, and a gallery which shows new works of art, makes them come alive, and thus challenges the artefacts in the ‘museum’ by expanding its boundaries and conventions. We can summarise Herbort’s binaries even more briefly as the sometimes opposing forces of preservation and innovation within an opera company (Herbort, 1985, p. 11).1 The ‘museum’ can be aligned with the more traditional, but still important functions of opera, among them showing works of art from previous ages which can only be appreciated through performance, ensuring the continuity and maintaining the standard of productions and providing a platform for social and societal encounter. Although these functions are here listed without any judgement, they are still loaded with ideas about opera being outdated, anachronistic, elitist and inaccessible. In short, all the negative connotations of ‘museum’. In its ‘gallery’ guise, on the other hand, opera is associated with new works, the staging of ideas, the challenging of conventions and the conceptual flexibility afforded, paradoxically, by the familiarity of the core repertoire. Deconstructing Madama Butterfly is easier than deconstructing an unknown commission, where a ‘template’ (the German term ‘Aufführungspraxis’ is useful here, the evolving practice of staging) — a set of conventions for performing the work is yet to be established. The museum section is able to give people what they want or expect, the gallery section aims to show people what they don’t yet know they want or what they could expect. Expectations can mean that opera has to function simultaneously as a concept-based artefact (‘Ideenkunstwerk’), an aesthetically rewarding experience (‘Ausstattungsstück’) or as a societal event (‘gesellschaftliches Ereignis’ — see Herbort, 1985, p. 12). Opera North is in receipt of Arts Council England and other public funding and, like most full-time companies, could not exist without it. However, this makes up for approximately two thirds of its income. Ticket sales and other income cover under a third of company income and the rest of the cost is raised through philanthropy.2 The result is that the company has to try and meet the needs of a large and diverse audience spectrum. From the start, giving the North its own company came with the pledge of producing opera for everyone, with education staff and soon a department, and dedicated activities to extend the reach of opera. As subsidy fell in proportion to expenditure rising, the role of sponsors and donors became more important. It is a simplification, but in principle, every performance or activity the company presents must take into consideration the expectations of this large audience spectrum.

‘Schizophrenie der Gattung […] zugleich Museum zu sein, in dem Altes bewahrt und so optimal wie möglich konserviert wird, gelegentlich auch wieder hervorgeholt und vorgezeigt wird und Galerie in der das jeweils Neueste ausgestellt und damit propagiert, ins Leben gerufen wird’ — my translation. 2 Figures for 2012/2013. 1

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Is ‘an ideal opera for first-timers’ also what is expected by the subscriber of 35 years, the corporate donor, the occasional opera-goer? How can this need, then, be balanced with the company mission statement: ‘Develop the art form, develop the artist, develop the audience?’ A brief summary of the ‘givens’ of the company’s work offers some context applicable to all three perspectives. Opera North has existed as a national, touring and full-time opera company since 1978, when it was founded as English National Opera North. It became independent of its London mother company, ENO, in 1981, and has been ‘Opera North’ since this time. It is the only UK opera company with an orchestra that has the dual role of playing Opera North productions and an independent programme of around 25 symphony concerts every year. It was initially named ‘English Northern Philharmonia’ and changed its name to ‘Orchestra of Opera North’ in 2003. The company employs around 200 staff on a permanent basis, but its numbers will go up significantly when its operatic seasons are being prepared and performed. The company still employs a number of founder members, and there are 29 staff who have worked for the Opera North for longer than 25 years. There is no core ensemble of soloists, in keeping with the models of other UK companies. Singers, production teams and conductors (except for the Music Director and in-house music staff) as well as additional musicians needed in the chorus and the orchestra for certain projects are all employed on a project-basis. Apart from main-stage opera performances in Leeds and on tour, which are the main focus of this book, the company’s other work is made up of Opera North Education projects and performances, events programmed by Opera North Projects, mainly in the company’s other venue, the Howard Assembly Room, audience events (such as talks and discussions), symphonic concerts and opera in concert. Whilst the company has always had three or four annual seasons of residence in its artistic home, Leeds Grand Theatre and has always spent 12 15 weeks touring northern venues, the exact number of performances is renegotiated each year, and the touring venues have not always been the same. The company’s education and outreach work is tasked with supplying the whole of the North of England. Many projects are centred in Leeds, but there is a track record of long-term work with communities across many areas. In 2011/2012, Opera North's total income of £16,162,563 was formed from these categories: • 78% from grants, sponsorship, investment and fundraising — around £12.5m • 21% from production and performances — around £3.5m • around 1% from Rental Income for Opera North productions

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The company took a cut in Arts Council funding from 2011 and after three ‘austere’ years, the grant will rise slightly again in 2014/2015: • 2012 2013: • 2013 2014: • 2014 2015:

£9,574,010 £9,822,545 £10,092,6923

The company has some choice in terms of the work it programmes, but it is crucial to create a balance between the popular and the adventurous, the need to cover a broad repertoire base and to create company specialisms — as well as programming interesting and challenging work for the two company assets, the chorus and the orchestra. Opera North has a case-by-case policy as to whether opera is performed in its original language or in English translation. Surtitles are becoming a frequent feature in performance, again in keeping with UK trends, but their use will still be considered afresh for every production. The company has built up a number of strategic partnerships; the largest in scale is with the University of Leeds (the DARE Partnership). It is partly thanks to this connection that this project has come about. In short, the company is tasked with looking after established operatic works, as well as creating a climate of innovation that will mean renewal of the operatic canon. While none of its productions, even of repertoire ‘stalwarts’ can be described as museum-like, the initial comparison of ‘museum’ and ‘art gallery’ serves as a useful model at the outset of this study, and it is therefore maintained that the two functions are both at the core of operatic production, and it is their balance in co-existence that determines how companies are perceived by audiences, peers and critics.

THE EVOLUTION OF A PRODUCTION The company’s work covers a wide range, with operatic production as the centre of the ‘spider’s web’. It is an interesting introductory exercise to trace a production’s evolution through its different points of development. 3

See Art Council England (2009).

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The idea of a production will often exist within the company for a very long time before it starts gathering momentum. There is always a contingent of works that are considered to be important for Opera North’s artistic development. Whether they get programmed depends on numerous factors: the question of whether the right conductor, director and scenographers can be contracted is an important early consideration. Sometimes works are very specifically paired with a person considered ‘right’. Costing and casting are often processes that also start a long time before a production moves into a rehearsal room. So a production is centred in arts administration, before being handed over to a creative team. It is then introduced to the company through a series of model showings, which help to specify budgetary and creative decision making. The tendering is followed by the construction process, most of it off the Opera North premises. The production now exists within the Opera North sphere, as a marketing identity is constructed around it and planning and casting continue. And in parallel, work continues within the creative team and with those responsible for the material construction. The rehearsal process then starts by centring the production in the music department for preparation and coaching, before starting its own very distinctive phase in the rehearsal studio and later on stage. While it develops internally, it also acquires an external identity through the way it is promoted. This production ‘microcosm’ and the question of when and how the different sites of the production merge is the focus of Perspective 2. Perspective 3 picks up the thread after a production has opened to the public and thus acquires a layer or external reception through audiences, critics and colleagues. I was commissioned to write this monograph by Emerald Publishing in 2010 after the process of peer-reviewing that is normal for academic publications and have not received payment from Opera North for my research. Their in-kind contribution to this study is considerable: to accept an in-house researcher over a period of four years, to grant access to absolutely all of its documentation, to patiently answer questions, engage in frequent debate about points emerging from the research, to accept my presence in the rehearsal room and auditorium during rehearsals and to contribute opinions, memories and a vast array of knowledge — all these make contributions by members of Opera North the spine of this book. Their acceptance of the different time frames in which we produced our work was exemplary, and the collegial and inclusive environment of the company made the research a joy. I sometimes felt like Mad Margaret (Ruddigore), absorbing the sheer volume and variety of information the research has drawn, the aim to channel it into the three perspectives, while constantly moving between the University Campus and Opera North. Mad Margaret and Despard Murgatroyd agree on a code for her to suspend her madness: Basingstoke. All the way through this process, my ‘Basingstoke’ has been the delight of being surrounded by people of musical, dramatic and administrative distinction while being able to witness operatic production and music-making of a phenomenal standard.

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Illustration 2.

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Ruddigore. Heather Shipp (Mad Margaret). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

REFERENCES Arts Council England. (2009). Opera North. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/browse-regularly-funded-organisations/npo/operanorth/. Accessed on 18 August 2014. Atkinson, P. (2006). Everyday arias: An operatic ethnography. Oxford: AltaMira Press. Born, G. (2010). For a relational musicology. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(2), 205 243. Daniel, J. (2010). Swanhunter: Communicating the Kalevala and constructing the ‘Idea of North’ for a young audience. Musiikki, 2, 22 40. Gilbert, S. (2010). Opera for everybody. London: Faber & Faber. Herbort, H.-J. (1985). Opera in Stuttgart. Stuttgart: Staatsoper Stuttgart.

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Leeks, S. (Ed.). (2003). Opera North 25 (‘The Silver Book’). Leeds: Opera North. Lindenberger, H. (2010). Situating opera: Period, genre, reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McAuley, G. (2012). Not magic but work: An ethnographic account of a rehearsal process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Opera North. Annual Report 2011/12. Leeds: Opera North. Risi, C. (2011). Opera in performance. In search of new analytical approaches. The Opera Quarterly, 27(23), 283 295. Rosenthal, D. (2013). The national theatre. London: Oberon.

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PERSPECTIVE 1 OPERA NORTH — A HISTORY FROM MANY SOURCES This perspective constitutes a history of Opera North. It does not claim to present the history, or a definitive history of Opera North, as it depends firstly on the availability of sources and secondly on my selection from these sources. Here, ‘history’ functions as an umbrella term for a selection from many different historiographies. Another writer working on this task could have consulted similar documents and had similar conversations with key people and would have written a different kind of history. Just as the biographer determines the way in which their subject is represented, so the historian cannot be seen as merely channelling ‘facts’, but as an interpreter and arranger of sources. Daniel Rosenthal actually calls his history of the National Theatre ‘the authorised biography’ rather than ‘the official history’ (2013, p. xiii). There is also a big difference between ‘lived’ history and documented history. What has been preserved in the archive or an individual’s memory is shaped by specific circumstances. Lowenthal talks of three aspects through which the past is considered: memory, history and relics: Memory and history are processes of insight; each involves components of the other, and their boundaries are shadowy. Yet memory and history are normally and justifiably distinguished: memory is inescapable and prima-facie indubitable; history is contingent and empirically testable. Unlike memory and history, relics are not processes but residues of processes. (Lowenthal, 1985, p. 197)

This section offers perspectives on Opera North’s history, its relics and the memories of many. These strands of information tell the story according to their function — for example, the narratives told by Arts Council documents will differ considerably from the narrative of a company member. When scrutinising sources, the aim has been not to prioritise the ‘official’ over the personal. The non-hierarchical positioning of sources and the belief that every person or every document have their own specific value helps to juxtapose and connect information. The intention is to produce a history, forged from various historiographies. The aim is therefore to amalgamate, alternate and knit together different accounts and perspectives to provide elements of all the sources in turn, and in reaction with each other.

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THE UK OPERATIC LANDSCAPE IN THE 20TH CENTURY English National Opera North took a long time to hatch from initial plans, which date back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. When it did, it burst onto the scene in November 1978 as a fully fledged, permanent company. This makes it unique among UK opera companies, as all of the others came into being in much more roundabout ways. The Royal Opera House has been operating since the season of 1946/1947, but has a history that reaches back into the 18th century, with three different buildings on its site, all with a history of operatic performances. Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera both started off as seasonal ventures, festival-like, as collaborations between professionals and amateurs and gradually grew into full-time companies. What became English National Opera (ENO in the following) in the 1970s started as Sadler’s Wells Opera company in the decade before World War II, but has its roots in a theatre enterprise started by the family of Lilian Baylis as a temperance measure, to offer alternative entertainment to alcohol-soaked and rowdy music halls around the turn of the century. When English National Opera North opened, however, it did so as a fully staffed company with a theatre, or at least as a company in residence at the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House, where it has remained since 1978. Even though it started its life as a ‘subcontracted’ company to ENO, as English National Opera North, it was shaped to be fully operational from the moment it started working. It had to be: there was a touring schedule to be taken over from ENO and a void to fill for operatic production across the North of England. Where other opera companies gradually came into the Arts Council’s view, presenting a valid case for receiving public money to continue their work, it was Arts Council staff who were among the major facilitators of the English National Opera North scheme. In its gestation period, the Arts Council and its principles could be summarised as follows: The Council was neither the tool of the ruling class nor did it favour left-wing arts. The decision to set up the Council had been taken by a wartime coalition government endorsed by a brief Conservative administration and finally implemented by a Labour government. The view that the arts should be funded by the state was whole-heartedly supported by both the major political parties. The British way of organising public subsidy for the arts was admired and envied throughout the world. ‘Government pays the piper, but makes no attempt to call the tune’. (Sinclair, 1995, p. 223)

The subject of this study, Opera North, as it was known from the time it became independent in 1981, is the youngest UK opera company, the only permanent national English opera company outside London, as well as the largest English arts organisation outside London. All UK opera companies have complex and fascinating histories, they are not the focus here. Studies

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of Covent Garden, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera exist and are recommended.1 In order to understand the origins of Opera North, we do, however, have to take an excursus into ENO’s history, as this is where Opera North originated.

THE MOTHER COMPANY: ENO ‘A respectable house “at which purified entertainment shall be given and no intoxicants sold”’ (Jarman, 1974, n.p.) — this was a description of a charity venture at the Royal Victoria Hall (later: Old Vic) that hatched several companies that are now central to cultural life in the United Kingdom. Lilian Baylis, whose work eventually resulted in national theatre, opera and ballet companies, arrived from South Africa in 1898 to work with her aunt on providing entertainment for the working classes. They programmed concerts, performances and lectures, as an alternative for workers to music halls and public houses as part of the temperance-movement. Morley College (an educational institute for workers) also occupied the building. Emma Cons, Baylis’ aunt, died in 1912, and in the same year, the Old Vic was granted a theatre licence. Gradually, the recitals of opera programmes turned into fully staged performances. The Old Vic Shakespeare company was launched in 1914, led by Sibyl Thorndike. By 1920, there were five performances a fortnight and Shakespeare consistently made for a stronger box office return than opera performances. The Duke of Devonshire launched an appeal to raise funds for the conversion of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, with plans to make it ‘an Old Vic to north London’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 38). Situated on the Islington/Finsbury border, the theatre was built in the 18th century, and had been used as a cinema from the late 19th century, but had been virtually derelict since 1916. Thanks to many subscriptions, donations and to Lilian Baylis’s ingenious and tireless fundraising during the second half of the 1920s, the freehold for Sadler’s Wells was obtained. The theatre was in a bad condition, so the renovation took five years and Sadler’s Wells opened on 6 January 1931 (paradoxically not with opera, but with a performance of Twelfth Night!). England had its first permanent opera company in its own building, also a home to Sadler’s Wells Ballet, which moved to Covent Garden and then became the Royal Ballet in 1957. Baylis’s original scheme was to have a programme of drama and opera in alternation with the Old Vic (sometimes referred to as ‘the Vic-Wells’), changing over every two weeks. 1

A History of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Andrew Saint et al., 1982), Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the Twentieth Century (Frances Donaldson, 1988), Opera for Everybody (Susie Gilbert, 2009), WNO: Celebrating the First 60 Years (Caroline Leech, 2006), WNO (Richard Fawkes, 1986), It is a Curious Story … The History of Scottish Opera, 1962–1987 (Cordelia Oliver, 1987), 50 Years of Scottish Opera. A Celebration (Ian Brooke, 2013).

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Audiences preferred theatre at the Old Vic, however, while opera and ballet flourished at the Wells and so the productions ceased their commuting between Rosebery Avenue and Waterloo by the 1935/1936 season. There was some teething trouble in the transfer: Gilbert mentions a repertoire that was at first not expansive enough to fill eight months of performances per year ‘and the tired stagings of the Vic looked shabby and out of place in Sadler’s Wells, just as those of Sadler’s Wells would when the company eventually moved to the Coliseum in 1968’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 44). Operatic quality improved as the singers merged into an ensemble (the continental model of permanently employed artists) in a company reaching new standards, but constantly threatened by financial deficits and huge workloads. Baylis died at the age of 63 in 1937. Her legacy consisted of two theatre companies which were among ‘the best and strongest civilising influences to be found in London’, as WH Auden wrote in 1936 (quoted in Gilbert, 2009, p. 61). The ‘interregnum’ without a designated general or artistic director lasted until February 1939, when Tyrone Guthrie was appointed as the director of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells, with plans to make the Old Vic the National Theatre and eventually to run two entirely separate artistic organisations. The start of World War II meant the closure of all theatres. Sadler’s Wells became a refuge for bombed families, but the opera and ballet companies managed to resume an irregular pattern of performances, sometimes under difficult circumstances. As Sadler’s Wells sustained some bomb damage, some performances were shown at the Princes (now Shaftesbury) Theatre. The company’s wartime touring is discussed below. After the war, the world premiere of the new English opera, Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten, launched the re-establishment of Sadler’s Wells. Internal problems accompanied this brave programming decision and hostility was aimed at Joan Cross in particular, who had been the opera director during the war years and created — on Britten’s wishes — the role of Ellen Orford. She resigned in September 1945 and went on to found the English Opera Group with Britten and Peter Pears at the end of the year. Alongside the development of a national opera company, demands for a publicly funded national theatre had become stronger throughout the 20th century. It was no longer enough for English theatre to be ‘independent and commercial, with occasional small grants for deserving causes’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 163). The founding of CEMA in 1940, which became the Arts Council in 1945 (launched by John Maynard Keynes), recognised the arts as deserving of state subsidy, also promoting ideals of democratising culture and access to art for everyone. At this time, however, it had been explained that only Covent Garden would receive such ‘special treatment’, because, being such an ‘exotic growth’, it could not otherwise establish itself. The potential demands of three national companies was [sic] a worrying prospect for the government, and Sadler’s Wells was soon drawn onto the political battlefield (Gilbert, 2009, p. 163). Several schemes were mooted, debated and dropped in

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the following decades, for Sadler’s Wells Opera company, many of them hinging on the question of where it should be based. The idea of having a South Bank arts complex was subject to discussion between 1959 and 1967, when the National Theatre and Opera House scheme was dismissed (the architect of the National Theatre, Denys Lasdun, was told in 1967 that there would be no opera house as part of the complex). The year 1966 saw an Arts Council enquiry about opera and ballet provision, the balance between London and the ‘provinces’ and touring. It was chaired by Lord Harewood, also the Chair of the Council’s music advisory panel at that time. Sadler’s Wells Opera company had transformed its wartime touring schedule into something that provided impressive cover across the whole of England (see the section ‘Touring — Origins, Reasons, History’). In 1968, the company moved into the largest theatre in London, the Coliseum, near Trafalgar Square. While this provided some respite from the uncertainty of ‘the opera drift’ situation (see Gilbert, 2009, p. 136), the fact that Sadler’s Wells now occupied such a large theatre in the direct vicinity of the Royal Opera House meant that the competition between the two companies immediately stepped up. It was sometimes complex to negotiate agreements about repertoire and programming without clashes — Covent Garden’s management committee was often sceptical about large-scale works planned at the Coliseum, and there was resentment at the funding difference between the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ company. Sadler’s Wells was renamed English National Opera (ENO) in 1974, by which time the idea of a northern national company was starting to establish itself. As shown in the following, the direct roots of ENON reach back to the early 1970s and indirectly back to the early 20th century. The company’s existence is owed to ENO trying to devise more efficient, labour- and money-saving ways of fulfilling its touring obligation. It is therefore useful to trace touring activity throughout Sadler’s Wells/ENO’s existence in order to understand the initial function and expectations of its northern ‘satellite’ company.

TOURING — ORIGINS, REASONS, HISTORY Sadler’s Wells Opera company started touring during the war, after 1940, when London opera houses were damaged or were needed for shelter and accommodation. The company gave its last performance in London in the early autumn of 1940. The building was needed as a shelter for homeless air raid victims, but company members also had permission to use it — at one time, the theatre was inhabited by 160 people (see also Gilbert, 2009, p. 72). CEMA made funds available for touring, with financial contributions by the BBC. Tours went out to various (mostly northern) parts of the country, visiting

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up to 60 regional venues between 1940 and 1945, often with an orchestra and a chorus of five each, everyone filling several roles. As tours were popular and successful, providing much needed morale and escapism, five other small opera companies were sent out during the early 1940s. The company around Tyrone Guthrie and Joan Cross toured continuously for most of the war, clocking up 87 venues in the course of these years (see Gilbert, 2009, p. 73). When the company was playing West Yorkshire in 1941, Joan Cross and Edward Dent reported that ‘the two Lascelles boys came every night’. A private performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Harewood House, then a convalescent hospital, was arranged (Gilbert, 2009, p. 78). It is interesting that George Lascelles (the seventh Earl of Harewood from 1947) should have witnessed the beginnings of Sadler’s Wells’s touring in England as an 18-year-old, and would later become the facilitator of change through the foundation of the touring company ENON. During the gruelling wartime years and the exhausting touring schedules, those at the heart of the effort thought about the future of opera and its funding, as is illustrated by a note by Tyrone Guthrie from a programme in 1943: […] the effort to keep Sadler’s Wells alive is not unjustified, that upon this company of singers and players, familiar and loved at the old Wells, may be founded the National Opera or hereafter; that this company is the isthmus, small but strong, linking the continents of the past and the future. (Jarman, 1974, n.p.)

After the Arts Council had been founded in 1945, it started regulating the company’s touring patterns from 1950 onwards — starting with around nine weeks per year. Sadler’s Wells’s ballet company transferred to the Royal Opera House in 1946. The post-war years were characterised by the spirit of artistic endeavour and by financial difficulties. The Arts Council’s and successive governments’ doubts over the funding of two London-based opera companies resulted in several proposals for the merger of Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Opera House. While this was avoided and communication structures were improved (a committee was established to avoid overlaps in scheduling), the Royal Opera House was very much perceived as ‘the favoured child’ when it came to funding (Gilbert, 2009, p. 121). By the early 1960s, Sadler’s Wells Opera was touring almost full time, for up to 40 weeks. In order to accommodate this, the company split into two (the ‘S’ and the ‘W’ companies), one mainly at home, one mainly touring. Touring was reduced to 20 weeks in 1967 and the 10-week ‘double tour’ was established around 1969, where a larger and a smaller company toured all of the United Kingdom at the same time (concentrating on England, with occasional visits to Scotland). WNO toured mainly in Wales, with very occasional performances in England, as the professional full-time orchestra and chorus were not established until the 1970s. Scottish Opera’s touring was minimal at the time. David Lloyd-Jones, who worked for Sadler’s Wells/ENO and also for WNO and Scottish Opera before

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becoming ENON’s Music Director, recalls those touring days, when a big tour and a little tour would go out every spring to suit different theatre sizes. Meanwhile, the Coliseum would be rented out to touring companies or productions, including long annual spring seasons by the English Festival Ballet. The S and the W companies would each spend a week or a fortnight (big tour) in each theatre with a repertoire of four operas, not necessarily following the same order or visiting the same theatres on every tour. Occasionally, the larger company would be ‘in rep’ and take up residence in a theatre for a month, also with four operas. The two companies each had their own crews, stage management teams, wardrobe and make-up staff, choruses and orchestras. The only personnel to switch between the two companies when the schedules allowed were soloists and conductors. This stability made for a regulated but alternative life outside London for both of the companies — the same groupings, friendships or affairs, the same ‘digs’ (accommodation), the same travel patterns, depending on the logistics of planning. The get out of sets would normally happen after the last show on a Saturday, the technical staff would travel to the next touring destination on a Sunday and start their next get in straight away. Performances would then normally run from Monday to Saturday. The extent of time and logistics presented, according to Lord Harewood, an ‘intolerable strain’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 286) over the years. Everyone involved remembers the cost of this enormous undertaking — travel, subsistence, local fees, adapting to the different specifications of the theatres, the logistics of get ins and get outs Apart from expense and exhaustion, however, issues of quality became a growing concern. Sadler’s Wells had only been in its current home, the Coliseum, since 1968. Moving from Sadler’s Wells (around 1600 seats, with a proscenium width of 42 feet (12.8 m) and a height of 19’7” (5.9 m)) to the largest theatre in London (2359 seats, with a proscenium width of 55 feet and a height of 34 feet) meant the company itself was still having to adapt to its new spatial conditions and sets had to be enlarged to fill the Coliseum’s stage. On the other hand, sets built to the dimensions of the Coliseum would rarely fit any theatre in the touring destinations. Tight budgets meant that custom-built, reduced sets to go on tour could not always be made. Sets from the Sadler’s Wells era were therefore a welcome opportunity to save money by sending them on tour, with just a small number of purpose-built sets. Many of them were of quite a considerable age by the early 1970s and added to the growing sense of dissatisfaction from audiences, the gist of which is described by David Lloyd-Jones: The people of, say, Manchester and Leeds were saying to the Arts Council ‘We pay our taxes and we want opera — you must provide it’. […] And then they saw a different cast to the London cast and only half the sets on tour […] there was a general feeling that when they did get opera, they were disappointed in it, so the Arts Council felt doubly peeved by this because a) they were paying [Sadler’s Wells Opera company] a hell of a lot of money and b) getting no thanks for it. And I think it was Jack Phipps who said ‘for just a little bit more money, you could found an opera company in the North of England which would also have its own orchestra which could give concerts

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and play for choral societies — because there was a real lack of northern orchestras, especially on the East side of the Pennines. (LloydJones, 2010)

The absence of their own music provision was keenly felt among the people of the North — there was one non-permanent regional orchestra, the Newcastle-based Northern Sinfonia,2 and otherwise Yorkshire relied on ‘missionary’ visits from Londonbased opera companies, the Hallé and the Liverpool Philharmonic (now Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra). A society with a great musical (particularly choral) tradition and art appreciation wanted its own opera company.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ENON In 1970, Arts Council touring officer Jack Phipps had been appointed to run DALTA (Dramatic and Lyric Theatres Association), a scheme in support of the touring of opera, ballet and drama. It was thanks to their work that the Sadler’s Wells Ring cycle production was equipped with sets for touring — there were two highly acclaimed Leeds visits in 1975 and 1976. However, the general misgivings about national touring were supplemented by Lord Hutchinson’s 1976 report on regionalism, which can be seen as a precursor of sorts to ‘The Glory of the Garden’ (1984, see below). Regional companies (whose grants were centrally administrated at that time) were consulted and were largely opposed to being put under the authority of Regional Arts Associations (RAAs) (see Sinclair, 1995, pp. 207–208). The feeling of being part of a ‘national plan’ gave them security. There was concern at the Arts Council that the ‘arm’s length principle’, established over a long time, would pose problems for local politicians. In the autumn of 1975, the Arts Council set up a working group to examine its policies and patterns for touring opera. Nicholas Payne (then Subsidy Officer at the Arts Council) worked on the report. He recalls being asked to compile a report on ENO’s tour during the 1975/1976 season and going to every theatre the company visited, seeing about 15 different performances in total. When he produced the report (‘it was full of admiration but also critical’), it went to the Arts Council, but also to ENO, and instead of the company reacting defensively, a meeting was set up in response. It was chaired by Lord Harewood, attended by the other senior directors of the company, plus Arts

2

The Northern Sinfonia was founded in 1958 and was made Royal Northern Sinfonia in 2013.

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Council staff Jack Phipps (Touring Officer), John Crufts (Music Director), Tony Field (Finance Director), and Payne as the author of the report. Payne says he was: […] probably challenged on one or two points, but broadly they accepted the conclusions. And it is from that meeting that the germ of Opera North came, and I absolutely remember Harewood saying that the thing was that there was a huge resource of singers and artists in England which could be put to better use. (Payne, 2011)

Lord Harewood, one of the driving forces behind the ENON scheme, remembered explaining to the Arts Council that ENO was ‘running out of small-scale productions (with two ensembles, one in London, one on tour) which had been built for Sadler’s Wells (these needed to be used, as productions built for ENO would not have fitted into the regional theatres set up for touring) to maintain and sustain touring on the present capacity’ (Harewood, 2010). In interview, Lord Harewood credits two people at the Arts Council in particular, who ‘had the intelligence to see the predicament and the imagination to get out of the predicament’: Jack Phipps and Nicholas Payne. Nicholas Payne’s involvement with Opera North was to be more long term than he realised in the mid-1970s (he went on to be the General Administrator of the company between 1982 and 1993). Jack Phipps, who sadly died in 2010, combined entrepreneurial spirit with strategic and artistically inspired vision. At the time, he was interested in giving regions or cities control back over their theatres and he maintained that nine principal regional theatres had been saved between 1972 and 1982 ‘by direct action from the Council who had managed to buy them back from theatre chains’ (Sinclair, 1995, p. 209). Phipps was successful in making connections between London and the regions through touring schemes — and the founding of English National Opera North was one of his greatest achievements in this context (see also Sinclair, 1995, p. 209). He was a driving force behind the scheme for a regional opera company in the North right from the start, possessed the vision and could communicate it to stakeholders with charisma and energy. This was evident from the way he managed to persuade receiving theatres to support the emerging scheme financially: […] a distant ancestor [of Jack Phipps] had built a number of these theatres, Nottingham Theatre Royal was one of them. And Jack was fantastic — there was a bit of a blarney about him and he would always come up with something that linked him with the theatre. When negotiations were a bit tricky with the Nottingham Councillors, he would say something like ‘I always have to come to Nottingham to buy my shoes!’, but they felt he understood them and was part of them. (Payne, 2011)

Jack Phipps knew how to stress the advantages not only of a Northern opera company, but also of an orchestra, which would have a remit beyond the company, with a programme of symphony concerts and collaborations with the famed choral

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societies. Lord Goodman, described by Lloyd-Jones (in the spirit of Gilbert & Sullivan) as ‘the Pooh-Bah of the Arts Council’, also the Chairman of the ENO Board, was said to be in favour of focusing the council’s touring policy more on regional organisations (see also Gilbert, 2009, p. 286).3 One of the realisations to come out of the meeting was that neither the timeframe nor the scope of ENO’s touring were sustainable for much longer and the funding situation and decreasing ticket sales would lead to shorter tours, which would raise equality issues for the receiving theatres. The outcome of the meeting — to pursue a proposal for a regional base for ENO — was submitted in December 1975 (see also Gilbert, 2009, p. 287). The gist was that touring should be replaced by a new opera company, a northern branch of ENO. This company (it was not yet decided where it would be based, although Leeds Grand Theatre was already a strong contender) should tour the region for 18 weeks in larger theatres and 8 in middle-scale ones. Brian McMaster, who was then the controller of opera planning at ENO, and Nicholas Payne prepared a draft plan for English National Opera North, ENON, as it was known from an early stage. Payne recalls them meeting in a small room at the Coliseum, then called the ‘Snuggery’, to map out the first two years of the new company’s budget, schedule, the size of the chorus (32) and the orchestra (40), a nucleus of soloists and the number of annual productions.

TUG OF WAR: 1975–1978 When news arrived in December 1975 that Harewood’s proposal for what was to become ENON had been accepted in principle, there was excitement in Yorkshire. Ernest Bradbury (Yorkshire Post) called the news ‘an unexpected Christmas present — inevitable — especially remembering the triumphant Ring tour of last Spring’ (quoted in Gilbert, 2009, p. 287). There was a meeting on 5 March 1976 at Harewood House, where Rupert Rhymes talked about the Leeds scheme ‘as a natural development of the move from Sadler’s Wells theatre to the Coliseum’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 287). Of course, ENO’s touring could not stop immediately; instead, touring was to go up from 34 to 40 weeks in 1977/1978, before ENON would take over. Projections for the cost of the new company were set at around £800,000, and an estimated subsidy of £500,000 would be needed. The majority would be met by the Arts Council, with Leeds Council and the the councils of the counties to which the company would be touring hopefully making around £125,000 available (Rhymes, 1976). Despite all the enthusiasm and goodwill, it was

3

Lord Goodman’s obituary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7597575/Lord-Goodman.html

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not easy for ENO and Arts Council staff to get firm commitments out of the civic and regional partners, although a ‘Friends of Opera North’ organisation was already being discussed. Richard Phillips, music officer of the Yorkshire Arts Association (YAA), called this civic enthusiasm ‘a good basis for a subscription scheme’ and ‘the best propaganda weapon available’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 289). David Lloyd-Jones started working at what was then still Sadler’s Wells Opera as a freelance conductor from the late 1960s. He has a particular expertise in Russian opera and conducting the British premiere of Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the Coliseum in 1972, a landmark production directed by Colin Graham, put him on the map. Lloyd-Jones was then invited to become Music Director Charles Mackerras’s Deputy, a position he also held for another year under Mackerras’s successor, Charles Groves. ‘By this time [the mid-1970s] the whole idea of ENON was brewing up’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010). He remembers the night he was asked to take on the ENON adventure: he had conducted Tosca in Southampton on tour and he and his wife, Carol, were invited to dinner with Lord Harewood, who then proceeded to ‘pop the question’, as Lloyd-Jones put it. He replied on 9 August 1976 that he would be very glad to accept the post. The fact that he was in employment with ENO meant a certain ‘safety net’ to them, he reflected in 2010, as it would not have been an existential threat to him had the scheme crumbled at the last minute. The close symbiosis with ENO, its role as the ‘umbrella company’ was essential to ENON’s start up. Apart from the administrative support and scores and sets being made available, there was also a sharing of singers. After the first hurdle had been taken, things slowed down considerably. In the summer of 1976, the ENON opening date was postponed to late 1978 (see also Gilbert, 2009, p. 295), mainly because the local government elections in 1977 made politicians cautious, thus making it difficult for the Arts Council to get firm financial commitments. Lord Harewood was frustrated by this and warned against postponing the scheme again, lest the initial surge of enthusiasm should ebb away. His frustration would have been aggravated by the ENO’s Arts Council grant not rising in real terms particularly at a time when inflation was very high (around 20%). The costs, particularly for touring, which had been expected to remain at the same level, rose all the time, making a balanced budget almost impossible to achieve (see also Gilbert, 2009, p. 297). There was very little movement on the ENON scheme between autumn 1976 and summer 1977, when Leeds Council elections took place. In a letter to Rupert Rhymes, Jack Phipps urges him to ‘hold the position’ and to tour ENO for 28 weeks to the 1976 pattern in 1977 (Phipps, 1976). From correspondence, it seems Harewood had given up on the northern company. However, when Labour won the Leeds Council elections in the spring of 1977, things slowly started to come back to life. The fact that the Council had been financially conservative for 18 months had paid off, as there was now money to spend on capital and revenue budgets

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(Arts Council, 1977). Councillor Ken Potts, described as a dynamic and positive force by the Harewoods and by Lloyd-Jones, was enthusiastic about the opera scheme from the start. He also knew how to mobilise civic pride to harness support for the scheme. West Yorkshire at this point had not committed any money to ENON, but it seemed to Jack Phipps that Leeds supporters might try and ‘go it alone’. Looking at the genesis of UK opera companies, it is noticeable that all of them, however differently they came about, had a strong patron figure: Lilian Baylis for Sadler’s Wells/ENO, Idlis Owen for WNO, Alexander Gibson for Scottish Opera — and Lord Harewood can very much be seen as the key figure for ENON’s genesis — of course he was also instrumental to the successes of the Royal Opera House and of ENO from the early 1950s onwards. In 1977, the Labour cabinet minister Kenneth Robinson was appointed as the new Chairman of the Arts Council and consequently left the board of ENO. Lord Harewood told the Arts Council Deputy Chairman Angus Stirling that they had to make a formidable commitment by guaranteeing three seasons in order to enable the ENON scheme to get going, as the local authorities would have to see it working before they committed themselves. By May 1977, he got the desired commitment and the Arts Council agreed to give the go-ahead for ENON to exist from the autumn of 1978. Lloyd-Jones and Lord Harewood maintained a lively correspondence during this time and decided jointly that a possible merger with English Music Theatre (EMT; it was being abolished by the Arts Council) would not be a wise move for the new company. There was a risk that the new company’s identity would be too ‘crowded’ by being an offspring of ENO and a receptacle for EMT, and not given the space to form its own identity (Harewood, 1977; Lloyd-Jones, 1977). The Arts Council wanted a scheme with details of costing and planning for the early seasons to be worked out by August 1977. Even before the go-ahead had been given, many communications were received with regard to the possibilities which the new company could offer. Local authorities seemed particularly excited by the prospect of a permanent, resident orchestra and there were many suggestions about concerts and concert seasons. Richard Phillips (Music Officer of Yorkshire Arts Association, 1977) pitched the possibility of ENON’s orchestra working with local choral societies — and ‘to avoid endless Messiahs and Passions, ENON could take the initiative by offering certain challenging works’. In July 1977, Leeds City Council promised ENON its full backing and the following month Lloyd-Jones started working on the project and had a meeting with the Chief Executive of Leeds City Council. Rupert Rhymes and Lloyd-Jones went on a recce to Leeds and made a detailed list of what the Grand Theatre’s premises could offer and what modifications would be required. Considering possible spaces for offices and rehearsal

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rooms, they also inspected what was then the Plaza Cinema, now the beautifully restored Howard Assembly Room. The Plaza was then a cinema for ‘B’ movies, showing mainly pornographic films, and two amusing accounts exist of the visit: We only had a brief look in the Plaza Cinema, trying to cause minimal distraction to those studying the cultural delights on the screen. (Rhymes, 1997) The manager of Leeds Grand Theatre said ‘one day, this space called the Assembly Room might be quite useful, but at the moment it’s a cinema’… so we went into this cinema which was showing ‘I was a Swedish Nymphomaniac!’ It was up in enormous letters outside. We said to the chap at the door ‘we just want to look at the building!’ and he said ‘oh yes, I’ve met your sort before’. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

Lloyd-Jones commented that Leeds Grand Theatre was not too big: ‘it didn’t encourage us to do another Coliseum — to do an enormous production in our home place and then to try and fit it into Nottingham, York or Hull’. Lord Harewood (2010) also mentioned sheer luck as a factor: the simultaneity of the right people working at the Arts Council at the right time, the Grand Theatre being available and Leeds City Council being disposed towards supporting the new scheme. After some initial reservations, they were happy to put the money on the table (initially £200,000 per year) and over the decades, they have consistently supported their opera company. This was still true in 2013, when Leeds City Council opposed the trend for wideranging cuts to arts budgets by keeping their contribution to Opera North stable in the face of 15% cuts to the company’s Arts Council budget over three years (with an additional cut of 5% for 2015/2016 announced in June 2013). As Leeds Grand Theatre is owned by Leeds City Council, around half of the grant given to Opera North goes back into paying the rent for the company’s annual periods in residence. Back in 1977, there was some disappointment that Manchester did not pose stronger competition for being the home of the new company, but there was general satisfaction about the choice of Leeds and its commitment — not least because of Lord Harewood’s ties with West Yorkshire and the esteem he enjoyed locally. It was also a factor that neither the Manchester Opera House nor the Palace Theatre were in a state to accommodate the full time company. Looking back, Opera North’s Technical and Operations Director, Ric Green, confirmed (2010) that alterations would have been too extensive, with a big old sewer at the back of the Opera House, the diversion of which would have been costly. Nicholas Payne, speaking about Manchester at a later point, adds slightly provocatively that different attitudes reigned in Leeds and Manchester at that time. He contrasts ‘Leeds, who wanted to build something of themselves (and also West Yorkshire) — this kind of identity with a company which we always tried to foster’ with ‘Manchester, who always wanted to “buy in”

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London’ (Payne, 2011). The prospect of the company starting up was received with enthusiasm by the regional and national press, who were positive about operatic ‘decentralisation’. As an unknown author in the Telegraph & Argus (Anonymous, 1978a, 1978b) pointed out, the Leeds productions — whether brand new or restagings of Coliseum originals — would be ‘tailor-made for provincial conditions, not simply “a poor man’s version” of capital culture’. An end to missionary operatic provision was finally in sight.

SETTING UP THE COMPANY From the start, the fledgling company was not going to be a carbon copy of ENO and its policies — Lord Harewood, Edmund Tracey, Lloyd-Jones and other key players agreed early on that ENON would not find itself in a ‘straitjacket’ similar to that of its parent company (see also Gilbert, 2009, p. 305). The straitjackets they might have been referring to were the size of the Coliseum, which restricted repertoire choices, as well as the policy of performing opera exclusively in English. Lord Harewood echoed the spirit of optimism and innovation when he referred to the new venture as ‘the best musical opportunity in this country since the war’. He considered the Grand Theatre to be ‘the perfect home for an opera company bent on making Yorkshire a musical power house’ (quoted in Lennon & Joy, 2006, p. 60). A press conference was held on 22 November 1977, chaired by Brigadier Kenneth Hargreaves (Lord Lieutenant of West Yorkshire), who gave an introduction to the new company and its aspirations in Leeds, also introducing Lloyd-Jones, key board members (Leeds Grand Theatre, West Yorkshire County Council) as well as Jack Phipps from the Arts Council. As soon as the Council had given ENON its twoseason guarantee, the ‘Inaugural meeting of the Northern Steering Committee of English National Opera’ took place at the Coliseum on 14 December 1977 and was chaired by Lord Scarman (Vice-Chairman of the ENO board). At this point, the company had three employees: Lloyd-Jones, Veronica Mountford (Publicity Officer) and Richard Jarman, ENON Advance Manager (‘he acted like John the Baptist in Salome’, Lloyd-Jones recalled in 2010, ‘alerting everyone to the new company: behold, it’s coming!’). The eventual independence of the company was written into the minutes. The post of General Administrator was not planned at first, Lord Harewood assuming that the phone connection with ENO would be sufficient when decisions needed to be made. But it quickly transpired (and Lloyd-Jones was very insistent) that someone was needed in situ. Graham Marchant was appointed in December 1977. He had previously been the General Manager of the English Music Theatre company and, before that, Administrator of the Actors’ company (a touring theatre company lead by Ian

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McKellen).4 Marchant’s appointment turned out to be an excellent one, as everybody confirms. He and Lloyd-Jones forged a very close working relationship and his managerial, financial and theatrical competence was exactly what was needed for the company’s first seasons. The small, but growing nucleus of ENON’s administration moved into three offices in the Civic Hall, a short walk from Leeds Grand Theatre. Graham Marchant had an office to himself (kindly given up by the Leader of the Council, Lloyd-Jones remembers). Lloyd-Jones shared an office with his secretary, his deputy Clive Timms, the orchestral manager Ian Killik, Roger Taylor (Marchant’s assistant) and the company Manager. ‘And then there was another room with everybody else, bashing away at typewriters …’. Virtually all the singers were contracted by ENO and the agreement with the Arts Council was that they would move from one operation to another without incurring costs, as Lord Harewood recalled. ‘That meant that singers who were understudying for ENO could actually come up and do parts with us which they did as if they were on tour’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010). Singers at ENO had a clause in their contract that required them to perform for ENON, but it was not quite the same as a touring arrangement, as there was no allowance for subsistence, something that would be revisited in the early years of the company’s existence. Both Lloyd-Jones and Lord Harewood recalled in detail the exhausting process of auditioning for a full orchestra and chorus in early 1978. The standard was high, and musicians were young. Lloyd-Jones and his wife Carol were staying at Harewood House when in Leeds (he was working for ENO full time) and the daily updates on auditions were a delight to the Harewoods. In all, Lloyd-Jones and Ian Killik heard some 300 orchestral auditions. Lady Harewood: I remember him [Lloyd-Jones] saying one day ‘I’ve found the absolutely ideal person to be the leader, he’s a wonderful, wonderful violinist, he’s got everything — but the trouble is, he’s only 22!’ Lord Harewood: David Greed. The youngest leader in the country. One of the rocks on which the company was founded. (Harewood, 2010)

The thoroughness of the process is evidenced by the fact that many founder members, particularly in the orchestra and in the chorus, worked for the company for the rest of their professional lives. The Orchestra of Opera North remains the only orchestra in the United Kingdom that has the full-time dual role of opera and symphony orchestra and runs its own seasons of concerts across the North of England. This means the orchestra is performing when the company is ‘between 4

As a consultant, Graham Marchant later worked with the Southbank Centre, the Royal Shakespeare company, Northern Ballet, English Touring Opera, Music Theatre Wales and Rambert Dance company, among others. He also led an independent inquiry into the Royal Opera House’s scheme to have a northern base at Manchester’s Palace Theatre in 2008 (http://press.artscouncil.org.uk/content/detail.aspx?releaseid=384&newsareaid=2).

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seasons’, i.e. having finished a cycle of performing at Leeds Grand Theatre and on tour, and rehearsing for its next season. During the weeks of the orchestra’s involvement in the rehearsal and performance process, concert activity is more difficult to fit in, as the eight weekly sessions are filled by opera rehearsals. Back in early 1978, there was a lively debate about the orchestra’s name. Their two strands of activity called for an independent name, akin to continental conventions, where this model is much more common (names are, e.g. The Gürzenich (Cologne), the State Orchestra (Stuttgart, Munich et al.)). The orchestra’s founding name was decided on as English Northern Philharmonia. You could have called it Northern Philharmonia, but I said ‘Is it the Finnish Northern Philharmonia, is it the Swedish Northern Philharmonia?!’ You’ve got to have ‘English’ in there somewhere! The Northern Sinfonia in Newcastle has this problem all the time when they go abroad. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

A draft budget appeared in early 1978, projecting a total expenditure of £729,000 for the first financial year, an income around £130,000 and grants of over £1m. This made for a deficit of £54,000 (Draft budget 1978). The Steering Committee met in Leeds for the first time on 24 February 1978. By this time, Lloyd-Jones had appointed Clive Timms and Ian Killik, John PryceJones (Chorus Master) followed soon after. Many steering group members transferred to the ENON Board once the company became independent in 1981: Gordon Linacre, Peter Sparling (at that time Chairman of Leeds Grand Theatre) and Baron Edward Boyle (Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University). On 10 March 1978, the inaugural meeting of the Friends of ENON took place in Leeds Civic Hall with Lord Harewood, Lloyd-Jones and Graham Marchant; they already presented substantial numbers. Lord Harewood was keen that a resident producer and a small number of principal singers should be appointed. This was consistent with his frequently expressed belief in the ensemble-model, as it was practiced by most central European countries. Lloyd-Jones was sceptical about employing singers on permanent contracts, because of the company’s size: if the repertoire of a company like ENO had, say, 25 operas a year, they could be well deployed, he explained, but with around 11 productions, it would mean often putting people in unsuitable roles, as they had to be used or else paid for not working. It was nevertheless decided that the appointments should go ahead, so Patrick Libby became resident producer, directing seven productions and their revivals in the first few years. The five singers were Joy Roberts (Soprano, married to Clive Timms), Claire Powell (Mezzo), Robert Ferguson (Tenor), John Rawnsley (Baritone) and John Tranter (Bass).

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THE FIRST SEASONS Lloyd-Jones chose Samson et Dalila (Saint-Saëns) as the inaugural production over The Flying Dutchman, which he had also considered. He decided Samson would be preferable, because it had not been done in the United Kingdom for about 20 years: … and something I wanted for the first production was a work that involved the orchestra and chorus the whole time. I didn’t want the trombones to say ‘can we go off for an hour and a half’ — I wanted almost a symphonic thing. The chorus are not involved in Act 2, but my god, they’re involved in Acts 1 and 3! (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

He also wanted it to be understood that although the new company was English National Opera North, it was not carbon copy of English National Opera and its policy of singing in English, so Samson was performed in French. While it was an unexpected choice, the story was reasonably well known — a consideration for the first night audience — and had a degree of the spectacular, particularly in the last 30 seconds of the opera, when the temple falls down. Rehearsals started in late September, conducted by Lloyd-Jones and directed by Patrick Libby, and a little later for the double bill of Les Mamelles de Tiresias and Dido and Aeneas. The two short pieces were directed by John Copley (Tiresias) and Ian Watt-Smith (Dido) and conducted by Clive Timms. Lloyd-Jones calls it a ‘miracle’ that everything came together. ‘I rehearsed the orchestra until they were nearly screaming, well, the few older members, that is. I had sectional rehearsals, we dissected every note … John Pryce-Jones did the same with the chorus’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010). Critics called the new company ‘a reality greater than the promise’ and commented that ‘a star was born’ in Leeds (see Leeks, 2003, p. 12; Lennon & Joy, 2006, p. 60). With London dominating over regional arts provision, making for a ‘provincial’ feel in cities like Leeds, this really was an act of faith in the future. The confidence of the new company is evident in Lloyd-Jones’s introduction to ENON’s first season. He expressed delight that such a large region and population should at last have their own company, ending ‘this shameful state of affairs’ — ‘not gradually, by means of occasional seasons, but at a stroke with the creation of a full-time opera company working the whole year round from the Grand Theatre in Leeds’ (Lloyd-Jones, 1978). While the company had high aspirations, Lloyd-Jones also set the stakes high for the audience: Think of what you are giving your audience and think of what you should be giving them. The company should be run to suit its audiences, which is not the same thing as giving them what they want. (Lloyd-Jones, 1978)

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1978/1979 ENON opened on 15 November 1978 with Samson et Dalila, which was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. Both the company’s triumphant emergence and the success of the opening night were referred to as ‘a near miracle’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 32). The mixture of anticipation and quality in preparation led to what both Lloyd-Jones and Lord Harewood remember as an ecstatic reception by the audience, made up of Leeds dignitaries, operatic heavyweights, many critics and a stronghold of new subscribers and supporters (‘received like the second coming’, Walsh, 1978). The excitement and good will were tangible (‘No one will deny the warmth of unofficial response to the formation of an opera company in Northern England, even before David Lloyd-Jones gave the first down-beat of Samson et Dalila’; Mann, 1978). There was a great deal of relief at the rapturous reaction — and just as importantly at the excellent reviews. LloydJones half-jokingly remarks that the motto of the first night could have been ‘the importance of pleasing Ernest Bradbury’, because the Yorkshire Post was so widely read in Leeds and the notoriously harsh critic carried a lot of critical weight. His overnight review (Bradbury, 1978) abounded with superlatives: ‘fulfilment is now here, and beyond wildest expectations’ — ‘marvellous’ — ‘extraordinarily magnificent’. The orchestra was Illustration 1. 1978/1979 — Samson & Dalila. Katherine the focus of everyone’s praise, Bradbury describing them as ‘a first-rate, Pring (Dalila), Gilbert Py (Samson). Photo: Forbes well-disciplined, superbly streamlined orchestra, mainly of young players’, Henderson. playing with ‘majesty and sensitivity’. His praise was echoed by the national newspapers, the word ‘triumph’ and ‘miracle’ frequently used. Alan Blyth (1979, p. 82) struck a humorous note: ‘The temple’s collapse was well managed, and as colleagues have suggested, perhaps a hint to any Northern Philistines of the fate that awaits them if they do not support this excellent new venture’. The chorus was also rated as outstanding and there was a rapturous reception for the ensemble, notably Gilbert Py (Samson) and Katherine Pring (Dalila).

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While the main critical attention was on the opening performance of Samson et Dalila, the two one-act operas, Les Mamelles de Tiresias and Dido and Aeneas, as well as La Bohème (directed by Stephen Pimlott, in a Sadler’s Wells set by Margaret Harris), also drew enthusiastic responses. The new company showcased its three productions in Leeds between 15 and 25 November, then moved to Nottingham for a few days, performed a more extensive Christmas season in Leeds with a set of three different productions (Orpheus in the Underworld (originally from Sadler’s Well and revived by its director, Wendy Toye), The Magic Flute and Hansel and Gretel) and then toured them to Doncaster, Billingham, Hull and Stratford, which took about a month. The fact that ENON had been able to convince the administrators of the Grand Theatre that the company should be resident during the coveted Pantomime season shows confidence on both sides — this was even mentioned in Sinclair’s history of the Arts Council: ‘The creation of ENON in Leeds had attracted large numbers of people even at traditional pantomime time’ (Sinclair, 1995, p. 224). The company had started with productions of a high standard, showcasing its excellent new chorus and orchestra, and had already asserted itself as not doing the obvious. Both the opening productions represented unexpected, interesting choices for which the company would become renowned. After Samson, the unusual combination of Poulenc’s Mamelles and Purcell’s Dido confirmed this. In decades to come, innovative one-act operas often sparked interest from the critics. In 1981, Mamelles was paired with Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky) and Dido and Aeneas has been paired no fewer than three times: first with Mamelles, once with Les Noces in 2007 (Stravinsky) and most recently with La Voix Humaine in 2013. The company forged long-term artistic associations from its early years: David Parry, for example, who still regularly works at Opera North, conducted Die Fledermaus in the inaugural season, with Sheila Armstrong as Rosalinde and Dad’s Army favourite Clive Dunn as Frosch. ENON’s first year saw an extraordinary range of touring activity — not just in terms of the number of venues, but across a range of sizes, taking in smaller houses, such as Doncaster, Barnsley, Scarborough and Darlington with a small-scale Figaro. The main house productions travelled to Norwich, Bradford, Manchester Opera House and Hull. There were also three small-scale projects on offer: evenings of Offenbach, Viennese Operetta and Stendhal’s Life of Rossini at a cost of £400 each for the touring venues. Touring met with great critical and public acclaim — save the minor disaster where someone pressed the button a bit too early in Act 3 of Samson et Dalila in Nottingham and the temple collapsed prematurely. Ramon Remedios, brother of Alberto, was singing his one and only Samson on tour. It would have taken 45 minutes to build it back up, so the performance carried on and it was pretended that the already collapsed temple was collapsing in the correct place at the end of the opera.

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So, from early 1979 onwards, ENON’s three to four annual tours replaced ENO’s two-company spring tour; the latter would only rarely tour after this time (notably to the United States in 1984 and to the Soviet Union in 1990). ENON also set up a relationship with its German twin city, Dortmund, in June 1979 and took its production of Peter Grimes there alongside Samson et Dalila. Scottish Opera’s set and costumes for Grimes were borrowed at short notice, as the ones that came with Colin Graham’s production at La Monnaie in Brussels did not match the dimensions of the Grand Theatre. The large number of touring venues was not something the company could sustain and the first seasons were about testing the boundaries, finding the most suitable venues and considering budgetary restrictions and technical specifications, ticket sales, co-operation of the touring venue in promoting ENON’s performances and not least local financial backing. The first casualty was Bradford in 1979, although the company would return there in decades to come (Anonymous, Telegraph & Argus, 1979a). But generally the words of Graham Marchant summarise the feeling about ENON: ‘One is at home. We belong. The audience responds to us as theirs’ (quoted in Anonymous, The Stage, 1979b). An Appeal Fund (President: Lord Harewood) was launched as a permanent trust, to raise funds for the continuing operations of ENON and to establish the company’s foundations on a sound financial basis. The reason was simple: ENON had no significant endowments and under the conditions at least an extra £1,000,000 a year would be needed for the work. There was a financial setback in February 1979, when West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council’s (WYMCC) vote on subsidising ENON was defeated unexpectedly with 17 votes against 15 (Phipps, 1979). Other county and metropolitan councils continued their contributions when, unaccountably, the ‘host’ county could not agree to do so. This was balanced by news in February 1979 that the company’s Arts Council grant would be raised from half a million to a million (Arts Council Finance Director, 1979). In summary, ENON received £200,000 from Leeds City Council, £25,000 from North Yorkshire County Council, £20,000 from Humberside, around £34,000 from South Yorkshire and around £10,000 from Yorkshire Arts Organisations. There are many things that the company established in its first few years of existence — the four seasons in Leeds, lasting around five weeks each, followed by touring, the concert programmes by the English Northern Philharmonia (ENP hereafter) and the basic structure of preparation periods and rehearsal processes. These were difficult to facilitate, and never more so than in the first few ENON years. The Leeds Grand Theatre had created a rehearsal room below the stage by taking out the under stage pantomime machinery after ENON’s first year. This space could double as a chorus rehearsal space for their musical rep calls, but was not big enough for the orchestra to rehearse in. Also, only one of the typically three productions in preparation for the next

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season could find space in the Grand Theatre rehearsal room, so the other two and the orchestra would be scattered all over Leeds, in spaces such as the Astoria on Roundhay Road, the Salem Institute on Hunslet Road, the City Varieties Music Hall, St Martin’s Church Hall on Chapeltown Road and Blenheim Hall, off Woodhouse Lane. Later, the orchestra established a ‘residency’ at the Polish Catholic Centre and then at the West Park Centre, until an in-house rehearsal space became available in 2008 with the restoration of the Howard Assembly Room. Conditions were not much easier once the shows were touring: ‘Members of the orchestra were asked to avoid using the Maestro’s room as a practice room when it was also being used by the technical staff’ (ENON Committee Minutes, 15 April 1979). There were imaginative ways of saving money; one of them was remembered by Lloyd-Jones in conversation: The City Library used to have sets of orchestral parts, so in the early days, when we didn’t have much money, I used to say to the librarian Andy Fairley ‘look, they’ve got Sibelius’s 3rd there and it’s completely new!’ So we used to take them out and bow it and annotate it, and then when we took them back, they’d say ‘Ah, but you’ve ruined them’ — and I’d say ‘We should charge you for the bowings in this set, you’ve got a fantastic, professional set of bowings, you can’t play the thing without them!’ — ‘Well, we aren’t used to this’ — ‘No, because you’ve not had a professional opera company around before!’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

The 1979 general election was won by the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister on 4 May. Her premiership was to have profound consequences on the arts and state funding in the United Kingdom. My interviewees, while talking about the company’s early years, all agreed that had the opening been delayed by just six months, ENON might never have existed (‘1978 was a close thing!’, Lloyd-Jones, 2010). While real difficulty was not going to strike until a few years later, the process whereby the Arts Council moved from ally to gatekeeper had begun.

1979/1980 We want to convince the public at large that they and the elite are one. (Harewood, 1979)

In its first full season, 1979/1980, the company impressed with ambitious and unusual repertoire choices: its first Wagner and Strauss operas, as well as a rarity with local connections: the Bradford-born composer Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet. ENON also made appearances in miners’ social clubs in South Yorkshire (‘Pints and Puccini’) in a series of concerts and were reported to have coped very well with ‘smoky rooms, low ceilings with acoustic tiles, constant use of the bar, barracking

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(friendly) and eyeball-to-eyeball contact’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010). The audiences were enthusiastic and ranged in numbers from about 100 to over 300. The first references to ENON becoming independent from ENO can be found even before the company launched, in spring 1978. In a document titled ‘Future Management of ENON’ it is stated that the company was set up under the ‘auspices of ENO in London. The intention was that the company should eventually become fully independent, both artistically and financially’ (ENON Committee Minutes, 17 February 1978). Lloyd-Jones mentioned that it was always the plan and the expectation: It was something planned from the very outset. I’ve always compared it to a moon rocket — we had the kind of rocket booster at the bottom, which was ENO, but we had the actual spaceship, ENON, which then took off on its own as Opera North […] it was just planned we should get started with 9–12 operas, we needed a bit of help, we would need to borrow orchestral parts and scores and singers — those were the three main things. But that of course lightened the financial burden right from the start. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

Illustration 2. 1979/1980 — A Village Romeo and Juliet. Laureen Livingstone (Vreli), Adrian Martin (Sali), Stuart Harling (The Dark Fiddler). Photo: Colin Gordon.

There was to be a continuing arrangement with ENO, whereby they would only charge for sets and costumes on the basis of repair and maintenance and would still lend some chorus and orchestra material. The only financial link between the two companies that remained to be clarified was the exchange of singers. As referred to

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above by Lord Harewood, singers were not happy with the arrangement that working in Leeds was a part of their ENO contract. The fact that they were performing in Leeds, but not being paid any more to cover the costs of being away from home left some of them ‘tremendously out of pocket’, according to Lord Harewood, and amendments were made in that a weekly allowance was added to cover accommodation and subsistence. The Arts Council was also in favour of independence, Jack Phipps remarking that it would cement the company’s local standing and image even more. There was also the question of its name to be decided on, and a letter by ENON Chairman Gordon Linacre summarises discussions: You said you would like to know what new name for the company would be put forward. The problems that the Executive Committee have faced in this are ones of constraint. With ‘Royal’, ‘English’, ‘Welsh’ and ‘Scottish’ already established; eschewing titles that would confuse rather than illuminate and rejecting those that would, by definition, restrict the proprietorship of the company to a population less than that we aim at, we have found ‘Opera North’ not only the least objectionable on the list, but we are beginning even to like it. (Linacre, 1980)

Gerald Larner of The Guardian (1980) remarked that the company had quite a safe start due to necessity and financial precariousness — ‘Common sense and careful management’ had thus brought an 89% capacity audience to the Grand Theatre in the first financial year and 91% in the second. ENON was now, however, ‘starting to speak with its own voice’, rather than being an extension of ENO. Larner comes to this assessment particularly through the company’s production of Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet in spring 1980. It could be argued that choices such as the Poulenc and Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Mines of Sulphur showed the company was ready to tackle lesser known repertoire right from the start, raring to go as soon as their position was secure enough. Of course, a benchmark of ‘speaking with its own voice’ was the number of new productions, not the ‘recycled’ ones that originated from Sadler’s Wells (as The Mines of Sulphur had). As soon as there was a little more leeway, progressive and leftfield programming choices could be tackled — and there was confidence the audience would take lesser known pieces on board. It was still a daily struggle to do the work needed to achieve the quality expected of ENON. Lloyd-Jones told the Yorkshire Post’s Ernest Bradbury that the company was

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‘… grossly — and I use that word advisedly — understaffed at the moment. We are all doing two or three jobs compared with other regional companies. For two reasons, partly financial, and partly because in a sense we still have the Coliseum [ENO] behind us. […] So although the initial thinking was to have a small staff and make savings by being affiliated to the Coliseum, in practice it just means that we work twice as hard’. (quoted in Bradbury, 1980)

As to its flexible approach, the company made decisions in which language to perform on a case-by-case basis. This meant that cornerstones of the repertoire, such as Der Rosenkavalier (in a revival of John Copley’s ENO production) and The Flying Dutchman (in a revival of Basil Coleman’s production) were sung in English. Nabucco, in a new production by Stephen Pimlott (designer: Stefanos Lazaridis) was sung in Italian and was ‘carefully prepared musically’ by Elgar Howarth. There has always been a tendency for the company to do Italian operas (particularly those with quite schematic plots) in Italian because they are led by the singing. ‘Chorus and orchestra (along with the Friends) continue to be the young company’s strongest asset, and Nabucco was reported to be “full of bold strokes”’: ‘Jehova’s thunderbolt split the palace wall and dislodged the segment of crumpet on which Nebuchadnezzar was standing’. He emerged moments later from the hole on all fours — ‘very Blake, very effective’. Patrick Magee’s voice was heard reciting the score’s quotations from Jeremiah introducing each act in ‘sepulchral tones’ in a ‘wildly melodramatic, but convincing style’ (all quotations: Milnes, 1980a, pp. 600–601). With these heavyweights in the repertoire, critics attribute the company with ‘coming of age’ (e.g. Horsfall, 1980). There is something about performing Wagner which brings forth declarations of maturity or notions of a ‘proper’ opera company, as the reactions to Opera North’s 2011–2014 fully staged concert Ring cycle prove (see below). This could be connected with the considerable resources needed to stage Wagner or with the composer’s dedicated fan base. Performing new works, on the other hand, results in statements along the line of ‘the company begins to speak with its own voice’. ENON’s emerging distinctive production style was often seen as a marker of individuality and innovation, and of emancipation from its ‘mother company’, ENO. At this early stage in its history (or due to the focus on value for money anecdotally associated with Yorkshire identity?), economic considerations were often discussed in reviews. Rodney Milnes talked about ‘singing [that] was of a standard one could realistically expect in the circumstances. Only a handful of singers can weather this kind of vocal writing and their fees are presumably beyond ENON’s budget’ (Milnes, 1980a, p. 600). Similarly, Arthur Jacobs wrote about The Mines of Sulphur in value-for-money terms: I imagine the company’s management defending the choice of opera by asking what other work by a living British composer would a) grip the audience b) exist in a read-made and available production and c) is so economical to produce — with ten soloists, no chorus and a single set. I confess I do not know the answer. (Jacobs, 1980, p. 500)

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Looking at the company’s way of representing itself, it is interesting to note that ENON’s logo starts undergoing changes: from early 1980s, the words ‘English National’ appear in smaller print, with ‘Opera North’ becoming larger and bolder. Frederick Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was directed by Patrick Libby. ‘Here is an opera that breaks every rule in the book yet in a good performance, which this was, can be extraordinarily moving’. ‘Hopeless, but a masterpiece’ was Rodney Milnes’s verdict (1980b). Antony Besch returned to revive his acclaimed Sadler’s Wells production of Rossini’s Count Ory, 17 years old at this point. The first full season had indeed been a full one: important 20th century works, core Italian and German 19th century repertoire, a deft balance of comedy and tragedy, and a company full of drive and ambition.

1980/1981 Classical modernity was well-represented in this season: works by Janáček, Stravinsky and Poulenc were combined with core repertoire by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini and Mozart and other important cornerstones of opera and operetta repertoire, such as Offenbach, Lehar and Weber. The company’s first Janáĉek, Jenůfa, was acquired from WNO/Scottish Opera’s very successful cycle of the composer’s work, whose operas were to become a significant red thread of the Opera North repertoire in years to come. It was met with ‘full-throated’ acclaim by the audience and inspired praise from Michael Kennedy Who would have prophesied, even ten years ago, that the day would soon come when a repertory opera company, established courageously in the English provinces, would open only its third season (and at a time of economic stringency which encourages box-office timidity) with a Janáĉek opera? (Kennedy, 1980)

It was performed in English, in a translation by Edward Downes and Otakar Kraus.5 The Tales of Hoffman was premiered in a new production by Anthony Besch on New Year’s Eve, providing a ‘sober but intelligent’ approach; the chorus and orchestra were praised for producing musicianship which reflected their enthusiasm for their work (Milnes, 1981). ENON’s first Freischütz was also performed in translation (David Parry and John Cox, with dialogues adapted by Stephen Pimlott) and drew praise for its supernatural effects, whereas Don Giovanni (in a Scottish Opera 5

Otakar Kraus’s grandson Anthony has been on Opera North’s music staff since 2003.

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production by David Pountney) was applauded for its Personenregie (Forbes, 1980, p. 962). The new company could take pride in its artistic achievements and in having established itself so quickly as one of the major cultural players in Leeds and the North of England. On the verge of independence, the main threat was underfunding, lack of rehearsal space and there were some other practical issues (in no particular order): no pension fund, no sickness provision, no hand basins in toilets, no permanently manned stage door and approximately half of similar companies’ administrative staff (ENON Board Minutes, 14 October 1980). At this time, Graham Marchant was planning for legal independence to come into force on 29 March 1981 — in effect, the document was dated 13 March 1981.6 He was going to announce this to the public at the same time as launching the 1981/1982 season, which featured another change: Manchester would step up to be the company’s shared base with its own subscription series. For the autumn, winter and spring seasons, the company would play in Leeds, plus two weeks in Manchester and then go on tour. Opera North would still be producing in Leeds, but would open one new production a year in Manchester in the winter season and then bring it back for the Christmas season in Leeds. Rehearsals would still take place in Leeds, as the Manchester Palace Theatre was not equipped as a producing theatre (ENON Board Minutes, 14 October 1980). Marchant, with Lloyd-Jones and the Board behind him, had wanted to readjust the balance between Leeds and Manchester and give Manchester a primary position in comparison to the other touring venues. The issue of other companies’ presence in Manchester had been negotiated by presenting a joint subscription series with Glyndebourne Touring Opera (GTO). When ENON was first launched, there had been some critical voices from across the Pennines about the company going to Leeds, but there had not been enough financial commitment from Manchester City Council and there was the added problem of a suitable permanent base. Referring back to this, Lloyd-Jones wrote on the subscription leaflet that, as was shown by ‘Britain’s two other major regional opera companies, the Welsh and Scottish […] the ultimate ideal of serving the public is only achieved by having a dually based company (Cardiff-Birmingham; Glasgow-Edinburgh)’. … and so it is with enormous pleasure and keen anticipation that Opera North now comes to the sumptuously refurbished Palace Theatre to fulfil its initial intention of becoming a truly northern, trans-Pennine company. (Lloyd-Jones, 1981a)

Unfortunately, the audience did not take up this enthusiastic invitation in sufficient numbers to see the trans-Pennine balance turn into a more permanent arrangement.

6

Certificate of Incorporation of a Private Limited company No. 1550778.

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The first board meeting as an independent company took place on 2 July 1981. Opera North was limited by guarantee through its subscribers. All members of the Board were automatically on the Council (40 members), which appointed the Board, whereas the Board was to appoint new members of the Council. A specific resolution was passed, empowering Graham Marchant to sign contracts on behalf of directors (Opera North Board Minutes, 2 July 1981). In one of several articles at the start of the 1980s, Rodney Milnes reflected on the 1970s as ‘An eventful decade’ (Milnes, 1980c), with the healthy development of more opera being available, particularly through the Arts Council’s support of regional companies, calling this ‘perhaps the most heartening single trend of the last 10 years’. Opera North’s auspicious start and the company’s sense of fresh talent and optimism were to be valuable assets in some of the battles to come during the next decade.

PERIOD OF ASSERTION 1981–1993 1981/1982 Opera North opened its first ‘independent’ season with a tried-and-tested production of Carmen (Copley/Lazaridis) from 1970, which had first been shown in Leeds in 1979/1980. Arthur Jacobs, enjoying the performance, made some observations about the Leeds audience, which were meant in a positive spirit, but have quite a patronising subtext: Saturday night at the ‘Grand’: a packed audience of Yorkshire people who surely regard Opera North as their own in the way they regard Leeds United or Huddersfield Town. And, just as they are aware of what makes good football, so they give the impression of knowing what makes an operatic money’s-worth. Many have seen Carmen before and not a few have sung in an amateur production or in one of those concert selections cherished among Yorkshire’s choral societies. This was an audience as ready to applaud a neat, lively delivery of the smugglers’ quintet as a hot-blooded Habanera or a full-throated tenor outpouring of the flower song. (Jacobs, 1981, p. 1189)

A new and highly acclaimed Macbeth, directed by Michael Geliot, was a particular success for John Rawnsley and Elizabeth Vaughan as the Macbeths, as well as for the chorus and orchestra. It was accompanied by successful audience favourites, Hansel and Gretel and Wendy Toye’s Orpheus (17 years old by now, but still coming across as a sparkly entertainment). The company then gained an unexpected new production: The Bartered Bride was planned as a revival of Scottish Opera’s

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Illustration 3. 1981/1982 — The Bartered Bride. Thomas Lawlor (Kecal), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Asadour Guzelian.

Illustration 4. 1980/1981 — Carmen. Ann Howard (Carmen). Photo: Donald Southern/Royal Opera House/ArenaPAL.

production by David Pountney, but when this deal did not come to pass at short notice, Stephen Pimlott was asked to direct a new production (with designs by Stefanos Lazaridis). Critics wrote of busy, plausible scenes by an ‘inventive young producer’ and a ‘credible, flexible set’ (Milnes, 1982, p. 203). The air balloon in the circus scene was a particular hit with audiences. The Bartered Bride was the first Opera North production lined up to open in Manchester rather than Leeds — although Robert Cockroft (1981) remarked that it ‘must rank as the company’s most thoroughly opened opera’. It had seen an unofficial premiere in Hull, the official first night at Manchester’s Palace Theatre, an abortive Leeds first night without its set due to severe winter weather — and it finally opened ‘properly’ for the Christmas season at Leeds Grand Theatre.

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Three other new productions (Manon Lescaut, Così fan tutte and Werther) complemented other successful revivals, such as The Flying Dutchman (the first revival of Basil Coleman’s 1979 production) and Nabucco, a great success for Norman Bailey and Pauline Tinsley in the leading parts. With administrative independence achieved, the company concentrated on expanding its artistic integrity. Even though the public and the critics showed understanding and pragmatism, there was no question of accepting the current situation as the status quo within the company. Robert Cockroft said the company had become […] unduly coy about the provenance of its productions. It is well enough known that the young company exists on a tight budget and its regular audiences have accepted that hand-me-downs from other companies must form part of its repertory. So for the ‘new’ productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Manon Lescaut, it was necessary to read ‘newish’, even though the fact that both were borrowed in varying degrees from WNO was not immediately acknowledged. What mattered to the majority, however, was that the productions […] were new to Leeds. (Cockroft, 1982)

The need to work out production processes without overloading staff was another key concern. Martin Dreyer noted in an interview with Mike Roberts, Opera North’s technical manager, that the stage crew’s schedule for November 1982 consisted of a ‘solid month of seven-day working weeks, starting at 9 am and finishing at 11 pm, plus at least one additional four-hour stint from midnight to 4 am when a set has to be completely changed in time for morning rehearsals’ (Dreyer, 1982). The other major companies worked on a double-shift system, but that was not fundable for Opera North. The unevenness in funding across the UK companies worsened morale by forcing Opera North to scrimp and save, and to over-stretch staff and their goodwill. WNO and Scottish Opera, as the companies that could most consistently compared to Opera North for repertoire turnover and volume of touring, received up to £1m more Arts Council and local funding a year than Opera North did. Basil Deane, the Arts Council’s Director of Music, admitted in a letter that expectations of local support and philanthropy, though they had materialised, had been over-optimistic. ‘There is no doubt that Opera North is under-funded, and any jealousy shown towards other companies is understandable. It is obvious from these figures [in comparison with WNO] that Opera North have a strong case for additional funding’ (Deane, 1981). The ENO productions had helped to keep production costs down in the first two years, but the supply was not endless and productions that originated in the 1960s could not be revived forever. But mounting four seasons of their own was ‘something which they really cannot do on their present funding, if they are to keep up the highest artistic standards’ as Deane conceded. Not everyone at the Arts Council was as sympathetic, and the company’s independence was used on some occasions to see it

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as a ‘regional company’, declaring this the reason for the inequalities in funding with other companies (Arts Council Finance Director, 1981).7 While Opera North was steadily fighting its corner with funders and donors, the political climate-change was taking hold. The appointment of William Rees-Mogg (former editor of The Times) as Chairman of the Arts Council in 1982 was seen as a political intervention, as was Luke Rittner’s succession of Sir Roy Shaw as Secretary General (Sinclair, 1995, p. 251). Shaw described Rees-Mogg a ‘very political animal. He was put in to put the Arts Council right — to put it to the right’. He was the first journalist to run the Council (Sinclair, 1995, p. 253). ‘William Rees-Mogg was certainly anxious to be an executive chairman. When I retired, he became just that and the role of Sec-Gen was quietly diminished’ (Shaw quoted in Sinclair, 1995, p. 253). In an interview with The Times, Rees-Mogg explained his view: Arts grants should be primarily ‘a consumer and not a producer subsidy […] Throughout my period, some members of the Council would have preferred a subsidy policy aimed more directly at the artist — and particularly the experimental artist. […] Ought the health service to exist for the medical and administrative staff, or for the patients? Ought arts funding to be for the artists or for the audiences?’ (Rees-Mogg quoted in Sinclair, 1995, p. 254)

The differing views of many Arts Council leaders were often expressed through botanical analogies, such as the ‘few, but roses’ principles coined by Roy Shaw — meaning the very best art should be supported and made available to the people by the Council. Spreading access, however, was becoming as important as raising standards, which Shaw lamented: ‘it would be folly to starve the roses and change to a policy of “many, but dandelions”’ (Shaw quoted in Sinclair, 1995, p. 214). He did, however, agree with a drive towards a higher level of arts education, so the arts could be appreciated more widely. The other principle that has always been associated with the Arts Council since its establishment was the ‘arm’s length policy’. Whenever the Council was seen to intervene too closely in the programming decisions or the day-to-day running of companies, a violation of this principle was claimed. However, the clear political allegiance of Rees-Mogg and his subsequent decisions made these cries more sustained than they had been previously. ‘In truth, I think the answer is that, now Opera North has severed its connection with a national company it becomes a regional company (unlike the Scottish and Welsh National Opera companies). This is exactly parallel in Drama Department where the gap between the national companies and the regional companies is much greater (£2.55m for the RSC this year against £370,000 for Bristol Old Vic being the largest regional drama subsidy. Leeds Playhouse receives £190,000) — Memo from AC Finance Director to Regional Director, 17 November 1981.

7

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Graham Marchant had announced his resignation in 1981. Highly respected as one of the Opera North founders, everyone in the company was sad to see him go. Lloyd-Jones explained the rapport he and Graham Marchant had enjoyed: ‘Graham is a straight theatre-man, with a passion for opera, I’m a straight music-man with a passion for theatre, so we have different viewpoints but they always seem to converge’ (Lloyd-Jones, 1981b). Marchant had said from the start, however, that he only envisaged working in Leeds (also meaning ‘away from London’) for a few years and that his preference lay with starting ventures and then looking for the next challenge, as both Lord Harewood and Lloyd-Jones explained in interview. Nicholas Payne was on the shortlist for the post, as was the Arts Council’s Jack Phipps, one of the ‘midwives’ of Opera North in the mid-1970s; he and Payne bumped into each other on their way to and from the station. With Brian McMaster, Payne had overseen a transformation at WNO from what he called ‘something that was semi-amateur into something professional and that was big and quite fractious’. He had been approached by Scottish Opera in the early 1980s, but had decided the organisation did not suit him at that time. Payne recalls the interview with Gordon Linacre, Lord Harewood, Councillor Elizabeth Nash, Tom McDonald and David Lloyd-Jones. According to Lord Harewood’s feedback to him some years later, he had not presented himself as well as had been expected: Fortunately, Harewood did know what I could do and apparently, as I afterwards learned, said to them ‘that may have been a bad interview, but he’s the right man for the job’. And I think that in a way, I was, because five years sorting out money, planning, industrial relations, marketing, dramaturgy and so on was very good training. They knew that I knew the nuts and bolts of it. (Payne, 2011)

While Payne says he had been very happy at WNO, he was excited by the potential offered by running the newly independent Opera North — he was not interested in being subservient to a London-based organisation, although he very much liked and admired Lord Harewood and David Lloyd-Jones for the work they had done for both companies. He found on arrival that ‘the strengths were the orchestra and chorus and that says something about David and Graham, but it also says something about Killick and Pryce-Jones’, the orchestra manager and chorus master.

1982/1983 In about 1982, I said to Graham ‘Look, we’ve got to do an opera that really is our opera, but something that hasn’t been seen for yonks in Great Britain, something that’s a household name but which hasn’t been done professionally since 1937’. That was Borodin’s Prince Igor, which was of course a great speciality of mine. I said ‘we must do something so they can say “only at Opera North can you see Prince Igor!”’ He said

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‘alright’, and it was quite expensive, additional extra chorus, overtime, ballet, etc, and then Graham said ‘sorry David, but we just cannot afford it’ and I said ‘but we MUST do it, we’ve got to schedule it’ — ‘I’m sorry’ and so on. So, I said ‘right, leave it to me’ and in three weeks I raised £85.000 from Norwest Holst, in 1982! Yes! (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

The sponsorship for Prince Igor was believed to be the largest ever received by a regional opera company for a single production (Opera North Press Release, 17 September 1982). Musically, the production was a milestone for chorus and orchestra, brilliantly led by Lloyd-Jones, who had gone to Moscow to consult Borodin’s manuscripts, as well as collaborating with Stephen Pimlott (also a Russian speaker) on a new translation. The company performed a reworked production of John Copley’s production of Madama Butterfly in December 1982. Lloyd-Jones (2010) called it ‘very simple, with a striking set, which we did in Italian, even though I’m a great believer in performing verismo opera in the vernacular. Elizabeth Vaughan was an excellent Butterfly; a really strong cast’.

Illustration 5. 1981/1982 Madama Butterfly. Elizabeth Vaughan (Cio-Cio San), Kristian Johannsson (Pinkerton). Photo: Asadour Guzelian.

In the autumn of 1982, thanks to a generous grant from the West Yorkshire Country Council, Opera North launched an expanded community and educational programme. A formal Board Dinner to bid farewell to

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Graham Marchant and to acknowledge his achievements took place in the autumn. In November 1982, Nicholas Payne moved to Leeds to take up his post with Opera North. He recalls seeing Jane Bonner in the supermarket on their first evening in Leeds (she had arrived at the same time as him to work as a Deputy Stage Manager and has been the company Manager since 1986). I left WNO one week and I started at Opera North the next, and I’d never lived in Yorkshire; I had a lot of learning to do. […] And I sort of vowed that we would make our own production style and find our own people — and that was to do with the whole business of wanting to be independent. And I think initially people suspected that I wanted to impose a WNO continental style on it — particularly because I got in one or two good directors with whom I was in contact. But the aim was to find good Brits and to find the company’s style, which we did eventually, but it took time. (Payne, 2011)

Excited by the potential and by the size of Opera North’s catchment area, Payne started with high expectations. These were met by the musical standards of the company, but not necessarily by processes and procedures. The thin staff cover, the pressures created by spatial inequalities and the fact that every new company needs to develop its own method of doing things meant there were some issues to be tackled. While Opera North was beginning to amass a sizeable number of its own productions (i.e. productions that originated with the company, not Sadler’s Wells/ENO), a ‘hybrid’ was beginning to emerge: on several occasions, young directors worked with existing sets on a revival budget on a newly conceived production. In the 1982/1983 season, Opera North thus gained its first home-produced Janáĉek: Graham Vick had been asked to revive David Pountney’s production of Katya Kabanova, but delivered a new production with new sets by Stefanos Lazaridis on the revival budget. That was a great, big set with a house built on a revolving platform — the stage crew lived inside it for the entire duration of the show. We called it the hamster wheel! And on a cue (I was on the book), they pushed it around; it was a stunning effect. Now we’d have a revolve, but it was all by hand — they slung hammocks in there. (Bonner, 2013)

Stephen Pimlott and also Graham Vick produced new work in similar conditions during these years. When a planned revival of a Buxton production of Beatrice and Benedict (Berlioz) fell through, David Alden delivered a new production, including the set, for the revival budget of £5,000. Claire Powell and John Brecknock appeared as the capricious lovers. The production marked Opera North’s ‘first proper controversy’ (Leeks, 2003, p. 32), as some audience members were disgruntled by its obvious non-naturalism. The stage was exposed up to the brick walls at the back of Leeds Grand Theatre and in the wings, with various locations and periods suggested, among them a Victorian setting and a field hospital in World War I. For this, the stage was covered in specially grown grass. Backstage, the inconvenience of the material made

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for some resentment — Lloyd-Jones (2010) recalled shreds of grass dropping out of his conducting clothes during a performance months later. He attributed the production’s aesthetics, notably the real grass, to the influence of Pina Bausch, whose 1980s — A Piece by Pina Bausch had been such a talking point a few years earlier and is still part of the repertoire of Tanztheater Wuppertal. The Marriage of Figaro had been conceived in a flexible mode for smaller venues in 1979 and was now revived for touring. It had been premiered in Barnsley (‘such is Opera North’s penetration’, Martin Dreyer (1983a) remarked in a review that praised the company for ‘illuminating some of the North’s darker corners’ in a back-handed compliment, even though Dreyer is from the North himself). It went to the New Theatre in Hull, which had been newly refurbished with a new orchestra pit. Lesley Garrett won a lot of praise as Susanna, the charming focus of the production. Audience favourite La Bohème was revived for the 1983 spring season. The set stemmed from Sadler’s Wells in 1966, and, reviewing a performance in Hull, Martin Dreyer (1983b) suspected that the ‘murky’ lighting was down to the set being unable to ‘withstand anything brighter, even if a certain amount of gloom is to be expected in a Bohemian attic’. Overall, the season showed a steady rise in originality and confidence, mixed with the necessary pragmatism.

1983/1984 Rebecca by Wilfred Josephs was Opera North’s first commission, directed by an expert for new work, Colin Graham, and designed by Stefanos Lazaridis in a set that realised Manderlay almost as a protagonist within the work, a space that exuded a dream-like quality, as well as paranoia. For this, Lloyd-Jones had again raised the necessary sponsorship, this time from Schweppes. Illustration 6. 1983/1984 — Rebecca. Gillian Sullivan (The Girl), Ann Howard The production enjoyed critical and public success. The (Mrs Danvers). Photo: Asadour Guzelian.

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season also introduced company and audiences to the work of continental directors Andrei Serban, Hans Hollmann and Joachim Herz, as well as nurturing British directors who had formed an association with the company in past seasons, such as Graham Vick. Despite some eye-rolling by people uncomfortable with updated productions, Rodney Milnes (1984) passed a positive verdict on Serban’s production of Il trovatore, which updated the opera from one Spanish Civil War to a 20th century one — ‘while this may be happening twice a week in dozens of German houses, it has not been tried here yet’. Milnes credited the production with narrative clarity for a very convoluted tale, making some perceptive points about ‘the endless cycle of revenge’. He also praised the differentiated performances of a cast including Eduardo Alvarez (Manrico) and Cynthia Buchan (Azucena). The company’s production of Eugene Onegin (in Lloyd-Jones’s translation) was a mixture of old and new: Roger Butlin’s sets, first used for Scottish Opera’s 1979 production (then directed by David Pountney) housed a new production by Graham Vick. With the exception of the Greater London Council grant to the ENO, we are by far the best funded, in local authority terms, of all the opera companies in this country. And apart from it being extremely important money — particularly when Arts Council money is less than to other companies of similar status — it does mean there’s a very special link with the region. (Payne in Rosenthal, 1983, p. 1079)

One of Payne’s big aims during his tenure was to ‘crack the touring destinations to bring them up to the following Opera North have at Leeds Grand Theatre’. Recognising opera as a minority interest, he nonetheless asserted that such interests needed the consensus of public support if they were to increase their appeal for new audiences: ‘If we restrict it to a selfperpetuating, American subscription-type audience, that won’t help establish such a consensus’ (Payne in Rosenthal, 1983, p. 1081). There were two key appointments in Payne’s first few years, both of whom still work for Opera North: Christine Jane Chibnall (Planning and Casting Director) and Ric Green (Technical and Operations Director); both turned out to be enduring and transformative for the company. Chibnall arrived at Opera North in 1983, after a period of working at WNO. Her title was ‘Controller of Planning’, but she remarks that there was no planning department at the time — and planning processes were in their early stages of development (Chibnall, 2011). This was brought home to her when there turned out not to be a detailed enough schedule for A Village Romeo and Juliet in spring 1984 (Robert Carsen reworked Patrick Libby’s production, conducted by Nicholas Cleobury). The orchestra had a concert on the Saturday before a Bank Holiday; the show was opening on the Tuesday after the Bank Holiday. Result: unnecessary overtime and the urgent realisation that processes needed to be put in place.

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So, a lesson in a nutshell, I thought ‘OK, let’s do something, let’s work out how technically we get from the first rehearsal to the first night before we do anything else — and how we get the sets in and out’. (Chibnall, 2011)

There was only one crew working, doing a four-hour changeover between the morning call and the performance in the evening. Joining up what previously had been separate production schedules, so a bigger picture emerged, rationalised processes — it felt more like a rep company this way, and averted many heated discussions, as Chibnall remarked. The emerging systems started to put the company’s planning on a more secure trajectory. Gradually, casting was added to Chibnall’s remit, although she stresses the dialogic nature of the process, which is still in evidence now. She also took over some of the financial aspects from Roger Taylor, a founder member of the company and deputy to Nicholas Payne. As the company was administratively independent from ENO at that point, the relationship was less prominent, although there still seem to be a few instances where singers were ‘sent’ to Leeds to do a few performances. So the first lesson was to expand and solidify the production planning process — the second one was to cast longer in advance, and the third was to operate a cover-system, after a wakeup call relating to Beatrice and Benedict, where the singer of Hero fell ill (‘and this is before “Operabase!”’, Chibnall, 2011) and it was almost impossible to find a replacement. For Opera North, the cover system has always been more than a safety net in case of illness; it is the entry point for many young singers, providing opportunities to learn repertoire and try things out. The Chorus of Opera North have been very involved in the cover system from the start and choristers are given the opportunity to audition for roles in advance of each season. The second appointment, of a technical director, was an equally good match, and Ric Green has now worked for Opera North for 30 years. As Payne remembers: I did a very thorough interview process and I eventually decided on this young man who’d been a Production Manager at the National Theatre. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. And he’s still there. And I had to say to him at the time ‘look, Ric, there are things that need fixing here’ — some problems around personalities and competence. Every morning I’d go into the auditorium at 10.30 and the rehearsal didn’t start on time and I said ‘we just have to have a system, otherwise it’s demoralising for the artists’. So, for a couple of years … it was very difficult at times. (Payne, 2011)

There were inevitable internal growing pains for the young company, but the external challenges and pressures in the mid1980s at times almost overshadowed these.

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Innovative artistic choices were being made and while this led to critical acclaim, there was sometimes resistance from inside the company, as well as audience disgruntlement. But Opera North was being led with ambition, vision and a solid commitment to quality. Musical preparation had always been outstanding and the rationalisation of production processes meant that rehearsal conditions were becoming more favourable all the time. The year 1984 was an embattled year for opera companies: in London, Lord Harewood was resisting proposals of ENO and the Royal Opera House sharing a theatre and similar problems were to afflict Opera North. However, in January 1984, the company’s Arts Council grant was confirmed at just over £2m for the 1984/1985 season (Arts Council, 1984a). At the same time, a letter from the Regional Director (Arts Council Regional Director, 1984b) outlined some fairly long-term expectations for the company, such as improving the quality of productions and the standard of performances, including, where appropriate, better known principals, which would result in higher box office takings. There remained the long-term goal of extending touring weeks, too, and of improving the infrastructure, more specifically, obtaining adequate rehearsal space, establishing a double crewing system and appointing a full-time production manager and assistant. Hilary Pugh, Music Officer at the Arts Council, put on record in a letter (Pugh, 1984) her preference for Opera North ‘to be looked after entirely by the Regional Department and not by a combination of departments, as had been the case until now. Apparently, the department was beset by an “anti” opera feeling’ and she feared the ‘fights going on when I would be trying to obtain sufficient funds for them’. It is not known how far this internal discussion went and how vocal Pugh was in advocating a restructuring of the operatic landscape.

Illustration 7. 1984/1985 — Pagliacci. Kate Flowers (Nedda), Angelo Marenzi (Canio). Photo: Asadour Guzelian.

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As happened with some regularity, Payne pointed out to Arts Council Executive Director David Pratley in a letter, the ‘inbuilt contradiction between the necessity to achieve a balanced budget and the obligation to present a full programme as specified by the Arts Council’ (Payne, 1984a). He explained that the Opera North budget shortfall was a result of the battle of maintaining and building up the company’s quality and honouring touring. Overall, the relationship with the Arts Council had changed since its inception, when a member of the Council (Phipps) had been credited as the ‘midwife’ of Opera North. Personalities were partly responsible, but the political climate had turned into one that was unfavourable for arts dependent on subsidy to survive, and the philosophy of self-determinism was filtered down to the Arts Council, which had to pass it on to companies. The Priestley Report was commissioned by the Arts Council at the instigation of the government in order to look into the operations of the Royal Opera House and the RSC and their mounting deficits. It was published in November 1983 and subsequently debated at a three-day meeting in Ilkley.8 The decision to issue a one-off grant to clear accumulated deficits was contested by organisations that were less afflicted with deficit, such as ENO and the National Theatre. The large payment to the Royal Opera House, ring-fencing of sorts, meant that the grants for other companies were affected. Peter Hall, Director of the National Theatre, led reactions which pointed out that companies with lower levels of debts were incurring a penalty for good housekeeping (see also Turnbull, 2008, p. 79). After the Arts Council had barely lost a client for decades, funding allocated by the government meant that cuts had to be considered. The White Paper ‘Streamlining the Cities’ (1983) proposed the abolition of regional arts funding through Metropolitan and County Councils. This would have left all but nine top organisations to find funding via city councils and private donors. With shake-ups and cuts looming, Arts Council personnel once more employed botanically inspired vocabulary. As Luke Rittner9 declared in the Ilkley letter:

8

In spring 1985, the Priestley Report was discussed in the House of Lords. Lord Jenkins of Putney (asking The Earl of Gowrie): Does he agree that the underfunding discerned by Priestley at the Royal Opera House is rife throughout the country? Will he do something to put it right generally? The Earl of Gowrie: My Lords, I have to say that I do not believe in an ever upward movement of funding for the arts. I believe in a good baseline of Government subsidy that is supplemented by an inflow of private funds. I am glad to say that this is taking place (HL Deb 21 May 1985, vol. 464, cc161–cc163). The exchange continued with an assertion that the slowing of the rise in the Royal Opera House’s grant was partly to do with the AC diverting a greater portion of its grant to the regions, including the regional opera companies. After the year-long battle they had been fighting, staff at Opera North and Scottish Opera must have taken this information in with some bewilderment. 9 A Labour spokesman warned ‘that if the Council was being rebuilt in the image of Mrs Thatcher’s government, then it would be dismantled by the next Labour government’ (Sinclair, 1995, p. 261).

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The arts, like seeds, need to grow if they are to blossom. Some of the seeds we have nurtured over the years are now bursting to grow but are held back by lack of space and nourishment. This strategy will help the Council to thin out the seed-bed and to give more room for them to develop, and for new seeds to be planted. It was an end to the tradition of response in favour of ruthless selection. (quoted in Sinclair, 1995, p. 266)

Notions of concentrating on centres of excellence had been discussed just a few years earlier, so the next big statement from the Arts Council, in spring 1984, incorporated these ideas. ‘Thank you for your letter of 29 March and for the prompt delivery of the policy document with the disarmingly ironical title’ Payne replied to Luke Rittner in receipt of a document that was to create some turbulence over the next year (Payne, 1984b): William Rees-Mogg’s unfortunately named pamphlet ‘The Glory of the Garden’, setting out his vision of a restructured arts provision in the United Kingdom. It proposed a ‘national grid for the performing arts to be established with local authorities under local management’ (Sinclair, 1995, p. 268), a strategic concentration on 13 major British cities, providing other areas with access to the arts through subsidised transport. Its aim was the decentralisation and devolution of the arts — ‘we live as two artistic nations — London and everywhere else’ (Rees-Mogg quoted in Sinclair, 1995, p. 269). ‘The Glory of the Garden’ and the ideas it carried marked ‘a sharp deterioration in relations with the Arts Council’. Gilbert (2009, p. 358) states this in reference to ENO, but it was certainly true for Opera North and for Scottish Opera. The perception was that, under the new chairmanship, ‘the Arts Council changed from being the defender of the arts to being the policeman’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 358). Rees-Mogg expressed his concern over arts organisations’ reliance on state subsidy. His other main aim was to ‘decentralise’ the arts and create a more even level of access across the regions. This hit London companies, particularly ENO, who were in the throes of a financial crisis, but ironically, Rees-Mogg’s document created serious problems for some regional opera companies, contrary to his agenda of strengthening both regional arts provision and access. ‘His premise was that if the Arts Council changed its policy, it would get more money. But Mrs Thatcher stopped the funding where it was. He was led up the garden path’ (Sinclair, 1995, p. 275). In an Arts Council Memo from the Music Subsidy Officer to the Regional Director (22 May 1984), the proposal for a ‘parent company’ in Scotland was set up: this was to be an umbrella organisation of the two subsidiaries Scottish Opera (to serve major theatres only in Scotland, touring as presently into England) and Opera North (to tour as presently in England). The memo also refers to Opera North and WNO taking over responsibility for the ‘replacement of Opera touring hitherto undertaken by the Royal Opera House and ENO’. This is a confusing proposal, as ENO had ceased most of its touring six years earlier, with the foundation of Opera North in 1978. Finally, the document mentions a company ‘to tour smaller Scottish theatres and to replace Opera80 in

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England’.10 The changed climate meant that companies were told that philanthropy was the key to solving their funding difficulties. Rees-Mogg had pressed for increased fundraising from the start of his tenure as AC Chair, convinced that there were ‘too many opera companies, just as there are too many nuclear power stations’. Several interviewees mentioned that this analogy was used, but there is no written source to verify it. The companies’ bleak choice was to either scale down their operations and ambitions (there were some suggestions that touring companies were operating beyond their subsidised means and should not have the ambition to produce world-class work as a consequence) or to find the funds to pay for them themselves. There was a meeting at Opera North between Payne, Lloyd-Jones, Rees-Moog and Rittner in early May 1984. It seems that at this meeting the very reasons for company’s foundation in 1978 were questioned by Rees-Mogg, even though, ironically, the Arts Council and Phipps in particular, had been the main driver of the scheme. In a letter to Rittner, Payne reveals frustration at what must have felt like a U-turn to him as someone who had worked for the Council and was involved in the inception of the company. The letter also shows defiance: The evidence compiled by the Arts Council at the time was that no other company was capable of serving this enormous region with opera. The figures since show just how successful we have been, especially in Leeds. Naturally that is not shown in the composite figures for opera in the Bulletin Supplement. […] It cannot be right that anyone living between Nottingham and Inverness should be lumbered with a uniform Magic Flute. […] Against the odds, we are trying to think positively. It is the Arts Council’s job to help us, not to hinder us. (Payne, 1984c)

While the extent of the potential upheaval did not affect the day-to-day running of Opera North, Payne’s frustration at the company being held back in its ambitions was tangible. And of course the remit of finding other sources of sponsorship and private funding was damaged by the Scottish Opera merger proposal. Payne recalls that neither company had a single major sponsor for 18 months because nobody was prepared to commit funds when they did not know whether the companies would continue to exist. Rather than merge with Scottish Opera, there was a preference (in the sense of the lesser of two evils) by Opera North

10

Opera for All, small-scale touring with piano accompaniment for areas with limited or no access to live opera. It was founded by the AC in the late 1940s and was initially planned and financed by the department, responsibility for it was eventually devolved to a subsidised organisation. See also: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/wid/ead/acgb/acgbf.html Opera80 was founded in 1979 and changed its name to English Touring Opera in 1992. The company tours a wide range of repertoire to medium to smaller theatres which are not touring destinations for the three UK opera companies outside London and runs an extensive outreach and education programme. See also: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/browse-regularly-funded-organisations/npo/english-touring-opera/

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senior management to realign itself with ENO and to revert to the same arrangements that had surrounded the company’s foundation in 1978 (Blackstock, 1984).

1984/1985 The company continued to programme unusual repertoire — Jonny Strikes Up (Krenek) being perhaps the most adventurous piece. It was popular with audiences and within the company, although Payne was not keen on the opera or the production. Another exciting production we did was Jonny Strikes Up by Krenek, and that was done by the New Opera company, of which I used to be chorus master in my salad days. It was the last one they ever did and we got money from them to do it. It was very striking, and a lovely black singer played the all-important banjo, really marvellous. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

Opera North made its first visit to London (Sadler’s Wells) touring Jonny. The year also saw the company’s first production of a Handel opera — not an obvious one, such as Julius Caesar or Alcina, but Tamerlano (Tamburlaine 1724). Die Meistersinger, directed by Ladislav Štros, was unfortunately poorly received. Francois Roachaix’s production of La traviata was a big success and was revived a number of times over the following years.

Illustration 8. 1984/1985 — Tamburlaine. Sally Burgess (Andronicus). Photo: John Vere Brown.

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Graham Vick described the set of his new Magic Flute as 18th century science fiction (Cockroft, 1984). He avoided both Egyptian and Masonic allusions, as he did not see any advantages in the historical perspective of the work (Jonathan Miller had recently focused on this in his production for Scottish Opera). Vick said that opera should be about what T. S Eliot called ‘the direct shock of poetic intensity’. Tamburlaine was a co-production between WNO and Opera North and was first performed by WNO, who also took it to the Edinburgh Festival. For Handel’s tercentenary, Opera North was invited to bring Philip Prowse’s production to the Komische Oper in East Berlin, also performing at the Halle Handel Festival on 23 February, the date of Handel’s birthday. It was the company’s first foreign visit since 1979; 80% of the cost (£59,000) was funded by the hosts. The set, also designed by Prowse, was dominated by huge statues of the horses in St Mark’s Square, Venice, showing a baroque city in ruins and evoking the composition of a classical painting. German critics remarked on the length of the evening, as it often was the custom of East German companies to cut the middle and da capo sections of arias. The casting of Felicity Palmer (Tamburlaine) and Sally Burgess (Andronicus) was noted for its intensity and both singers praised for their differing timbres and vocal characterisations — and produced a standing ovation at the performance in Berlin. Robert Cockcroft from the Yorkshire Post had accompanied the ensemble on their visit and produced a vivid account of the performance in the Bertolt Brecht theatre of the Chemical Works on the outskirts of Halle, which, despite its forbidding exterior, provided a performance space with fine acoustics and facilities (Cockcroft, 1985). Fulfilling Nicholas Payne’s aim of ‘geographical loyalty to Yorkshire’, the revivals of Madama Butterfly and Salome were taken to ‘The Big Top’ tent in Sheffield’s Norfolk Park, as none of the Sheffield theatre venues were suitable for opera (the only theatre to offer flying mechanisms and a pit, the Lyceum, was closed at that time). Die Meistersinger finished off a remarkable season with mixed critical reactions, among them the unavoidable ‘coming of age’ reaction to Opera North performing Wagner (see The Flying Dutchman in November 1979). Ladislav Štros’s lifeless direction, ultra-traditional right down to ring-a-ring-a-rosing apprentices, made one secretly long for Ken Russell, Harry Kupfer, David Freeman — anyone. […] Visually this was the worst possible advertisement for conservatism in opera production. (Milnes, 1985a, p. 952)

The acclaim for Lloyd-Jones’s musical leadership (‘I do not believe Lloyd-Jones has done anything better with the company of which he was a founding father’, Milnes, 1985a, p. 952) was echoed by appreciation for his commitment to the company,

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attending every first night, maintaining contact and involvement even if he was guesting abroad. Ric Green remarks that this approach is more common in the British opera houses than on the continent, but that it was (and has remained) one of Opera North’s strengths. Having been largely nomadic during rehearsal periods, it was a relief that the company was able to reclaim the space at the front of Leeds Grand Theatre as an in-house rehearsal room in spring 1985 (now the Howard Assembly Room, magnificently restored and reopened in 2008). ‘The last furtive dirty raincoat left the building some months ago when the lease reverted to the owners, Leeds City Council which is contributing a substantial sum towards the £50,000 cost of converting and refurbishing it’. This meant that at last the company would have a secure and permanent space in which to rehearse, one which also equated to the floor area of the Grand Theatre stage. This was an improvement from having to rehearse Meistersinger ‘in a breeze block unit on an industrial estate under the most primitive of conditions’ (Anonymous, 1985a). Meanwhile, the threat of ‘The Glory of the Garden’ was being resisted, both by Opera North and Scottish Opera. Both Richard Mantle, then General Director of Scottish Opera, and Nicholas Payne vividly remember the meeting in London where they argued their case and the ‘absolute magnificence of Gordon Linacre’, Chairman of the Opera North Board. What he basically said (I remember) was: ‘look, the Yorkshire Post is a contributor to the Conservative Party because it believes it’s the right government for this country, but it won’t believe in you if you do this kind of thing’. It really was his finest hour. He could do it with the Yorkshire accent, which effete Southerners like me could not have done. (Payne, 2011)

Finally, there was an outright refusal to ‘merge voluntarily’ by both companies and the Arts Council shied away from enforcing the scheme, not least because of Opera North’s deficit at that time. The consequence of remaining independent was that the companies would have to operate without an increase in subsidy in real terms (Opera North) and a cash standstill for two years (Scottish Opera) (Arts Council and Scottish Arts Council, Minutes of Meeting, 30 May 1984). In studies charting the Arts Council’s work (e.g. Sinclair, 1995; Turnbull, 2008), the assessment was that the impulses presented through ‘The Glory of the Garden’ did little to improve the situation of regional companies. ENO was embroiled in a funding crisis at the same time and its board also touched upon the issue of excellence and its cost, concluding ‘that ENO was striving for excellence without the ability to pay for it’. The remainder of the ongoing Ring cycle was

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cancelled in November 1984 (Gilbert, 2009, pp. 345–346). Lord Harewood had announced his retirement as Managing Director from end of 1984/1985 season and was succeeded by Peter Jonas, who would go on to form a ‘triumvirate’ with David Pountney (Head of Production) and Mark Elder (Music Director), which lasted until 1992 and became known as the ‘Powerhouse Years’. Ric Green describes Opera North as asserting its identity away from ENO during this period: The company had still been evolving its own work, but it had also been evolving its own way of working, so I’d say the company was just moving out of infancy into teenagehood, that’s a good way of describing it. […] When I arrived they were putting on what was then for the company quite challenging productions, coming to terms with how to get best value out of their work, how they should schedule things, how to fit everything together. (Green, 2010)

The technical office had moved into an office at the top of Leeds Grand Theatre and everything to do with technical production processes was crammed into one office area. ‘The whole company was in there, there were a lot of cross roles and inevitably it was about growing audiences, growing the work it was doing, deciding how best to present it’. As Green recalled in 2010, one of the things Nicholas Payne charged him with was restructuring planning processes to get more efficiency out of rehearsals in order to cut down on some of the overheads and rationalising the turnovers, too. Until then, schedules had predominantly evolved around the orchestra sessions. There was also a decision to be made whether to employ staff permanently to build sets (which would have meant renting workshop spaces in addition to the orchestra, chorus and production rehearsal venues already needed) or whether to contract this to outside companies. Green felt that a certain amount of flexibility was needed: ‘… when you get a lot of peak-and-trough levels in workshops people get used to working at the trough level and it’s very difficult to get them up to speed, so by the time you get them up to speed, usually it’s dropping off again’. So it was decided that the company should not have its own workshops, meaning that for the three different shows in each season, sets could be built in three different workshops, who had a large amount of workers they could bring in. These companies were used to building in a very short space of time and keeping the pace up. A lot of big decisions were made in the early 1980s, many of which have been retained and evolved further by the company. Payne had a clear idea of broadening the base. He was ambitious in terms of repertoire — and felt the importance of maintaining the number of Opera North’s annual productions: ‘the more shows you do the more risks you can take’, Ric Green remarked in interview, also stating that if the company had the money they would

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mainly do new productions (‘there’s no doubt in my mind; largely you’re wanting challenge and the opportunities …’, Green, 2010).11 Payne remembers what he perceived as a watershed moment in 1984. He felt doubts about the company’s work and his own strategy and describes this as a ‘low point’, but in the same week, he met and interviewed a young director called Tim Albery who had only ever done one opera before, which was The Turn of the Screw in Batignano. He was invited to direct The Midsummer Marriage (Tippett) which provided Payne with a renewed confidence: ‘it wasn’t perfect but it was a really interesting production of the piece, well cast and it was “us”’ (Payne, 2011). The threat of merging Opera North and Scottish Opera was still on the table, but after encountering some articulate and united resistance from the two companies (Richard Mantle describes himself and Nicholas Payne ‘fighting shoulder to shoulder’ (2010)), the possibility of a dignified retreat by the Arts Council became apparent from a memo sent to the Arts Council Chairman by the Regional Director. He described Opera North’s three-year plan as ‘(just) workable (and also brilliant)’, despite still being sceptical they could turn their financial fortunes around (Arts Council Internal Memo, 11 December 1984a): The day of reckoning may thereby be put back for three years. We are still left in terms of ‘The Glory’, dangerously overstretched on the opera front, but we would at least, maintain in England the present structure of companies until better times come and we would give Opera North the chance to prove itself and stay alive.

The company’s financial situation was still threatening and would take another year to show any signs of recovery. The books for spring 1985 show an accumulated deficit of £233,500, with the threat of a further loss of £150,000. David Pratley was reported to be ‘horrified’. It was maybe a good omen, though, that audience figures were reported to have risen by 13% by January 1985. Efficiencies had to be made and, somewhat predictably, two of the regular touring venues, Hull and Norwich, were sacrificed.12

11

In conversation, both Mantle and Chibnall said that they would still want to stage revivals of productions, even if they had a budget that could fund more new productions. Mantle asserted that a new cast could sometimes make for a new production and Chibnall pointed out the interesting results that had been achieved by allowing directors to revisit their productions and sometimes rework them completely. 12 It could be argued, of course, that once the Howard Assembly Room was established as Opera North’s smaller, more versatile venue in 2009, some touring with smaller venues was re-established — but under very different terms and mainly through projects commissioned or initiated by Opera North Projects or Education (e.g. Swanhunter, The Girl I Left Behind Me, The Fireworkmaker’s Daughter et al.).

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I would make a distinction: it was important: I wanted to get rid of Norwich, as to me Norwich is not ‘the North’. I see spheres of influence in terms of a constituency; a certain area is your job, and I see the job of an opera company as being educational. I see the choice of repertory as educational; every choice you make has educational consequences and for that purposes, you can’t just dot here and there. And I wanted to get rid of Norwich and as soon as I could persuade the AC to do so, I did. (Payne, 2011)

Payne also wanted Opera North to tour Newcastle Theatre Royal, which was still a Scottish Opera touring venue during his tenure and he respected that — but he saw it as Opera North’s (far) northern domain and also as a superb opera venue due to its acoustics. For this reason, Payne was also very keen to maintain the Hull touring visits. York was simply too small to accommodate the main repertoire, but Opera North produced a number of smaller productions specifically for the Theatre Royal, La Finta Giardiniera being the most ambitious project to open there (‘One of our most exquisite evenings, really’, Payne, 2011). He thought that 50% of Opera North’s work should be based in Leeds … and then you should go north to Newcastle, east to Hull, west to Manchester and south to Nottingham, and that should be the way you covered it. And then you’d invent something you could take to the smaller venues. (Payne, 2011)

For the time being, the smaller venues were off the touring schedule, never to return regularly. But in terms of what had been averted, the tone of defiance would also have carried a sense of relief: ‘We are determined not to compromise either the quality or the variety of the programme we offer to the public’ (Opera North Press Release, 8 May 1985). Robin Guthrie, Chairman of the Yorkshire Arts Association expressed his support in a letter to the Arts Council in early 1985, calling Opera North: the Arts Council’s best bargain among opera companies. The grant is the lowest of all those to building-based opera companies, and the grant in relation to the number of performances, the audience levels, the number of musicians employed and the number of productions make clear that this is the most economical of all companies. It has also won proportionately the highest level of local authority support of all Arts Council funded opera companies. This level of value for money can only be achieved by immense personal commitment and devotion by the people principally concerned in such an operation. The demand this makes on certain individuals is manifest, particularly towards the end of a season. Despite all the evidence of success, my view is that the organisation is barely at survival level, to a degree that those who enjoy higher subsidy level would find it difficult to understand and night well not be able to cope with (Guthrie, 1985).

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Thus ended a season that had shown great artistic endeavour and achievement, a stronger ‘steer’ about the company’s artistic and organisational styles. In the summer of 1985, Lord Harewood left his position as the Managing Director of ENO after 13 years. He reflected on the changes during his professional life, particularly those brought about by the decline of the ensembles of singers, brought about by faster and more frequent transport, enabling singers ‘to cart around a ready-made competence’ (Harewood, 1985). His valedictory note made a case against ‘instant’ opera, fuelled by the desire to have ‘gramophone voices’ on stage, and for nurturing, development and long-term investment in artists: ‘There is an old proverb now much in evidence at the Coliseum: if you want the flowers in your garden to be glorious and to smell good, you must risk an occasional stink’. Out of all the floral metaphors used and abused around ‘The Glory of the Garden’, this is the one that seems most useful with regard to running an opera company, or indeed any arts organisation.

1985/1986 Artistically, this was a bold year with big works from the 19th and 20th centuries at its centre. Twelve operas were produced, nine of them new to the company. The Rake’s Progress, Faust and Don Giovanni (directed by Tim Albery, whose productions thus started and finished off the year) were shaped into a themed summer season. The touring commitment was reduced by 20 performances and Norwich was taken off the touring schedule. I Puritani opened the season, David Walsh reviving Andrei Serban’s WNO production from 1982. In the programme notes, Nicholas Payne commented on some of the dramaturgical challenges of the opera and on the ways in which the production solved them. The trio of protagonists won critical and popular acclaim (Suzanne Murphy, Donald Maxwell, Dennis O’Neill). The Magic Flute was also a revival (although Graham Vick was a propagator of the Opera North philosophy of rethinking rather than repeating an existing production). Martin Dreyer (1985, p. 1430) described the audience as being ‘baffled’ at the production’s symbolism, although an unknown author in The Guardian (Anonymous, 1985b) saw it as a ‘serious attempt to rationalize the libretto’s manifest self-contradictions’. Michael Tippet’s The Midsummer Marriage established artistic partnerships that are still

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alive today and constituted a decisive moment in Opera North’s artistic journey. Tim Albery’s delivered his UK opera directing debut flanked by collaborators Tom Cairns and Antony McDonald (set and costumes) as well as Peter Mumford (lighting design) — ‘opera by committee’, as company Manager Jane Bonner jokingly recalled (Bonner, 2013). Critical reactions spoke of Albery’s debut (in a 1950s setting, the time of the opera’s composition) as having ‘buoyancy’, ‘a lack of solemnity and an optimism characteristic of the first decade after the Second World War’ (Milnes, 1985b, p. 1426). Bonner remembers The Midsummer Marriage, one of her first productions as Deputy Stage Manager at Opera North, as a lively mix:

Illustration 9.

1985/1986 — A Midsummer Marriage. Ensemble. Photo: Asadour Guzelian.

dancers, children, singers, a complicated set and the chorus having to move chairs and take their shoes off and fall on the grass … and then there was Madame Sosostris in Act 3 who was a great big puppet that trundled down from the back of the stage, which was an uneven rostrum, all hill-shaped, and the curtain opened and the singer was revealed inside. One night, the man on the rope missed the dead that was marked and it kept moving — it’s the only time I’ve actually shouted on stage because otherwise she would have gone into the pit, being inside the enormous dolly, screaming — and then she had to get out and sing. (Bonner, 2013)

After consultation, it was decided that the singer would not sit in the doll, but get in once it was at its dead, and clearer marks were put on the rope for the technician. The set had surrealist touches — grass, a piece of motorway, theatre seats and a staircase, combined with naturalist costumes. Milnes (1985b, p. 1426) called the production ‘the most apt and satisfying that

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Tippett’s opera has yet enjoyed in this country’. Michael Tippett appeared at the curtain calls in bright yellow beach-shoes to a rapturous reception. La Fanciulla del West (co-produced with Netherlands Opera, directed by David Pountney, designed by Günter SchneiderSiemssen), attracted attention for its visual references to early silent film production, concurrent with the period of its composition. Everything was in black and white, even the stage blood! It was a huge success for Texan soprano Mary Jane Johnson (Minnie): Everybody was potty about her — talk about the Girl of the Golden West — she was IT! Came from Amarillo. Such a perfect person for this and of course the only woman in the opera, all the rest were men: miners. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

Richard Jones revived David Pountney’s Scottish Opera production of The Golden Cockerel, praised for its magic and dream-like quality. Like Fanciulla, Aida (directed by Philip Prowse) had also been designed with the period of its making in mind, in a 19th century Egyptian, orientalist look. Rodney Milnes described the production as ‘very musically motivated. A total success, I thought’. […] ‘All in all, it is a long time since I have been so excited by a performance of Aida: another triumph for Opera North’ (Milnes, 1986a, p. 582). Faust (Gounod), the second leg of the company’s Faust-legend exploration, was a revival of an ENO co-production from 1985. Directed by Ian Judge, it marked a notable company debut: John Tomlinson as Mephistophèle. This was soon to be followed by Boris Godunov, Attila and many other parts — and Tomlinson still had a lively connection to Opera North in 2013 as artistic advisor for Siegfried. Tim Albery had agreed to direct a new production of Don Giovanni in partnership with designer Antony McDonald, who reworked Maria Bjørnson’s scenography. Described as ‘noir’ in style, the production transferred the Don’s Seville to Berlin in the 1920s. Peter Savidge sang Don Giovanni and Nicholas Folwell Leporello, both to form long associations with the company in the years to follow. The Arts Council published ‘A Great British success story: an invitation to the nation to invest in the arts’ in the summer of 1985, a plea to the government for £161m of arts subsidy. It was commented that Opera North presented a good return for its subsidy nationally, but also in international comparison: ‘Opera North, for instance, employed 150 people in Leeds in 1984/1985, gave 114 performances, for a public investment of £2.8m. Opéra de Lyon, in contrast, which has just performed at the Edinburgh International Festival, employed 300 people, gave 100 performances for an investment of £6m’

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(Anonymous, 1985b). The Arts Council went ‘on the attack against alleged government parsimony’ in this document, published in the autumn of 1985. This was a different note by William Rees-Mogg (‘previously a devotee of the government policy’) to the one he struck in 1984. He was most likely prompted by the realisation that the Arts Council had complied with government demands, but rather than stabilising funding, cuts were forecast, threatening a large number of organisations, Opera North, as ever, among them. By autumn 1985, Rees-Mogg and Rittner were warning of the possibility of a £21m funding crisis, affecting around 150 companies if funding fell short (Gow, 1985). In response, in December 1985, Yorkshire Arts compiled a directory of arts organisations whose activities were threatened by the abolition of the Metropolitan and County Councils — Opera North was near the top of the list. The Yorkshire Council awarded Opera North £165,000 in additional funding for 1986 spring season before its abolition in March 1986. By November, the new minister for the arts, Richard Luce, was reported to have changed his mind, persuading the government to increase the Arts Council’s grant, which was in part attributed to ‘A Great British success story’. This meant an additional £4m for the companies hit by abolition of the county councils (Anonymous, 1985c). In a joint letter to The Guardian, Brian McMaster (Welsh National Opera), Richard Mantle (Scottish Opera) and Nicholas Payne (Opera North) pointed out that recent raises granted to the orchestra of the Royal Opera House were considerably higher ‘than those granted to their counterparts in the regions’— Covent Garden salaries had risen by 75%, ON’s by 59% and SO’s by only 36% since its formation. ‘If Covent Garden is not exactly overweight, then the regional companies are anorexic’ (McMaster, Mantle, & Payne, 1995). West Yorkshire County Council13 received a ‘send off’ at a gala evening at Wakefield Theatre Royal, the start of a lengthy battle as to who should be the agency in charge of Opera North. After the abolition of WYMCC and before the formation of the Regional Arts Boards (RABs) in 1990s, Opera North and other arts organisations faced a potential gap in funding. A case was made for compensation funding to replace the developmental role that (some) Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs) had been playing in arts support, as Roger Lancaster (2013) remembers.

13

A potted history: From the mid-1950s onwards, 12 Regional Arts Associations (RAAs) came into existence, covering the whole of England. They were the predecessors of the 10 Regional Arts Boards (RABs) that were established from around 1990. Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts Association had been split, with Lincolnshire going into Eastern and Humberside being merged into Yorkshire Arts Association. In 1985, the RAAs with Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs) put together proposals to ensure that the funds the MCCs were giving to arts organisations were not lost when they were abolished in 1985/1986.

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He was Director of YAA from September 1984 and then Director of Yorkshire Arts Board (YAB) until 2001. There was a joint effort to ensure succession funding with the districts, leading to the West Yorkshire Joint Scheme, which held onto funds for Opera North that might otherwise have been lost. Compensation funds were also secured from the Arts Council, which had been receiving additional funding from the government for the purpose of providing supplementary grants to funded organisations (£25m in 1986/1987 but tapered in following years). Opera North did comparatively well with the final sum West Yorkshire MCC funding of £368,000 being replaced by Joint Scheme funding and getting an additional £100,000 from the Arts Council in 1986. The additional Yorkshire Arts money was built into base funding quickly. Lancaster negotiated a package with money from various agencies. John Gunnell remarked ‘that Mr Lancaster deserved our sincere congratulations for all his marvellous work with the joint committee’ (Opera North Board Minutes, 21 February 1986). The Arts Council was keeping a watchful eye on the company’s financial fortunes: ‘Rather to my surprise, they seem to be getting a “controlled” act together; they hope to break even by end of season’ (Anderson, 1986). Opera North had been invited to perform their productions of The Midsummer Marriage and Aida at the Wiesbaden International May Festival in Germany in 1986. Lloyd-Jones said that ‘performing it has given us the greatest artistic satisfaction in our eight-year history’ (Lloyd-Jones in Cockcroft, 1986). Robert Cockcroft from the Yorkshire Post travelled with the company. His renewed engagement with The Midsummer Marriage had made him a Tippett enthusiast. He reflected on the opera’s connections with Tippett’s wartime oratorio, A Child of our Time, displaying Jungian archetypes and balancing light and dark in characters, embracing good and bad to address the split in the world. Sally Burgess’s Amneris in Aida was described as the ‘sensation of the evening’ while the technical staff won praise from Cockcroft and their German colleagues ‘for their unstinting efforts’ (Cockroft, 1986). Unfortunately, there was an unpleasant coda to the Wiesbaden visit. Anonymous allegations were made against Opera North, accusing them of misappropriating sponsorship moneys and travel expenses, and also alleging that ‘lavish entertainment bills’ had been run up for parties at the theatre. The company instructed its own auditors, Peat Marwick, to look into these allegations. Leeds council also ordered an investigation. While this continued, grants were held back by the West Yorkshire Grants Committee (Anonymous, 1986a). Within a month, Opera North had been cleared of the allegations, which had been brought by a disgruntled former partner of an employee. The auditors recommended the company tighten their internal audit trail and make it more transparent in order to increase their accountability, but no further action was taken (Anonymous, 1986b).

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Decisions over programming for the 1986/1987 season were stormy at times and prompted Nicholas Payne to write to his board with a detailed rationale of his decisions (Payne, 1986), in reaction to doubts over programming Daphne by Richard Strauss, a UK premiere. Payne felt the repertoire was carefully balanced with two ‘mainstream 19th century works’, The Trojans and Norma, being produced alongside Daphne. Recent years had seen box office success for 20th century opera, too, with most of them grossing more than 70% at the box office.14 ‘None had been an absolute sell-out, but all of them played to perfectly respectable business over three or four performances in Leeds, and none was a familiar title to our public’, Payne pointed out — ‘Interestingly enough, our worst season at the Grand was when we put on three 19th century operas (Beatrice and Benedict, The Elixir of Love and Der Freischütz) and only played to 64% overall)’. For the following season (1986/1987), there were plans for cheaply mountable 20th century operas, ‘adding spice to the season without damaging the box office’, as it was explained to the Board. Oedipus Rex (Stravinsky) was to be revived because of its previous success in 1981 and because it fitted very well with an exciting new collaboration with Ballet Rambert on its companion piece, Pulcinella. Daphne (Richard Strauss) had partly been chosen because its British stage premiere meant good media coverage for the company and for the Grand. Payne stressed the importance of British premieres taking place in Leeds rather than always in London. He also explained his decision to not make popular 19th century repertory the centrepiece of the 1986/1987 season. There were signals from the Arts Council that they wanted the company to concentrate more on contemporary work. Payne agreed and was ready to argue with the Board over the choices and financial concerns, supported by Lloyd-Jones and Hilary Pugh from the Arts Council, who attended the meeting where the repertoire was discussed: I must admit, as I was asked by the Chairman what I thought about this, I had to support Payne and Lloyd-Jones. I said that the company had to venture a bit into the less known works, to vary the operatic diet. Mrs Nash (Labour Councillor and Opera North Board Member) wanted to know if I had gone to Leeds to start an argument with her — to which I replied that that was not my intention, but that the company would not simply provide the public with Puccini and Verdi, however popular they were. In fact if you look at the proposed rep, Daphne will be presented with Mozart, and Puccini and Verdi. (Pugh, 1986)

Pugh commented on the meeting positively, calling it ‘refreshing to sit with a Board who actually participate actively in the discussions, and who are not afraid to question the management on points they disagree upon!’ (Pugh, 1986). 14

Katya 68%, Rebecca 75%, Vixen 75%, Salome 80%, Threepenny Opera 77%, Johnny Strikes up 70%, Midsummer Marriage 71%, Intermezzo 72%.

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1986/1987 Berlioz’s The Trojans was a show of strength of the three opera companies outside London, a three-way co-production between Opera North, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera. Opera North produced Part 1, The Capture of Troy, Welsh National Opera opened The Trojans at Carthage and the plan was for Scottish Opera to first show both of them together. It was, as Chibnall (2011) described it, a way for everyone to get some profile out of it, a creative pooling of resources that also extended to its creative team David LloydJones (conductor), Tim Albery (director), Tom Cairns and Antony McDonald (design). Hugh Macdonald (also the translator) orchestrated the vocal score of the ‘Sinon’ scene, which Berlioz had withdrawn in 1861. Sinon was the Greek who persuaded the Trojans that the horse be offered to calm the Gods’ wrath. Its acceptance sealed the Trojans’ fate. Max Loppert described the production as ‘one of the most exciting performances in Opera North’s history. The style might be described in negatives (though its effect is far from negative) — nonopulent, non-ornate, non-period, non-Second-Empireexotic’ (Loppert, 1986, p. 1306). Despite the scale of the set and the score, The Capture of Troy did not come across as a spectacle, but as a concentrated drama that gave equal amounts of attention to characters and narrative. ‘But within Peter Mumford’s elaborate

Illustration 10. 1986/1987 — The Capture of Troy. Kristine Ciesinski (Cassandra). Photo: Andrew March.

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lighting plot the whole constitutes one of the most strikingly beautiful and dramatically apt designs, at once (like Berlioz) neo-classical and romantic, that I have seen for years’ (Milnes, 1986b). There were several outstanding performances, for example the Cassandra of Kristine Ciesinski in her UK debut. Soloists were in bright colours. The chorus, appearing in grey attire as the Trojans, looking ill and emaciated through the hardship of the siege, were named as heroes of the evening. The production received international attention on account of its rarity and quality. Director Sally Day was invited to rework Madama Butterfly, originally John Copley’s production in Robin Don’s set. Some critics thought the original production had made clearer points about the ‘confrontation between orient and occident’ (Dreyer, 1987a, p. 86). David Freeman, who ran the innovative, London-based Opera Factory, was invited to direct ON’s new Bohème in an English translation by Anthony and Amanda Holden. Some critics, not all fans of Opera Factory’s work, were astonished at an interesting, ‘un-extraordinary’ production: ‘no roller skates, no sandcastles, no nudity, and not a sheep in sight’ (Kenyon, 1986). Julian Rushton, on the other hand, found Freeman’s work ‘unconventional’, but was buoyed by this fact, ‘because the work has been so sickeningly prettified in its 90 years of perhaps excessive popularity’ (Rushton, 1986). Freeman had engaged with Murger’s source for Illica and Giacosa’s libretto, highlighting some of their different approaches, particularly where the portrayal of Mimi was concerned. Acts were interrupted by Schaunard, 20 years on, looking back on the lives of the Bohemians. The action was constantly (not just in Act 2) surrounded by everyday life going on as normal around the protagonists. Rodney Milnes called it ‘verismo’ in the proper sense of the word, not cosy naturalism (Milnes, 1987, pp. 199–202). Norma, a heavyweight of the belcanto repertoire with a melodramatic plot, opened in Andrei Serban’s production, previously seen at WNO. Martin Dreyer was impressed by Monika Pick-Hironimi’s singing of the title role, although less taken by her ‘slow motion’ acting style (Dreyer, 1987b, p. 327). The first Opera North opera and dance double bill, Oedipus Rex and Pulcinella, was a combination of a revival and a new production. Pulcinella was a co-production with Ballet Rambert (choreographed by Richard Alston) with exciting designs by Howard Hodgkin (‘Perfect for the two-dimensionality that ballet sets need’, as Lloyd-Jones remembered in 2010). Oedipus Rex was a revival from 1981, Stefanos Lazaridis reworking with Michael Hunt the production he had originally designed. The two one-acters, one from Stravinsky’s neo-classical period, re-orchestrating Pergolesi’s music, one composed six years later, with

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words by Jean Cocteau, were deemed an excellent match. Hodgkins’s sets had Italianate warmth, but also matched the sharpness of the orchestration — an abstract idea of a Mediterranean townscape. The double bill was very popular with audiences and it was a disappointment for Opera North staff that touring had to be cancelled for financial reasons. A production of The Abduction from the Seraglio by Graham Vick in April 1987 was described as ‘sober-minded’ and quite static at times by Martin Dreyer, who speculated on whether this was a result of underfunding (Dreyer, 1987c, p. 689). Both Chibnall (2011) and Payne (2011) reflected on the fact that there was sometimes a certain unevenness in the distribution of resources. Not yet 10 years old, the company was forging its reputation of unusual repertoire in distinctive productions. One such choice was Daphne (2 May 1987), directed by Philip Prowse. It is typical of Opera North’s enterprise that they should have filled this gaping hole in Britain’s acquaintance with Strauss’s operas. It soon became apparent, however, that the reason for the work’s absence from our stages this past half-century is not its length, nor its alleged ‘undramatic’ plot, but the stark fact that it requires a cast of heroic vocal stature. (Kennedy, 1987, p. 816)

Helen Field’s ‘remarkable interpretation’ of the title role won Michael Kennedy’s and the audience’s approval, although the reviewer rather wished ‘we could have had Mount Olympus in the background and a sunset and some greenery’. Both The Love for Three Oranges and Zimmermann’s The Soldiers (planned for the 1987/1988 season) had to be withdrawn with reluctance because the extra £100,000 extra needed for an extended orchestra and for its other complexities, involving a film and a soundtrack parallel to the live orchestra. ‘This decision was particularly sad as both were to be co-productions and were novel’ (Opera North Board Minutes, 27 February 1987). Oranges was postponed to the 1988/1989 and is still one of the mostremembered Opera North productions to this day. Both Payne and Lloyd-Jones had been champions of The Soldiers, LloydJones having seen the Stuttgart production (directed by Harry Kupfer) while he was guesting in nearby Karlsruhe. With recent adventurous programming proving a success, the company set its sights on commissioning new work and on collaborating with partners in the field of contemporary music and production, notably the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and David Freeman’s Opera Factory in London. Paul Daniel was their music director. The ambition to extend touring activity beyond the company’s existing circuit was still strong, albeit dependent on successfully eliminating the accumulated deficit by the end of the 1988/1989 season. Another ambition has fuelled Opera North from its foundations and is still written on its banners many decades later:

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[…] to become the most exciting opera company in the country, to the benefit of our exceptionally large potential audiences in the North of England. (Opera North Policy Statement for appraisal, spring 1987)

Meanwhile, a ‘Powerhouse’ ENO was proposing to reconnect with venues and audiences outside London. The suggestion was that ENO should have seasons in a ‘major provincial city’, not dissimilar to the suggestion of the Royal Opera House having seasons in Manchester (a scheme halted by the recession in 2008). Payne wrote to his ENO counterpart, Peter Jonas, on 11 May 1987, dissecting a passage in a report that stated ‘Nor, in all fairness, is the creation of Regional Opera Companies likely to be a completely effective substitute for touring by the National company’ (Price-Waterhouse Report, 1987, pp. 166–170). The implied notion of regional inferiority was bound to get tempers up at Opera North, Payne pointing out to Jonas that the company was created in 1978 ‘specifically to replace the ineffective touring of ENO’. A firm believer in the Arts Council’s ‘spheres of influence’ principle, Payne asserted Opera North’s role of providing opera for the North of England (and not ‘the provinces!’): ‘If money were water, we should be delighted to see a season by ENO in a major provincial city, with an appropriate repertory. Since it is not, I should very much resent either public or private money being allocated to it’ (Payne, 1987). The role of the Council of Opera North had been reviewed during 1987, and a conclusion was reached that it had fulfilled its original purpose and was to be disbanded. Hilary Pugh commented that ‘the role of a wider body tends to diminish after a few years’, particularly referring to the changes that had taken place after Opera North’s independence in 1981 (Pugh, 1987). In summary, the company’s drive to be on par with the other UK companies and to distinguish itself through its productions was constantly at risk through the unfairness of a situation, in which Opera North’s funding was so far below that of its peers for historical reasons. Every initiative seemed to run up against that barrier.

1987/1988 Since its beginning, one has longed for this company to achieve a whole season of winners. This autumn, with The Trojans at Carthage, Figaro and now Macbeth — the latter two selling out completely — that time has arrived at last. (Dreyer, 1987d, p. 1456)

In the autumn season, Peter Gill directed a new production of The Marriage of Figaro in Edward Dent’s English translation, prompting Malcolm Hayes to comment that ‘we had here the intriguing situation of an English version (with a hint of Cornwall) of an Italian opera by an Austrian composer based on a story set in Spain by a French playwright: truly, a case of

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something for everyone!’ (Hayes, 1987). Macbeth (12 October 1987) won praise for the performances of Josephine Barstow (in her company debut), ‘bringing a touch of Shostakovich’s expressionist heroine to Verdi’s altogether less convincing musical portrait’ (Kenyon, 1987), as well as for Brent Ellis (Macbeth) and John Pryce-Jones (conductor, chorus director and by now designated Head of Music at Scottish Opera). Judge’s production in John Gunter’s sets used silhouette effects in a black-box setting, sliding panels and sudden shafts of coloured light. This had a concentrated chamber-play effect. Judge was a master at directing crowds, as remarked by several company members. Jane Bonner remembered Macbeth as ‘fabulous’, combining Judge’s skill with the ensemble with ‘a few trees that flew in and a red curtain, that was about it!’ (Bonner, 2013). A new Carmen in December, directed by Richard Jones in his first own production, split opinions among audiences and critics — it was also not popular with many in the company (Leeks, 2003, p. 52). While some attributed Jones and designer Nigel Lowery with intelligence and an interesting perspective on the work, others spoke of unevenness, although Opera North’s policy of directors revisiting their work meant there was potential for a future reexamination. The Trojans at Carthage, Part 2 of Berlioz’s The Trojans, arrived in Leeds in September 1987. Part 1, The Capture of Troy, had premiered at Opera North the previous autumn, Part 2 had first been seen at Welsh National Opera, who subsequently showed both parts together, something that sadly was not possible at Opera North for financial reasons. ‘There is no doubt that this Trojans should be regarded as one of the most substantial achievements of British opera in the 1980s’ (Clements, 1987). This was echoed by Tom Sutcliffe in his book Believing in Opera. He described The Trojans at Carthage in contrast to some of the imagery in The Capture of Troy. A post-industrial setting showed initial scenes of

Illustration 11. 1987/1988 — The Trojans at Carthage. Sally Burgess (Dido), Patricia Bardon (Anna). Photo: Andrew March.

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domesticity, peace and prosperity in Dido’s Carthage. The catastrophe of Aeneas’s departure and Dido’s suicide was introduced by Mercury, smeared in blood, dragging a sword across the stage. Instead of a funeral pyre, Cairns and McDonald gave Dido a red-covered metal Victorian bedstead, on which, assisted by Anna, she committed suicide. The bed was set in seaside mud, silhouetted against a dark blue night-sky backdrop with a sort of trompe-l’oeil door where the adored Trojans made their definitive departure, escaping into dreamland — and history. (Sutcliffe, 1998, p. 300)

The ‘Albery Troika’ (Sutcliffe, 1998, p. 293) played with symbols of time and place, and with notions of scale through a tiny forest in Part 2. The Trojans at Carthage was deemed more discursive than The Capture of Troy, which had been more dominated by ‘raw-edged, remorseless intensity’. Sally Burgess’s Dido was the emotional and musical centrepiece of the production (Clements, 1987) and Paul Nilon’s Hylas was seen as a defining moment of his career. Plans were being discussed for co-productions (The Love for Three Oranges with ENO, as well as The Pearl Fishers). Manon was to be produced with the RNCM and West Side Story (co-produced with Salts Mill in Saltaire) had various funders and sponsors (Opera North Board meeting, 2 October 1987). From early 1988, the Board stepped up the fight to raise the Arts Council grant at least in line with inflation. This is best documented by letters sent to Luke Rittner and Peter Palumbo (Chairman of the Arts Council from 1988 until 1994) by the formidable Chairman of the Board, Sir Gordon Linacre. An increase of 2% to ON’s grant was forecast for the 1989/1990 season, leading to a possible deficit of £250,000. It may be that the Arts Council was disappointed at the time with the level of funds provided locally, but it nonetheless accepted that level at the time the company was launched with full Arts Council support. Since that time, the Local Authority contribution has increased significantly in real terms. At 18% of turnover, it stands more than favourable comparison with any other opera company in this country. The Local Authorities up here, all of whom are under considerable pressure, feel very strongly that their contributions are not matched in other companies where the Arts Council contribution is so much higher. […] Please do not underestimate the strength of feeling, not just from our Board but from our whole community, on these issues. (Linacre, 1988a)

Close to its 10th anniversary and continuously building up the strength of its artistic output, the company feared the consequences of damaging cuts and their effect on the programming for the next financial year (risking ‘muted’ 10th anniversary celebrations, as Linacre put it). With three newly established Arts Council funds (the Incentive Fund, the Great Britain Touring fund (Opera North allocation £65,000) and the Development Fund), senior management and Board set their sights on applications to top up their inflation-damaged annual grant (Opera North Board Minutes, 20 April 1988).

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Meanwhile, having to rein in extra spending, the Opera North management was unable to compromise with Graham Vick and designer Stefanos Lazaridis over a production of Fidelio that had gone over budget (Opera North Board Minutes, 22 April 1988). Martin Dreyer’s comment (1988a, p. 737) was tinged with sarcasm: ‘Perhaps Vick had had ideas above his station (only £20,000 above, as it turned out)’. Director Michael McCarthy stepped in at short notice with designer Peter Mumford. Dreyer commented with a spirited defence of the beleaguered company: And what of the Arts Council support: how much further can Opera North pare down its productions, already reduced from twelve to nine, without sacrificing all credibility as a full-time professional company? Yes, this is only a single failure, though heaven knows the scrimping and saving in Leeds have seen some close shaves recently. Opera North is not a showpiece organisation on the London model. It is a living, vital part of its community, disseminating a love of opera at all levels. Where is the Glory of the Garden now? These gardeners are simply not being given the tools. (Dreyer, 1988a, p. 737)

Dreyer’s colleague, Rodney Milnes also sprang to Opera North’s defence in a review for Tosca (5 May 1988), claiming that the Arts Council mandarins should have been bussed up to Leeds to see how totally un-elitist the potential audience for opera is: this […] was relished by a heterogeneous assembly of every possible age, class and colour, and relished without the age of you-know-whats. […] The concentration, the communication between artists and audience, was tangible. (Milnes, 1988, p. 869)

This impression of a diverse and engaged audience was complemented by strong box office returns for the 1988 spring season (with the exception of Manchester, where it was just 64% of capacity). After he had been in post for 10 years, David Lloyd-Jones announced his resignation in July 1988, with the intention of leaving in 1990, giving almost two years notice to ensure that a good successor was found. It was time to move on, and one also realised they needed something fresh. In the old days, you just used to stay forever and ever, but those days are gone. People are much quicker in their turnover these days; you’re lucky if you stay for 5–6 years; that’s considered a good innings, particularly with London orchestras. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

The pending departure of Opera North’s founding Music and Artistic Director put some added significance onto preparing the company’s 10th anniversary season. The Duke and Duchess of York had been won as Opera North’s first Royal patrons. There were to be four main events: a concert at Leeds Town Hall, a Gala Opera Evening, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner and starring Ann Murray, and the first nights of The Love for Three Oranges (‘festive, fun and not too long’, as Lloyd-Jones described it in 2010) and The Pearl Fishers (as planned in the Opera North Board Minutes, 8 July 1988). Oranges was to open the season and Opera

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North’s first Boris Godunov was to conclude it — both would be performed in Lloyd-Jones’s translation. Back in the boardroom, Councillor Elizabeth Nash (outgoing chairman of Leeds City Council’s Leisure Services) was succeeded by Councillor Bernard Atha, a keen supporter of the arts in Leeds throughout his political career. Sir Gordon Linacre ended the season using metaphors that befitted Leeds’s textile tradition in a letter to Luke Rittner at the Arts Council: In this part of the country we know an awful lot about cutting coats according to the cloth, but in the Arts world it is extremely difficult establishing the size of the cloth and since we want as splendid a coat as the Arts Council once believed the world outside London deserved, the prospect of funds from the Arts Council is a critical factor. (Linacre, 1988b)

1988/1989 Run by Opera North Education with mostly amateur performers (and a few students from the Royal Northern College of Music) during the summer of 1988, company artists worked on West Side Story in a site-specific production at Salts Mill in Saltaire, directed by Graham Vick. Jonathan Silver, its director, who turned the World Heritage Site into a renowned centre of art and culture (the home of a large David Hockney collection, including all his set designs for opera), had recently taken over. West Side Story was produced with financial contributions by Yorkshire Arts, Bradford Council, Marks & Spencer and others. Chibnall (2011) made connections between this production and some of Graham Vick’s later work with Birmingham City Opera, turning large buildings into operatic promenades with community groups and professional singers. In an article in Opera magazine to mark Opera North’s tenth anniversary, Nicholas Payne looked back on the company’s journey since the auspicious opening premiere in November 1978. Dismissing Lord Rees-Mogg’s alleged statement that Opera North was one of the biggest mistakes of the 1970s as a joke (albeit a bad one), he played a few shots of his own. Referring to its unique position as the only English opera company outside London and the sheer size of the population Opera North catered for, he stressed the importance of the ‘formidable allegiance’ of the Opera North Board and the local authorities (first and foremost Leeds City Council, but also Greater Manchester, North Yorkshire, Humberside and Nottinghamshire), all of which formed a community of support that enticed the at first reluctant West Yorkshire into the fold. Payne remarked that inequalities in funding were unlikely to be addressed, but drew confidence from the strength of Opera North’s growing commercial success (i.e. an

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audience increase of 15% and overall capacity moving close to 90%) — also inspiring risktaking, particularly in view of a strong subscription scheme, ‘the backbone of Opera North’s audience’ in Leeds. The job of converting people to the ‘joy and terror, the cathartic experience’ of opera, could only be taken on by an ‘indigenous opera company’ with the kind of educational and community programmes that Opera North were developing. Payne confirmed what David Lloyd-Jones had suspected — and had articulated to Lord Harewood before Opera North was launched in 1978: ‘Like it or not, the oldfashioned company of singers is dead’. Payne named different reasons to LloydIllustration 12. 1988/1989 — Boris Godunov. John Tomlinson (Boris), Chorus of Opera Jones, who had looked at it from the point North. Photo: Stephen Vaughan. of view of the company having to stretch the singers too much. Payne asserted that the league of singers Opera North wanted to work with ‘do not wish to be tied to a 52-week contract’, and that paying full-time artists worked best for companies with a rolling schedule of performances, not ‘en bloc’ seasons a year, as Opera North had since its inception. This balance between ambition (high quality of singers) and pragmatism (cost of an ensemble of singers) was also applied to the repertoire in the first 10 years: out of the 70 operas produced, 44 were ‘originated by Opera North’. On the positive side, co-productions meant the company could afford to show a much broader cross-section of repertoire than it would have been able to do on its own — on the negative side, it meant limited artistic control over these preexisting productions. Opera North became good at extending its control in imaginative ways, however, nurturing new directorial talent in the process. ‘Revival’ has often meant a fresh look at a production, rather than ‘five minutes under the microwave’, as Payne asserted. While dissecting achievement in the company’s first decade, Payne was precise on the yet unfulfilled long-term ambitions: Monteverdi, more late Verdi, a Ring sometime in the

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future … There have always been big plans and ambitions for the company — unfortunately, financial constraints often meant projects remained ambitions (Payne, 1988, p. 1040). A festive autumn got under way with The Love for Three Oranges. Lloyd-Jones remembered meeting Richard Jones for the first time a few years before (he was later reminded that Jones had been an ASM on Oedipus Rex in the early days of Opera North) and asked him if there was an opera he would particularly like to direct. ‘Yes, I’d like to do The Invisible City of Kitej’, he replied and I said ‘well, you happen to mention one of my favourite operas! But — do you know what it’s about? A city sinking in front of our eyes into the bottom of a lake, three different armies, I mean, we couldn’t possibly do it!’ The choice for Jones’s second Opera North production, The Love for Three Oranges, a ‘characteristically off-the-wall choice’ (Leeks, 2003, p. 56), nevertheless displayed different and magical worlds on stage, fuelled by the surreal imaginations of Jones and the designers, The Brothers Quay and Sue Blane. Dreyer (1988b, p. 1378) described the visual style of the production as ‘at times expressionist, at times surreal, with touches of Victorian Gothic’ and also mentioned that the production had a ‘strong flavour of commedia dell’arte’. It was performed in a witty translation by Lloyd-Jones, specially done for this production and an ENO transfer was agreed for the following season. Sir Gordon Linacre called it ‘a fitting celebratory production […] and that it is a co-production with ENO which will reach London next year as a belated thank-you for helping to found us in the first place’ (Linacre, 1988c). For one of the dumb shows, put on to try to make the hypochondriac prince laugh, Lloyd-Jones recalled Richard Jones’s plan: He said ‘it would be rather fun if an alligator came on stage and ate a member of the chorus’ and I said ‘How will you do that?!’ and he said ‘Leave it to me’. And that’s exactly what happened. An alligator came on stage and ate David Owen Lewis — he began to grapple with it and he managed to make himself disappear into the mouth. And I said ‘what an imagination! You’re quite worrying if you have an imagination like that’. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

As well as the crocodile trick, the scratch-and-sniff cards that were handed out to the audience also became lodged in everyone’s memory, as did the funny and daring performances of the cast, including Peter Jeffes (The Prince), Andrew Shore/Robert Poulton (Leander), Patricia Payne (Princess Clarissa), Pauline Tinsley (Fata Morgana) and Richard Angas (The Cook). The production was invited to the 1989 Edinburgh Festival and filmed by the BBC over two performances. Broadcast on Christmas Day

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1988, it was the first Opera North production to be televised in its entirety. It also transferred to ENO in the winter of 1989 and later to the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv.15 For the new production of Lucia di Lammermoor, Ultz’s set had been borrowed from a 1986 Welsh National Opera production, around which a new production by David Gann was fashioned. The cast was headed by ENO ‘star’ Valerie Masterson. An anniversary gala concert on 13 November 1988 was introduced by Lord Harewood. The programme showed off the company’s impressive range: Handel, Mozart, Verdi and other 19th century Italian cornerstones of the repertoire, Strauss, Berlioz, Delius and Bernstein. All the pieces had been selected from operas that Opera North had not yet done and was interested in producing in the future, recalled Lloyd-Jones, who had also written the preface: At all times there has been a sense of pride in achieving and maintaining artistic standards, loyalty to our audience and a desire to preserve a serious yet harmonious working atmosphere, and it is precisely these qualities that are invariably commented on by visiting artists. (Lloyd-Jones, 1988, p. 4)

The season also featured two 19th century works in Philip Prowse productions. The Pearl Fishers (with a co-credit for Sally Day for direction) was shown in a production that had first been seen at ENO, but was reworked for its Leeds premiere. Max Loppert, expecting naturalism and exoticism, recommended that ‘some operatic philanthropist should send Mr Prowse on a holiday to the real Indian Ocean before he attempts this opera again’. He was very satisfied with the Chorus of Opera North, ‘an unfailing bonus on any visit to Leeds’ (Loppert, 1989a, p. 232). Aida was also directed by Prowse (reviving his 1986 production), but critics responded to it more favourably than to The Pearl Fishers, seeing its limitations as a strength and admiring ‘a fascinating “small house” view of the work, beautifully textured and shaped’ (Loppert, 1989a, p. 232). The production had an orientalist (i.e. notions of ‘the orient’ through the eyes of Western artists) feel to it, remnant of the work of Winterhalter or Delacroix. Lloyd-Jones (2010) recalled a member of the orchestra jokily asking why Aida was set in the basement of Liberty’s, but the production impressed audiences. Stephen Medcalf reworked Basil Coleman’s production of The Flying Dutchman, first seen in Opera North’s early seasons, with Kristine Ciesinski as Senta and Donald Maxwell as the Dutchman.

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Opera North’s The Love for Three Oranges is available in its entirety on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPGPP773zFY

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As well as directing Oranges, Richard Jones was also responsible for a new production of Manon (Massenet) in the 1989 spring season, previously seen at the RNCM in Manchester, where it had been conducted by Lloyd-Jones, with Clive Timms taking over the Leeds run. Max Loppert described it as one of the ‘most sparkling achievement of recent times’. The production combined the present (i.e. the late 1980s, a ‘severe grey raked box set’) with the early 18th century, using footlights, costumes and make-up of heightened colour (Loppert, 1989b, p. 736). Boris Godunov is often mentioned as a company highlight by Opera North employees past and present. It was performed in Lloyd-Jones’s widely used edition (Mussorgsky’s score, not Rimsky-Korsakov’s), in his translation and under his musical direction. Arthur Jacobs commented: ‘What was novel was to present, in place of what has become the standard fuller version, the composer’s original, much shorter seven-scene structure [1869 …] not merely a shorter opera but a starker, more direct one’ (Jacobs, 1989, p. 864). Nicholas Payne wrote in the programme that this process of concentration and omission of non-essential characters ‘damages the picture of Russian history, but it strengthens the relationship between the two central characters: Tsar Boris and the Russian people’ (Payne, 1989). Ian Judge, always considered as a director who produced excellent large-scale productions, was credited with ‘a vivid, lucid and concentrated staging’ (Jacobs, 1989, p. 864) in a scenography that was functional for both crowds and for more intimate scenes (Russell Craig/Deirdre Clancy). Critics admired the distinctive perspectives of the first two crowd scenes: the first one looking out of Novodyevichy Monastery, the second the crowd’s perspective onto the cathedral from the outside. John Tomlinson gave a performance that was ‘perhaps the pinnacle of his achievements with Opera North’ (Leeks, 2003, p. 56). A Chandos recording of highlights (conducted by Paul Daniel), which was based on Opera North’s production, was made in 1997. An advertisement for a new Music Director had gone out in early December 1988. A sub-committee (Lord Harewood, Nicholas Payne, Anthony Tapp and Tom McDonald) had in several meetings drawn up and discussed an extensive shortlist. After lengthy deliberations with several possible candidates, Paul Daniel emerged as the favourite. He was Music Director of the Opera Factory, had been on the ENO music staff between 1982 and 1987 and had a lively freelance career. Negotiations were still in progress in April, when an Arts Council internal memo (4 April 1989) documents Gordon Linacre telling Kenneth Baird, the Arts Council’s Music Officer, that the company were planning to appoint Paul Daniel. His appointment was publicly announced on 11 August 1989. The Yorkshire Post commented:

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Opera North, which has a reputation for being go-ahead within sensible limits, has characteristically made a bold choice in its appointment of its music director to succeed David Lloyd-Jones […] But Leeds audiences need not fear that Daniel is principally associated with contemporary operas. (Anonymous, 1989a; see also Anonymous, 1989b)

Plans were now being made for Masquerade (Carl Nielsen) to be the company’s contribution to the 1990 Leeds Festival. There was a shortfall of £16,000 from West Yorkshire Grants (Opera North Board Minutes, 7 July 1989). Even so, the company balanced its books in 1988/1989 for the third year running, a combination of careful cost control and strong box office returns, with The Love for Three Oranges (96%) almost as successful as Carmen and Bohème (100% each). It was also a season of expansion, as company productivity increased by 16%. The company was awarded an Arts Council Incentive Fund of £200,000, reducing its inherited deficit (Opera North Press Release, 9 May 1989). Figaro — the Untold Story toured 12 venues of up to 500 capacity (North and West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester — including the Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, North Yorkshire). The piece referenced Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s Barber of Seville to tell the story of Beaumarchais, from whose plays both operas were adapted. Founder member and deputy music director Clive Timms announced he was leaving at the end of the season to run the Guildhall School of Music’s opera course. All in all, the season provided exciting evidence of Opera North’s ability to programme cornerstones of the repertoire together with large-scale or ‘difficult’ work, making for a distinctive and ambitious artistic record.

1989/1990 The previous season had pushed the boat out, expanding the repertoire, showing some rarities and encouraging experimentation in production. The 1989/1990 season was aimed at a balance between security and innovation, but still 110 performances of 11 operas, of which 6 were new to the company, were achieved, as well as an ever-increasing education programme and the orchestra’s established concert seasons. The orchestra won acclaim for Britten’s War Requiem at Huddersfield Town Hall and at the Royal Festival Hall in London in November 1989, as well as performing Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius at Leeds Town Hall in March 1990.

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Illustration 13.

1989/1990 — Masquerade. Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

After a borrowed production from Scottish Opera in its opening year, Opera North presented its first own production of Peter Grimes to open the autumn season. Ronald Eyre’s production was deemed ‘expressionist’ by some critics in the first act and Mark Thompson’s set (a wooden gallery around a tilted revolve) did not concentrate on depicting the Borough, the sea or the sky in naturalistic terms — this was taken on by David Lloyd-Jones and the ENP in the pit, suggesting the orchestra ‘plays’ the

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part of the sea in score and plot. In one of its settings, the revolve became Grimes’s hut as well as the cliff from which the apprentice fell. The chorus was deemed magnificent; a tribute to Eyre’s direction of the crowd scenes and to Martin Pickard, the new chorus master. For a while, there had been discussions about producing a musical at Opera North. For Payne and Chibnall, this was again about expanding the range of genres and styles, not dissimilar to the German repertoire theatre model, where musicals and operettas form a regular part of programming. They made it a rule that only pieces that would benefit from having a proper orchestra and un-amplified singers should be done. Payne was interested in 1920s Gershwin, but then thought that the stories were ‘too inconsequential’. He went to New York for a meeting with representatives of the Gershwin estate: ‘We came up with a very good idea. I was going to call it “The One I Love”. And they hummed and ha-ed and gave me brunch and eventually wouldn’t let us’ (Payne, 2011). Payne’s demoralisation did not last long, as he warmed to Show Boat’s ‘wonderful score’ and epic narrative scope. It was to be the first musical produced by Opera North, and a co-production with the RSC Stratford — neither organisation could have afforded it on their own. Show Boat was cast jointly, with the RSC leading on the spoken roles and Opera North on the singing ones, with a double cast for Leeds and the run in Stratford. Director Ian Judge was the link between the two organisations, having worked for both regularly. The opening night on 8 December 1989 was a Royal Gala. The production then went on tour in the autumn of 1990, for which commercial promoter Pola Jones was employed, with Opera North retaining artistic control. The Arts Council (in the person of Jack Phipps) helped to broker the joint venture. An en-suite run of Show Boat meant that Opera North’s usual spring touring pattern was not possible, but the venues were to be compensated by receiving the commercial version on the autumn tour in 1990. It still cost considerably more than budgeted for and ended up with a substantial deficit, despite playing to 95% houses, as Payne explains. ‘And I had a very difficult board meeting because a £200,000 deficit was not good news’ (Payne, 2011). The gamble paid off, however, as the company managed to exploit the hugely acclaimed Show Boat commercially the following year with a run at the London Palladium and a national tour after the sell-out successes in Leeds and Stratford. It put the name ‘Opera North’ on the map. After Show Boat everyone knew who we were. It was actually a very good investment — I was just trying to make the repertory more interesting. I remember my mother coming to the first night and saying ‘it wasn’t as good as when I saw it in 1929 with Paul Robeson’. [laughter] But those who hadn’t seen Paul Robeson thought it was quite good. (Payne, 2011)

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This landmark 1927 musical tells the story of three couples, spanning 40 years, on a Mississippi floating theatre. Opera North presented a production that returned to the orchestration of the original and re-inserted elements that dealt with racial segregation and discrimination. Max Loppert remarked, using a term made fashionable by Soviet leader Michail Gorbachev, that the well-blended cast of opera and musical singers spelled a kind of ‘cultural glasnost’ for opera companies doing musicals, This Show Boat could boast the power and precision of opera-house ensemble at its best, married to the vigour and punch of a ‘real’ musical: the best of all possible worlds. […] It is one of many virtues of Ian Judge’s brilliant production […] that, in spite of the familiarity of the music, there is a pessimistic starkness, a grandeur, about the whole experience, that revives some of the original Broadway shock-wave reverberations — and indeed, sets the music in a revelatory new perspective. (Loppert, 1990a, pp. 149–153)

Sally Burgess’s ‘richly sung, exquisitely phrased, heartrendingly underplayed Julie’ won plaudits from most critics and ovations from audiences. A review in Musical Opinion claimed ‘it’s not too much to claim that Opera North have done for Jerome Kern what Glyndebourne did for Gershwin in Porgy & Bess. It is an all-round triumph, nothing less’ (KL, 1990). It was announced that for the 1990/1991 season, the Arts Council would raise its grant by 8% to match inflation, an improvement of the previous three-year settlement of a 2% raise (also, the Arts Council’s grant had been increased by 12.9%). Opera North was funded from the Music and Touring departments of the Arts Council. In a series of letters to Chairman Peter Palumbo, Sir Gordon Linacre expressed concern for Opera North’s ability to maintain its position in the market and among other UK companies: The other national companies treat us as equal partners, witness our recent co-productions of The Trojans with Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera, of The Love for Three Oranges with ENO and of Show Boat with the RSC. In each of these instances, Opera North was the initiating partner. Yet our funding has throughout our existence remained well behind the Welsh and Scottish companies, let alone the Londonbased companies. This situation cannot exist forever, and is worsened by the allocation for next year. (Linacre, 1989)

At a London meeting, Palumbo endorsed Opera North’s status as a national company, calling the underfunding an ‘historical accident’ that he would try and fight wherever possible. Sir Gordon Linacre still warned that balancing the books for 1990/ 1991 was ‘nigh impossible’ without additional funding and the risk of a deficit building up again was tangible, as were the difficulties arising from short-notice planning (Meeting of Board Members with the Chairman of the Arts Council, 31 March 1990). They agreed to an Arts Council reappraisal meeting to consider Opera North’s case and it was held at Opera North on 30 May 1990 (Opera North Board Minutes, 1 June 1990). The financial uncertainty caused the senior management team to delay the season announcement for 1990/1991. Leeds City Council and West Yorkshire Grants offered a slight rise in their grants. In order

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to balance the books, it was decided to replace the planned production of Billy Budd (Britten) with Attila (Verdi), although there was concern about it being relatively unknown, and was going to be running soon after Jerusalem (Verdi). On the other hand, John Tomlinson (already contracted as Claggart for Budd and very popular with Opera North audiences) agreed to sing the title role and Ian Judge was available to direct, continuing their successful partnership. In the spring season of 1990, the British premiere of Jerusalem (Verdi) was directed by Pierre Audi and marked Paul Daniel’s company debut prior to becoming Music Director. Verdi’s reworking of his I Lombardi was a British premiere (with major sponsorship by NatWest). With a complex plot from the period of the Crusades, Jerusalem comes with a chorus of weary pilgrims, similar to Nabucco and a chorus set in a harem, similar to the witches in Verdi’s Macbeth. Arguments raged about the staging, heavy with symbolism, both in public and within the company: ‘All that came across was the merest, most irritating Dada’, as Rodney Milnes commented (1990, p. 728), complaining about the lack of transparency or ‘readability’ of what was going on onstage. The production was acknowledged as avoiding typical 19th century operatic clichés by other critics, however, and deemed a big success musically, an auspicious start for Paul Daniel. It also launched the opera-directing career of Pierre Audi, the newly appointed Artistic Director of Netherlands Opera, who remains in that position to this day. L’heure Espagnole/Gianni Schicchi substituted a planned co-production with Stuttgart Opera (Germany) of The Damnation of Faust. It was Lloyd-Jones’s last production as Opera North’s Music and Artistic Director. The unusual, but very functional combination of the two short operas provided a welcome ‘operatic sorbet’ after the more heavy weight Jerusalem, as Julian Rushton put it in The Independent (1990). Performed in English (in Violet Tunnard’s rhyming translation), it also marked Martin Duncan’s directing debut with the company; critics agreed on the well-crafted nature of his work and his sense of comic timing, drawing comparisons with Alan Ayckbourn’s UK take on farce. ‘French and Italian humour bundled together in English pantomime style in plots spanning lust, deception, avarice, love — Ravel and Puccini between them have it all’ (Hughes, 1990). Tom Cairns’s designs were said to be inspired by the work of Dali for L’heure espagnole and embraced a more traditional Florentine setting for Gianni Schicchi. Andrew Shore in the title role had ‘quickly become one of leading comic baritones’ (Dreyer, 1990a, p. 732) and Louise Winter as Conception in Ravel’s one-acter was credited as singing gloriously and keeping her character balanced between coquettishness and sexual frustration. Philip Prowse revived his production of Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck) to mixed reactions. Opera North scored a big success with Carl Nielsen’s opera Masquerade in its British professional premiere, 80 years after its first performance. Produced for the Leeds Festival in June 1990, this effectively made for the company’s second British premiere in one season.

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This splendid production remedied an 84-year old omission […] Let us demolish the myth that this is some Danish Bartered Bride. […] With teamwork the watchword at every turn, this was not an evening of stars. (Dreyer, 1990b, p. 988)

Masquerade, composed in 1906 and an adaptation of a Holberg comedy from 1724, is a tale of parental opposition to a young couple’s love, with tinges of commedia dell’arte and a comedy of mistaken identities. The production was directed by Helena Kaut-Howson and was described as quite opulent in its scenography (Lez Brotherston). Ric Green (2011) called it lavish and well-designed, particularly the costumes in the masquerade scene, but not with an unusually large budget. Paul Nilon and Mary Hegarty, both Opera North regulars to this day, were cast as the young lovers. The audience had fun donning masks and buying chestnuts from a stand outside the Grand Theatre. It was a flagship production for the revived Leeds Festival (it had run from 1858, the year Leeds Town Hall had been opened by Queen Victoria, to 1985 — the revival of the festival was unfortunately short-lived). Masquerade was revived for the Opera North Christmas season in 1991 and subsequently taken on tour. In June, David Lloyd-Jones and the ENP made their first commercial recording on the Hyperion label, which was shortlisted at Grammophone’s orchestral record of the year. This inaugurated the orchestra’s much praised series of recordings. Nicholas Payne, in a letter to the Arts Council Secretary General, expressed confusion as to how the plans to devolve regional arts companies to Regional Arts Boards might affect the running of Opera North. The company was already having to piece together allocations from the Music, Touring and GB Touring Fund budgets, in order to arrive at an integrated budget for a year’s work, which does not easily fit the artificial division of ‘home base’ touring, concerts, education and community work across a wide tract of the country. Hence, in the past, our contention that we should be treated as a ‘national company’, whatever that means. (Payne, 1990a)

Against this resistance, the Arts Council subsequently recommended that responsibility for the base funding of ON should be delegated to the Yorkshire and Humberside Arts Board while touring grants would continue to be allocated from the Arts Council touring budget — this was to be effective from the start of the financial year 1992/1993 (Everitt, 1990). Payne (1990b) started his annual review with the opening sentences of A Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — in short, the period was so like the present period …’. Major and minor lay close together in this season: Opera North reached more audiences than ever before, had produced adventurous work of superior quality, but ran up an operating deficit higher than at any other time during the company’s existence. Following the cutback years (1986/1987 and 1987/1988) and a year of cautious expansion (1988/1989), the 1989/1990 season saw a productivity increase of over

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12%. In summary, Opera North was getting 78% of the Arts Council’s grant in comparison with Scottish Opera, and only 63% of WNO’s grant — yet in 1989/1990, it had exceeded the Arts Council’s projected levels of performances and audience figures, and also its own business plan projections of box office and private sector fundraising (Payne, 1990b). Lloyd-Jones, at the end of his tenure, could be proud of leaving a healthy and quality-conscious company which continued to convince through quality and courage. Would it be consigned to a strictly regional status, its ambition reigned in?

1990/1991 I think we were terribly ambitious and we took huge risks. (Chibnall, 2011)

The company’s sense of adventurousness pervaded the 1990/1991 season. It opened with Ariane and Bluebeard by Paul Dukas, which had not been performed in Britain since 1937 (a visit to Covent Garden by Paris Opera) and was sung in English. There was a significant connection with Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, both musically and dramaturgically: the libretto is by Maeterlinck, Debussy was a strong influence on Dukas, and Mélisande appears in the opera as one of Bluebeard’s wives. Ariane (known better to operagoers as Ariadne from several other operas), after the episode with Theseus and the Minotaur, appears as Bluebeard’s sixth bride and decides to rescue her five predecessors — but the women do not want to be liberated. Dukas explained this with humans preferring familiar slavery to ‘the terrifying uncertainty of the burden of liberty — a theory somewhat disproved by recent European events’ (Kennedy, 1990). Patrick Mason’s Opera North production (intended to be shared with ENO) set the opera just before World War I, with Bluebeard as a rich industrialist. It was Paul Daniel’s inaugural performance as Music Director. Opera North and their new conductor have made a thrilling success of it, one of the most gratifying in company history; in doing so they have demonstrated beyond question what some of us […] strongly suspected — that this is one of the operatic masterpieces of our century. (Loppert, 1990b, p. 1354)

Revivals of François Rochaix 1985 production of La traviata, Philip Prowse’s 1984 Threepenny Opera and Vick’s 1982 Così fan tutte (revived by Matthew Richardson) followed before the new production of Attila (Verdi) opened, thrilling audiences and quite a few critics, too. Ian Judge (director of Boris Godunov two seasons before) and John Tomlinson (his Boris) renewed their creative partnership in a production that provided some visual references to the 1979 sci-fi dystopian film Mad Max,

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particularly in the leather costumes of the men’s chorus. Peter Heyworth summed up the evening as ‘one of those rare performances when all components pull in the same direction’. John Tomlinson was credited with ‘indefatigable intensity, an appropriately black quality of voice and a compelling sense of phrase’ (Heyworth, 1991). The demanding female lead, Odabella, was sung alternatively by American soprano Karen Huffstodt and by Josephine Barstow. A certain recklessness seems to have characterised the production — ‘to play the melodrama for all its worth and damn the critical consequences’ (Brunskill, 1991), which Judge described as providing ‘the perfect mixture of mirth and menace’ (Cargill, 1991). Attila toured to the new theatre Schouwburg in Rotterdam during February 1991 in treacherous wintry conditions. The visit immediately led to talks about a revisit and the company’s work was greatly admired. The Jewel Box formed part of the company’s contribution to the Mozart bicentenary year, adapted from the composer’s material by author Paul Griffiths. Its plot was constructed from 17 ‘homeless’ Mozart arias and ensembles written for Italian comedies, material from unfinished operas and some rejected arias. Some reviewers were critical of the commedia dell’arte characters on which the production (Francesco Negrin) centred, others liked the time-travelling aspects of the production, with the centrepiece of Pamela Helen Stephen’s composer. Malcolm Hayes called it ‘a genuinely ingenious piece of stage craft, and Griffiths has done opera-goers a service in rescuing this music from obscurity. […] The problem is that as a package, The Jewel Box doesn’t work well enough musically’. The fact that the pieces were mostly in the grand manner ‘they amount to a musical log-jam of the kind that Mozart’s own flair for operatic pacing and contrast so instinctively led to avoid’ (Hayes, 1991). Of the three British productions of Sir Michael Tippett’s King Priam — first Covent Garden’s in 1962, then Kent Opera’s in 1984, now Opera North’s — the last is the best perhaps in every way … the most imaginative. (Larner, 1991)

King Priam, Tom Cairns’s Opera North directorial debut, had a direct connection to the collaborative achievements of The Midsummer Marriage (1985) and The Trojans (1986 and 1987): it was Tippett’s take on Trojan myth and Tom Cairns had been the designer on the earlier Tippett production, as well as on Berlioz’s opera on the Trojan myth. ‘The mosaic nature of Tippett’s construction is neatly reflected, moreover, in Cairns’s characteristic system of sliding panels and folding screens which can instantly reduce the width of the stage to a narrow, dramatically illuminated focal point’ (Larner, 1991). Andrew Shore’s Priam was judged to be ‘extraordinary’ in his tragic status. Larner also praised the ‘technical assuredness, inspiration and energy’ of Paul Daniel in his fourth Opera North production.

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The season was concluded by a new production of Don Giovanni. Tim Albery, having reworked David Pountney’s 1981 Giovanni in 1986, now directed a new production with designs by Ashley Martin-Davis. The production premiered at the newly refurbished Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. There was a strong focus on Don Giovanni and Leporello’s relationship, based on Kierkegaard’s theory of personal and erotic affinity between the two men (Milnes, 1991a, p. 1085). Milnes thought that Albery’s ideas eclipsed notions of comedy and class, crucial lynch-pins of the Giovanni plot. Some critics admired the ending, where an angel took Giovanni to hell. Robert Hayward, singing the title role, called the production ‘a fantastic show not everybody got’ (2013). He enjoyed the fact that a familiar tale was deconstructed in the rehearsal room and that the ensemble developed collective ideas and that results could not be achieved without a struggle: It was a difficult set for a difficult opera, so perfect really. We all worked hard to tell a story everyone knew in a way that stripped bare the characters by giving them pretty much no solid ground to stand on, few props, and furniture that had a life of its own. We all had to learn to move and to use our bodies in very different ways. Fortunately we had Patti, Tim’s wife, to help us. We all needed her physical warm-ups to survive! The end with a white and black angel was extraordinary. The Don having fun by wearing a dress was not universally received. We all had a ball and why shouldn’t the Don have fun? (Hayward, 2013)

Illustration 14. 1990/1991 — King Priam. Andrew Shore (Priam). Photo: Robert Workman.

There was a meeting between managers of the five permanent UK opera companies in early October 1990. In a follow-up letter from Nicholas Payne to Minister David Mellor (Payne, 1990c), the companies’ need for an added £4.5m in 1991/1992 and £5.5m in 1992/1993 was explained in detail. At times, there was a slight sense of exasperation in Payne’s and Linacre’s correspondence as they campaigned for Opera North’s success and expansion to be rewarded with an equal financial status to the other companies. Regional delegation was to be the next complication:

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[…] in an ideal world, Opera North would operate a three-year planning cycle against a background of known levels of income and expenditure […] As if the planning process were not difficult enough [they had been informed] that the responsibility for the base-funding of Opera North should be delegated to the Yorkshire and Humberside Arts Board and that that Board would be reconstituted by ministerial decree. (Linacre, 1990)

Payne was getting angry, as he described in a letter to Anthony Everitt and Lord Palumbo (Payne, 1990d) with the Office of Arts and Libraries ‘who appear to be bulldozing through new arrangements regardless of their impact on the future of the arts organisations concerned. But I am fairly angry with the Arts Council, too. Your recommendation that responsibility for our base funding be delegated while touring grants continue to be allocated from the Arts Council […] can be seen as the worst of both worlds’. Payne argued that Opera North would always be too large a fish to be in the Yorkshire and Humberside pool. In autumn 1990, the AGMA (Association of Greater Manchester Authorities) announced the withdrawal of its funding for the Opera North touring visits to Manchester from 1991 to 1992, adding further pressure. The commercial operator Apollo Leisure had recently acquired both the Palace Theatre and the Opera House. Opera North had successfully applied to the Foundation for Sports and the Arts receiving £250,000 for the conversion of space in the Grand Theatre into office accommodation for Opera North staff above the Grand Hall (now the Howard Assembly Room), then a disused supper room. This was the company’s first capital project and a step towards adequate working space (Opera North Board Meeting, 9 July 1991). In his Annual Review, Nicholas Payne (1990e) named as the highlights the success of Attilla and the company being awarded an Arts Council Enhancement Fund (the second highest award out of those granted). Using Ariane and Bluebeard as a metaphorical backdrop, Payne likened the beleaguered Opera North to Ariane rescued at the 11th hour from the hands of Bluebeard. The successful production of the Dukas rarity had contributed to the company winning the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Opera Award for 1990. Show Boat won an Olivier Award for best revival during its run at the London Palladium in 1991. The 1990/1991 season had seen a planned reduction in the number of performances, meaning that the figures from the previous season (1989/1990) were unsurpassable, but an average of 80% capacity ‘for a by no means safe programme’, as Payne remarked, was a source of satisfaction. The company had entered the 1990/1991 season with a budgeted deficit of £165,000 (sanctioned by Arts Council and Board at the time), which rose to £700,000 — ‘a horrifying figure that has only been sustainable because of our belief (and subsequently knowledge) that some sort of rescue plan was at hand’ (Payne, 2011). The 1991/1992 season marked the start of a three-year business plan, activated by the Enhancement Fund. There were strings attached: the season was to contain two large-scale productions, one commissioned or little known 20th century work and an additional touring week to Sheffield. Payne said the

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company had ‘welcomed these conditions, since they coincide with our own ambitions’. The plan was now to eliminate the deficit by March 1994. Nevertheless, another season of discoveries and rediscoveries lay ahead.

1991/1992 The year 1991 was an adventurous and broad-ranging season which pulled off the balance between satisfying artistic expectation and the demands of the funders, without denying the audience operatic favourites. It was initially planned as a much ‘leaner’ season than it turned out to be, but there were some late changes to programming thanks to the company receiving Enhancement Funding. L'etoile and Der Ferne Klang were added to the schedules. At this time, the Arts Council was still stipulating the company should programme innovative work and commission new operas, too, so the two sets of criteria were not mutually exclusive. Chabrier’s opera L'etoile was a two-fold discovery: it established the rarely performed work as an imaginative kaleidoscope of an opera (and celebrated the

Illustration 15.

1991/1992 — L’etoile. Pamela Helen Stephen (Lazuli, a pedlar). Photo: Robert Workman.

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150th anniversary of its composer’s birth). It was also the opera debut of Phyllida Lloyd, one of Opera North’s most important creative partners over the last two decades. Rodney Milnes called the 1877 score ‘like top-drawer Offenbach scored by Ravel and harmonised by Poulenc’, complemented by Jeremy Sams’s ‘double-entendre laden’ translation and ‘unbelievably rude surrealist humour’, wrapped in fairy-tale conventions (Milnes, 1991, p. 1262). Phyllida Lloyd was praised for her ‘sure hand with comedy’ and general directorial inventiveness in Anthony Ward’s ‘toy theatre sets’ […] ‘It’s another Opera North hit!’ (Kennedy, 1991). In October 1991, it was announced that Nicholas Payne had been appointed Director of the Royal Opera with effect from September 1993 (Opera North Board Minutes, 4 October 1991). There had been a carousel of new appointments during this period — Denis Marks succeeded Peter Jonas at ENO, Matthew Epstein had started his appointment at WNO in the summer of 1991 and Richard Jarman formally took over Scottish Opera after running it in an interim-capacity. The sub-committee to appoint Payne’s successor consisted of Gordon Linacre, Lord Harewood, Tom McDonald, Councillor Bernard Atha, Matthew Bullock as well as Paul Daniel and Nicholas Payne as advisers. The rest of the autumn season consisted of revivals of Mozart’s work in his bicentenary year: La Finta Giardiniera, The Jewel Box and Don Giovanni. For the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (HCMF) in November, the company presented Robert Saxton’s first opera, a co-commission shared with the festival, with a libretto adapted from a 1981 play by Arnold Wesker. Caritas is based on a 14th century case of a young girl, Christine Carpenter, who voluntarily becomes an ‘anchoress’, bricked up in a cell in a Norfolk church, with only a small window to communicate with the outside world. Her eventual doubts and pleas to be released give way to insanity. Saxton remarks that ‘Arnold Wesker felt impelled to write the play on account of his concerns regarding the nature of unquestioning dogma and its effect, not only on the believer, but also on the lives of others’.16 Paul Griffiths (author of The Jewel Box) reflected on the score and the fact it does not illustrate the protagonist’s inner life, instead revealing a ‘curious ambivalence’. When Christine sings of Christ or of divine love, bright sounds in the pit do not reveal themselves as either affirmative or agnostic, what they suggest most is that her experience cannot be shared, cannot be musically entered. (Griffiths, 1991)

16

http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer?category=Works&workid=11700, accessed on 30 June 2013.

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Against this accompaniment, the vocal parts contained the characterisation. Eirian Davies won much praise as Christine, some critics wondering whether the opera might have profited from being a monologue, despite its strong cast. Performed at Wakefield Theatre Royal and Opera House, Caritas was a welcome collaboration between two central features of Yorkshire's musical life, Opera North and the HCMF, founded at virtually the same time. Caritas did well at the box office, with 85% attendance, and toured to the South Bank Centre, London and the Cheltenham Festival in the summer of 1992, with a Collins Classics recording released the same year. In the world of the boardroom, financial worries caused by the withdrawal of funding from Manchester led to discussions whether it should be dropped as a touring venue. Payne maintained that it would be wrong to abandon Manchester because of audience loyalty built up under the Arts Council’s ‘spheres of influence’ policy — but ticket prices had to be increased to compensate for withdrawal of funding (Opera North Board Minutes, 5 December 1991). Der Ferne Klang was another major event in a season of rediscoveries, in line with Opera North’s policy of presenting British premieres of 20th century work. It was Schreker’s first success as an opera composer in 1912, and made him as popular as Strauss and Krenek between the two World Wars. The director was Brigitte Fassbaender, still a major singer on the international circuit, but also starting to forge a directing career. Designer Ultz contributed an unusual scenography which incorporated sections of the orchestra on stage. It was performed in English, in Paul Daniel’s translation. Der Ferne Klang centres on the life of a composer, in keeping with many works of its expressionist period (examples are Strauss operas Ariadne auf Naxos and Capriccio and Krenek’s Jonny Strikes Up, performed by Opera North in 1984). The ‘distant sound’ is a concept, the protagonist’s quest, who deserts the woman he loves, only to find that she embodies the sought after sound when it is too late. A work of its period, Peter Palmer found what he called the ‘gentle looniness’ and the mixture of dramatic styles of the production to be a viable realisation (Palmer, 1992). Peter Franklin (1992) agreed, adding that the production fitted well into Leeds Grand Theatre and delivered ‘magic without millions’. Robin Holloway (1992) was less convinced, calling the set ‘startlingly hideous’, bemoaning its lack of visual opulence. He credited Paul Daniel and the ENP with the ‘glistening shimmer’ and ‘bewitching flim-flam’ the score required, however. Wagner was treated to ‘meaty’ metaphors by Martin Dreyer, reviewing a Wagner concert, Music of the Gods, by the ENP and (the now freelance) David Lloyd-Jones, starring Anne Evans and John Tomlinson.

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What might have been merely bleeding chunks of Tannhäuser and Die Walküre emerged beautifully braised and done to a turn. […] This was certainly a marvellous sampler of Bayreuth. Is it too fanciful to dream that it may even herald a Ring cycle in Leeds? There has been none here since the ENO’s visit in 1976. (Dreyer, 1992, p. 869)

A wait of nearly 20 years was in store until Dreyer’s wish was to become reality. On 25 June 1992 it was made public that Ian Ritchie (previously Managing Director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra) had been appointed General Director of Opera North with effect from September 1993. The title was changed from the previous ‘General Administrator’ in keeping with other companies. Opera North was still struggling with all things Manchester — the Opera House touring visit had not been successful and Opera North was still in negotiations with Greater Manchester Authorities: part of the ceiling between the dress circle and the upper circle had collapsed during the interval. The performance had to be cancelled and the house cleared, but the Palace Theatre’s manager had gone on stage to say audience members would be given their money back, meaning Opera North had no box office return and had to seek damages for lost revenue from Apollo, owners of the Palace Theatre (Opera North Board Minutes, 6 July 1992). This was followed by a lengthy battle between Apollo Leisure and Manchester City Council for the £15,000 loss from Opera North’s performance, which was never refunded, as litigation would have been too costly. Orpheus in the Underworld had premiered in June 1992 and became part of the full tour in the autumn. Tim Hatley’s set design combined references to classical architecture and to burlesque — summed up in the image of ruched curtains on a temple, lending it an occasional ‘Carry On’ air (see also Leeks, 2003, p. 72). Some critics felt that Martin Duncan’s production, although hilarious and very well crafted, could have had more of a political sting, but admitted that the operetta was very dependent on contextual knowledge of the French second empire and of Greek mythology. In his annual review, Nicholas Payne reflected on Opera North’s move ‘from survival mode to a building mode’, also evidenced by the company winning the Prudential Award for the Arts (opera category) and various awards in 1991. The company was still profiting from the ‘life saving’ Enhancement Award of the previous year and had even been able to allocate £222,863 towards the deficit. Their ‘duty to experiment’ could be honoured, reflected in the programming of the season Payne was looking back on and the one ahead. Opera North’s rising profile and reputation for being daring and innovative was leading to a string of invitations: Finta Giardiniera and The Jewel Box went to Glyndebourne as part of their Mozart bicentenary celebrations; the planned Tchaikovsky double bill had been invited to the 1992 Edinburgh International Festival, King Priam was mounted by

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Flanders Opera in Antwerp. L’etoile and Der Ferne Klang were both hailed as significant rediscoveries. Even the repertoire staple Madama Butterfly (which, together with a revival of Carmen, had taken 100% at the box office) was performed in the 1904 Milan version, which had never before been staged in the United Kingdom. This (as Payne called it) ‘fairly esoteric repertory’ had played to an overall average of 82% attendance (88% in Leeds) across 107 full-scale performances, including a community opera in Leeds Grand Theatre, Ladders and Snakes. Looking at the 1992/1993 season ahead, Payne recommended that ‘the faint-hearted should not prematurely rejoice’. New work had been commissioned with composers Michael Berkeley and Benedict Mason. The ENP had been invited to the Vienna Modern Festival with Birtwistle’s Gawain’s Journey. Payne’s targets for his last season as Opera North’s General Administrator were to continue eliminating the deficit, so it would be paid off by March 1996, to ‘crack’ Manchester, to develop a more consistent policy for middle-scale and smaller venues and to push for capital improvements to Opera North’s Leeds premises, first and foremost for a home for the orchestra (Payne, 1992). During the summer, Opera North made its debut at the Proms with a concert performance of Boris Godunov in a season where Russian music had been strongly represented (8 September 1992). The concert was conducted by Paul Daniel and included most of the cast of the May 1992 revival. All the cast, the chorus and the ENP were praised — but ‘this was, supremely and gloriously, John Tomlinson’s evening’ (Finch, 1992).

1992/1993 I have to say, my last season was a fantastic season. Show Boat was a big event, that was very special, King Priam, Boris with John Tomlinson, in a fantastic production by Ian Judge. In the last big season, we did three productions (really crazy) — Ric [Green] told me afterwards that he only agreed to it because it was my final fling — La Gioconda with Philip Prowse, Phyllida Lloyd’s Bohème and Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck. That was not bad, for a season. (Payne, 2011)

The last season of Payne’s tenure could be summarised as something old, something new, something rediscovered — and some remarkable company debuts and collaborations. During August, the double-bill of Yolande/Nutcracker (Tchaikovsky) had premiered at the Edinburgh Festival. This production was the first time the two works were programmed together in the United Kingdom (Lloyd-Jones did not think it had been done anywhere together since the opening night at the Marinsky Theatre in 1892 and it had been one of his great unrealised ambitions to recreate it). Both works run to 87 minutes, are concerned with childhood and the fear of growing up, and formed an exciting partnership. Rodney Milnes called

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Yolande a ‘little masterpiece’ and the performance of Joan Rodgers in the title role ‘a miracle in itself’, displaying a touching directness as the girl who cured of her at first unacknowledged blindness in one of Tchaikovsky’s very rare happy endings (Milnes, 1992a). Although the opera is in a category of its own, being much more of a chamber piece than, say, Tchaikovsky’s Pushkin operas, Yolande was clearly a female protagonist in the tradition of Tatyana or Lisa. The opera was performed in Lloyd-Jones’s English translation. The Nutcracker was performed by the company Adventures in Motion Pictures and choreographed by Matthew Bourne (chosen in consultation with Dance Director of the Arts Council, with Martin Duncan providing a lot of conceptual connectivity between the two works). It was revived in 1993 as a contribution to the Year of Dance. The ballet was called a ‘hilarious travesty’ in contrast with the simplicity of Yolande by an unknown reviewer (1992a, p. 35). Lloyd-Jones considered the production one of the highlights of his work with Opera North: ‘When I suggested it, Nicholas said “Goodness, we ought to do it — you are funny — the whole time you were at Opera North you never mentioned it, and it’s one of the best ideas you ever had”’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010). The Nutcracker signalled the start of Bourne’s successful revamping of classical ballets, for which he established his own dance language — neither ballet nor contemporary dance. Bourne’s company later asked Lloyd-Jones to conduct their famous, male Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells with a full orchestra, ‘that went down an even bigger bomb’, as he explained. Adventures in Motion Pictures later revived Nutcracker, ‘which was difficult, because it was half owned by Opera North, but they managed to do it. It was so wonderful, witty and inventive’ (Lloyd-Jones, 2010). Opera North opened its autumn season with a rarity: The Duenna by Anglo-Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard. It had been a late addition to the schedule and was made possible by funding from the European Arts Festival. The Opera North planning team had decided to show it soon after its premiere in Madrid, which came 45 years after its composition and was performed in the original English text. Julian Rushton called The Duenna ‘A Spanish comedy written in English by a Catalan with Austrian training’, making it a perfect contribution for this European occasion. Gerhard had reworked a 1775 opera libretto by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (composed by Thomas Linley, father and son). In his score, Gerhard evokes a score coloured by genuine Iberian rhythms, framed by a modernist sensitivity in ‘an opera which transcends its literary source as surely as Pelléas or Wozzeck’ (Rushton, 1992). Often a big gap between composition and first performance has good reasons, but this was ‘emphatically not the case’ (Milnes, 1992b). Gillian Knight in the title role was praised as giving ‘the performance of her life’ (Anonymous, 1992b). The first night gala performance was attended by the Minister for the Arts, David Mellor.

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Opera North’s 1987 Peter Gill production of Figaro had been revived by David Gann in 1989, but then listed as a new production by Caroline Gawn in Alison Chitty’s ‘coolly elegant’ sets and costumes, deemed ‘lively and fresh’. Gerald Finley provided a good dramatic balance as Figaro: ‘the audience knows that it is time to stop laughing in the fourth act, where “Aprite un po” showed a man at the edge of the abyss’ (Milnes, 1992c). Milnes also reviewed the Leeds audience favourably, crediting them to be ‘open-minded, appreciative and hanging on every twist of the plot’. The ‘hilariously outrageous’ (Leeks, 2003, p. 72) Orpheus in the Underworld joined the company’s repertoire after its premiere in Bradford in June. Yolande and The Nutcracker, the Tchaikovsky double-bill (see above) premiered in Leeds on 18 December 1992, 100 years to the day after its Petersburg premiere. In the winter season, Billy Budd was a reworking of a production by Graham Vick, first seen at Scottish Opera in 1987 — Loppert (1993, p. 226) spoke of its ‘raw angry power’. In Chris Dyer’s design the HMS Indomitable was ‘seen in transverse section and layered in deck levels’ ‘The celebrated climactic sequence of chords achieved heart-stopping theatrical impact’. John Tomlinson (Claggart) was busy alternating between rehearsals for Budd and the new Don Carlos, both part of the winter season. Don Carlos was another large-scale new production, made possible by the 1992 Prudential Award for Opera, which meant £25,000 could be contributed to the production cost. Tim Albery directed, the first time he was not working with his regular designer-collaborators McDonald and Cairns at Opera North, but with Hildegard Bechtler — a creative partnership that has continued over the last few decades. Loppert (1993b) called the staging ‘spare, subtle, bleak’, and ‘fastidiously concentrated’, in a design that married ‘Appia-like abstraction to a wonderful painterly refinement of colour and line; it is altogether a sustained feat of dramatic economy’. The way the chorus was directed and lit (Lighting: Charles Edwards) reminded some of Dutch or Spanish group portraits. Others saw a strong connection with the source, a 1787 play by Friedrich von Schiller. Opera North had produced a meticulously prepared evening of intellectual clarity, dramatic rawness, ‘on about a tenth of the budget’ of the La Scala, production that came out around the same time, as Rodney Milnes remarked (1993a). Opera North had chosen to produce the four-act version from 1883 (as had La Scala), Verdi’s own reduction of his earlier five acts from 1867, in Andrew Porter’s English translation, forging a remarkable bond between singers and the audience. John Tomlinson (Philip II) and Anthony Michaels-Moore (Posa) were judged to be world class in an overall strong cast, also including Richard Van Allan as the Grand Inquisitor, supported with exemplary dedication by Paul Daniel. New General Manager Ian Ritchie had been introduced to the Board members at a meeting in December. At the time, Payne and his team were fighting to ensure that the new commission, Baa-Baa Black Sheep by Michael Berkeley (planned for the

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1993/1994 season, based on Kipling’s Jungle Book), was adequately funded, as the expectation was that there would only be a 3½% funding rise from the Arts Council. Payne argued that making cuts to new work would contravene the terms of the Enhancement Funding. Lord Harewood was keen to put on record the company’s outstanding achievement in obtaining sponsorship for all its productions in this season. The historical deficit had steadily been reduced and was now below £500,000. Although the ‘ceiling incident’ (see above) had not been resolved, the Opera North spring tour of 1993 was to perform at Manchester Opera House, also owned by Apollo (Opera North Board Minutes, 4 December 1992). The discussion about Opera North’s status (regional or national?) and which organisation should take responsibility for its funding (the Arts Council or Yorkshire Arts?) had been running for several years. After it had been repeatedly stated that Yorkshire Arts, the regional arts board, would take responsibility from 1992, it was decided that responsibility for funding and assessment of Opera North would remain with the Arts Council (Everitt, 1992). After the success of L’etoile, Phyllida Lloyd was invited to rework David Freeman’s production of La Bohème for Opera North’s spring season. She asked instead to do a new production on a revival budget: And she said ‘I’ve got to start again’ and has given us something which we’re happy to do forever, really. And we gave her three weeks to rehearse it — each time she revived it we gave her more time! She’d come from rep theatre, so it was a cheap, light-footed production — and if you look at it now, you think when it comes back in Spring ‘14 that there’s actually quite a lot of scenery. You forget that things have got less and less and less. (Chibnall, 2011)

Set in the 1950s and with lots of filmic allusions in its scenography (Anthony Ward), this Bohème has been described as ‘more Greenwich Village than rive gauche’ (Dreyer, 1993, p. 732). The ease with which the production flowed, its youthful freshness and the strong ensemble work at its core prompted Malcolm Hayes (1993) to call it ‘a lesson how to do opera’. Jane Leslie McKenzie as Mimi won plaudits for her excellent vocal and dramatic performance and Opera North stalwarts William Dazeley, Robert Hayward and Graham Broadbent were a strong group of Bohemian flatmates. Roy Laughlin, Head of Music, conducted the production, performed in Italian. Robert Hayward (Marcello) remembered the rehearsal period as a happy time, despite being in the subterranean rehearsal room underneath the Grand Theatre for weeks on end. He conceded that the claustrophobic environment probably helped with an opera like Bohème. Phyllida Lloyd always started (and still often starts) her rehearsal processes with exploratory workshops, progressing to improvisation. She set the ‘Bohemians’ the task of improvising the last scene of the opera in their own words and actions, without music or their text. Initially, this went on for 5 minutes, but after everyone had been sent away and asked to do the same again, it took 45 minutes, as singers were less worried about stillness

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and silence and less restricted by the economy and timing of the score. Hayward felt that the solutions found for Act 4 eventually had a very strong connection with the space in which they were created. The other ‘method’ he remembers, was making the Italian colloquial and conversational and therefore disregarding rules of pronunciation, the singers ‘anglicising’ the words to make them their own. This shocked some conductors and language coaches at later revivals when the method was used again, but by the time characters and rapports between them had been asserted, the singers would bring back their impeccable Italian (Hayward, 2013). A more regular part of the repertoire for continental companies, La Gioconda (Ponchielli) had not been performed in the United Kingdom within living memory. It offered a protracted plot, a story with which contemporary audiences could not easily form a connection, 19th century melodrama. Rupert Christiansen, who found the production ‘totally irresistible’, offered a refreshing view: A superior example of the second-rate genre of romantic melodrama, it drove the gallery to frenzied enthusiasm and most of the critics to paroxysms of snottiness […] there’s also the fascination of hearing a mid-19th century Italian opera that Verdi didn’t write […] but what you sense most is a composer landlocked in bombastic Meyerbeerian cliché at the very point when Verdi was decisively transcending it. (Christiansen, 1993, p. 38)

Wozzeck marked the important Opera North and opera directing debut of Deborah Warner. Her and Phyllida Lloyd’s rise was notable during a time when only a small percentage of directors were female (although Opera North had a better record than most companies). The number of female conductors was even smaller and only very few women were board members in arts organisations, Opera North included. Wozzeck is one of the great exponents of modernist music drama, Alban Berg’s word-for-word adaptation of Georg Büchner’s 1837 fragmented play Woyzeck, based on a medical journal of the time, which documented the murder case of Franz Woyzeck. Deborah Warner had collaborated with designer Hildegard Bechtler on theatre productions previously. Critics spoke of the focus, clarity and concentration of both the set and the singers’ performances, echoing the sparseness of Büchner’s text and giving space to Berg’s seminal score. The production balanced social, class-based and moral histories, presenting injustice and violence as casual and ‘normal’ within the protagonists’ world. The style of the production was not based on abstraction, but on visual and dramatic reduction to display only the essential: high white walls to suggest tenements, half walls for the soldiers’ barracks, a railing to suggest the separate worlds of the classes involved in the drama, a curtain to separate the short

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scenes ‘like a cinematic wipe’ (Edward Seckerson). Warner made the audience look at the whole scale of the tragedy, including Marie’s murder: Warner resists lowering the curtain on this appalling scene but forces us to hold our gaze on the violated body as two awesome crescendos on a single note, B-natural, underline the horror. This is a producer who not only listens to the music but truly hears it. She even explores the silences beyond it. (Seckerson, 1993)

High praise went to Andrew Shore (Wozzeck) and Vivian Tierney (Marie) for their realisation of Warner’s detailed and concentrated vision, as well as their vocal expressiveness and clarity. Shore’s face was ‘a seismograph of his fears and inarticulacy, the surges of emotion that he could not find words to express’; Tierney’s Marie was sung with ‘fierce immediacy’, key scenes with her child ‘much more fully drawn than usual’ (Clements, 1993, p. 763). In May 1993, a report titled ‘Opera in Britain — The Threat and the Challenge’ had been released, jointly compiled by all UK opera companies. It detailed the ‘unprecedented level of artistic distinction and financial control’ of the companies against the threat of ‘funding restraints brought on by recession’. This wealth of talent could not function without adequate financial support and a growing tendency for high-profile UK artists to work abroad (‘the voice and brain drain’, as the report referred to it) was causing concern. Companies were still adjusting to the shift in public funding in the 1980s, where increases in grants had fallen below inflation levels, while companies were set demanding artistic and social targets to qualify for their grants. Survival, although difficult, was made possible by a favourable economic climate and achievements in fundraising. In the early 1990s, additional funds were made available through the Arts Council and the government. There were threats ahead, though, as companies were told to prepare for smaller rises in grants, a reduction in 1994/1995 and a cash freeze for the following season. This would leave Opera North £700,000 worse off by 1996 if they were to produce work in the established pattern. All companies were set to lose a sum equivalent to the cost of sets, props and costumes for an entire season (or for ENO, the total budget for guest singers, or for Scottish Opera the loss of all its touring). Unless there was to be a sharp rise in philanthropic giving, the companies would have to either drastically reduce their artistic output or increase seat prices (which contravened the Arts Council’s principle of accessibility). Put simply, the conundrum is how to maintain the opera companies’ artistic, social and financial aims as well as the criteria of artistic service set by the Government and the public while coping with such a large, prospective loss of public sector revenue and, for most companies,

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simultaneously eliminating historic accumulated deficits going back to the middle or early eighties. (Opera in Britain — The Threat and the Challenge)

Valediction and celebration inform Payne’s annual report on his last season at Opera North: ‘In artistic terms — and that is what matters most — this last year has been the most successful in Opera North’s 15 year existence’. Triumphantly (and sadly, unusually), this also included a small financial surplus. The Arts Council Enhancement Fund award was crucial in reaching a more realistic level of central government subsidy. Payne raised ‘a few storm cones against the future’, warning that if the Arts Council and other funding were to drop further or not rise to match inflation, the company would fall back from building mode to survival mode. The company’s high standards were hard-won in the face of the ‘antiquated conditions under which we operate’ — there was still no permanent orchestral rehearsal base or additional in-house space for production rehearsals. In conclusion, Opera North was deemed ‘vital and match fit, well placed to enjoy the ride, provided it keeps its balance and retains the support of its backers’. And, just as crucially, it fielded an excellent team in all departments, appreciated by Payne: Opera North’s administration ‘make up a team of exceptional worth, unmatched elsewhere. They have been a fantastic support for me. They are the great hidden strength of the company. Cherish them’. The music department’s role in preparation was ‘central to the company’s standards’ and ‘the chorus remains a glory of ON and one which blazed brightly last year’. Payne also noted ‘that ENP’s unique role as an opera and concert orchestra is at last beginning to be more widely recognised’. After almost eleven years on this particular carousel, I jump off resilient in the belief that there is everything to play for and that Opera North’s best years are yet to come. (Payne, 1993)

1993/1994 The early 1990s were a fruitful time for new commissions, with new works by Jonathan Harvey, Judith Weir and Harrison Birtwistle being produced by UK opera companies. Opera North premiered two new operas in one season. Michael Berkeley’s first opera, Baa-Baa Black Sheep, opened at the Cheltenham Festival in July 1993. It was a co-commission, shared between the BBC, Opera North and the Cheltenham Festival (it was originally meant to be performed by the recently disbanded Kent Opera) and was adapted by Australian novelist David Malouf from Kipling’s autobiographical short story of the same name

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and elements of his Jungle Book. The plot tells the story of a young boy, Punch (Kipling), returning home to be fostered by a cold and cruel aunt in England and escaping into the animal world of the Jungle Book in his mind. ‘There are good grounds for drawing these parallels: Mowgli feels neither human nor wolfish, as the writer felt neither English nor Indian. […] This is a jagged musical world from the first notes, with uningratiating intervals whose angularity keeps sentimentality at bay in what is a pretty heart-rending story’ (Brown, 1993). Some critics heard allusions to Janáček, some to Britten or to Tippett in Berkeley’s score. The director and the designer (Jonathan Moore and David Blight) were credited with an enchanting production, creating swift transitions and juxtapositions between the human and the animal world, which often mirrored each other when the two worlds became intertwined in the jungle. The miserable English home, with the severity of ‘Auntirosa’ (Fiona Kimm) was coloured in ‘dissonant, grey music while the jungle vibrates with sumptuous colour’ (Brown, 1993). The treble Malcolm Lorimer (Punch/Mowgli as a boy) and William Dazeley (Mowgli as a young man) stood out from a strong cast, lead with precision by Paul Daniel. Back from the jungle, Opera North had to face the reality that the accent on new productions (five between April and July 1993) had ‘stretched the company to the limits’ (Opera North Finance Committee, 6 September 1993). Ian Ritchie started his appointment as General Manager in September. An autumn of revivals, all audience favourites, was planned: The Love for Three Oranges, a continuing hit; La Bohème from the previous season in Phyllida Lloyd’s popular production and Tamburlaine (first seen in 1985), with a new cast and some quite significant directorial changes by Philip Prowse, as well as musical ones, including two counter tenors. The autumn tour had included Sunderland for the first time, but box office returns had been poor and there was discussion as to whether the company should continue visiting the venue (others, such as Nottingham, had taken a while to ‘crack’) or whether other relationships such as Manchester should be prioritised (Opera North Board Minutes, 3 December 1993). The winter season featured the notable directorial debut of David McVicar with a production of Mozart’s early opera Il Re Pastore. This production replaced a scheduled Eugene Onegin, a co-production with WNO, which had not been a success: the director had asked to be released from reworking the production at Opera North. A ‘sideways’ deal with WNO was agreed, meaning that a different production exchange or collaboration would take place in the future. Christine Jane Chibnall’s account of appointing McVicar gives an insight into the work that goes into ascertaining whether a director and the company will make a good match:

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David McVicar I really researched — an agent said to me that he thought he’d make an interesting opera director. We met him, Nicholas and I, and somebody said he should work as an assistant and I didn’t think he should. So I then saw Dr Faustus in a kind of back street Glasgow setting and I went to something in Newcastle; about 5 different things and I talked to him a lot and in the end we settled on Re Pastore. (Chibnall, 2011)

Il Re Pastore (The Shepherd King), a tale of public duty and personal affection, was first performed in 1775, probably more as a diversion than a drama. Andrew Porter had ‘mixed feelings’ about the Opera North production, which came across as an unpretentious and playful staging of a rather static work, but he felt the staging did not match the music (Porter, 1994, p. 103). Other reviewers thought it interesting, but too busy: ‘Once McVicar calmed down […] some of the work’s charm and sentiment started to get through’. Joan Rodgers, in the trouser-role of Aminta, had a great success and ‘treated the Leeds audience to a gala evening of world-class singing, perfectly moulded, deliciously creamy toned’ (Milnes, 1993b). Britten’s coronation opera, Gloriana, premiered on 18 December 1993 and turned out to be one of Opera North’s biggest and most remembered successes; a real landmark production. Britten’s coronation commission from 1953 (suggested by Lord Harewood and based on Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex) had not been a success at its first performance — audiences expected celebratory pageantry on the occasion of the ascension of a youthful Queen Elizabeth II, not the in-depth human portrait of the ageing Elizabeth I. A long-running Sadler’s Wells production had contributed to the opera’s regeneration in the 1960s. Opera North’s Gloriana confirmed that the opera was on par with Britten’s other large-scale operas, in a production that ‘unequivocally proclaimed the opera as a musical and dramatic masterpiece with the force and conviction encountered in Leeds, not only from Lloyd but from the conductor Paul Daniel and the whole cast’ (Kennedy, 1994a, p. 139). Phyllida Lloyd and designer Anthony Ward focused on the contrast between the private and the public aspects of the drama with simple, even economical means. Josephine Barstow in the title role inspired rapture from audiences and from critics: ‘this, surely, was the crown of Barstow’s career, a musico-dramatic performance that held the first-night audience spellbound’ (Kennedy, 1994a, p. 139). Whether attired as the Queen we know from famous portraits, or unadorned, without her wig, confronted by Essex in her dressing room, Barstow responded to every nuance in the text and in the score. Gloriana was also a resounding success for Paul Daniel and the ENP — and one of the performances was led by Richard Farnes, the start of his enduring artistic relationship with Opera North. Gloriana was performed at Covent Garden, the site of its first performance, at the end of the winter tour. It was regularly reworked throughout the 1990s and then adapted for BBC Television (also released on DVD in

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Illustration 16. La Bohème. Jane Leslie McKenzie (Mimi), William Burden (Rodolfo) in 1993.

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Illustration 17. La Bohème. Anita Morris (Mimi), Ji-Min Park (Rodolfo) in 2014. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

2000) in an abridged version, tailored to the possibilities of television rather than preserving an iconic production. There is further discussion of the production and its television adaptation in Perspective 3. The winter season also featured revivals of La traviata and of Phyllida Lloyd’s phantasmagoric production of L’etoile. The winter season had slightly exceeded its budget. News came of a standstill grant from the Arts Council, which could have been worse,

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as a cut of 2% had been expected. Meanwhile, Kenneth Baird (Music Director) and Anthony Everitt (Secretary General) had both left the Council, the former after his recommendations on the number of Arts Council-funded London orchestras was overturned after a public outcry, the latter to return to journalism, after an at times difficult tenure of four years (Opera North Board Minutes, 11 March 1994). The Opera North spring season featured Puccini’s rarely staged opera La rondine, directed by Francesca Zambello in her UK debut and the first staging by an established UK company (there had Illustration 18. 1993/1994 — Playing Away. Ensemble. Photo: Laurie Lewis. been a production in Fulham in 1965). The work was praised as a compact opera with a brilliant musical dramaturgy and orchestration. The plot did not win the same acclaim: despite its sympathetic heroine, it was described as a ‘traviata without the tuberculosis’. Helen Field sang the title role of Magda and Alice Coote made her company debut as Suzy. ‘Opera North has pulled off another terrific success with its long-overdue revival for Puccini’s neglected romantic comedy La rondine’ (Christiansen, 1994). The production also reunited Opera North with its founding artistic director and Puccini devotee, David Lloyd-Jones. Annabel Arden, at that time one of the founders and key members of theatre collective Théâtre de Complicité, produced a much-noticed new Magic Flute in the spring season. Arden’s focus was not on the ambiguities of the opera, nor on possible philosophical, Egyptian or Freemason-related contexts. The comedy and magic within the plot, however, were given plenty of scope, in a sparkling style that was playful and simple, succeeding ‘miraculously in approaching Mozart’s Singspiel as all of a

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piece, rather than a procession of everyone’s favourite set pieces’ (Hickling, 1994). A young and well-cast ensemble also enchanted audiences, notably Linda Kitchen as Pamina and William Dazeley as Papageno, and the clear delivery of Jeremy Sams’s witty translation further increased communication between the stage and the auditorium. The second new commission of the season, Playing Away, was a football story entangled with the Faustian myth. A delightfully far-fetched fusion of topics, the libretto to Benedict Mason’ score was written by Howard Brenton and directed by David Pountney. It was a co-commission by the Munich Biennale, Germany, where it premiered in May 1994 and won prizes for best production and best design (Huntley Muir). Chibnall described Playing Away as ‘part musical, part madness’ (2011) and Jane Bonner remembered the more surrealist — and anthropomorphic — features of the production, such as a coloratura soprano (Nicola Sharkey) playing the ball on the football pitch in a scene that was described as particularly visually thrilling (Bonner, 2013). Pountney turned the chorus ‘into a mob of soccer rowdies charging into Munich (very self-referential, this piece) with the topical cry of “My team is fed on British beef!”’ (Hoyle, 1994). The plot centred on a star footballer in crisis, offered a Mephistophelian deal to help him with his problems. Brenton’s libretto was deemed witty, but at times too wordy for opera, whereas Mason’s score was described as ‘a cheerful kaleidoscope of allusions, quotations and parodies, where the listener, however fleetingly, catches fragments of everything from Humperdinck and Wagner to Bernstein and “The Stripper”’ (Hoyle, 1994). A ‘serious financial situation’ was building up, the spring season not having met financial projections — a budgeted surplus of £6,000 turned into a deficit of £61,000 (Opera North Finance Committee, 12 May 1994). Director of Development John Ward left Opera North to take up a position at West Yorkshire Playhouse. The board was concerned by the informality of arrangements between Opera North, the Grand Theatre and Leeds City Council — the lack of formal leasehold meant the company could have been asked to vacate its offices in the theatre anytime. A resolution was attempted several times over the following years (Opera North Board Minutes, 1 July 1994). In April 1994, the Arts Council of Great Britain was divided into the Arts Councils of England, Wales and Scotland by Royal Charter.

1994/1995 1994 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of French composer Emmanuel Chabrier. Opera North took a revival of his comic opera L’etoile to the Edinburgh Festival in 1991. It was to be shown with a new production, a British premiere, of

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Chabrier’s The Reluctant King (Le Roi Malgré Lui). Jeremy Sams had translated L’etoile and was the translator, librettist and director for The Reluctant King. Robin Holloway remarked that ‘the job confronting the collaborators (Michael Wilcox, scenario, Jeremy Sams, libretto) resembles a surgeon’s more than a couturier’s, but conceded that they had produced coherent work from a “glorious botch” of an opera […] a mismarriage of inspired score with shambolic plot is not so unusual’ — ‘and lo, the dodo waddles, flies and sings!’ (Holloway, 1994). The musical structure remained largely intact in Opera North’s version, but attracted some criticism for being unvaried and similar throughout in pace, despite Paul Daniel’s and the ENP’s excellent work. The rewrite by Sams and Wilcox reinvented the plot to take place in the 20th century and was credited with a fast-moving, dead pan humour. Just a few weeks later, on 6 September, Ian Ritchie was announced to have resigned, or, as the press release put it he ‘would be leaving the company to take charge of a number of projects, including the 1996 Highland Festival’ (Opera North Press Release, 6 September 1994). Ritchie had an excellent track record and a strong reputation in his previous field, managing the Scottish Chamber Orchestra — but might have found the operatic world challenging, particularly in the face of the dismal financial outlook Opera North was facing. In his Annual Review 1993/1994, Ritchie had talked about the frustrations of having to absorb cuts by the Arts Council (more or less expected) and the effects of the Council having to discontinue three-year funding agreements with major clients (this had been pushed through by the Department of National Heritage) (Ritchie, 1994). No official reasons for his resignation were given in a ‘case of British understatement’ (Fairman, 1994), in contrast to the big emotions displayed on the operatic stage. A mere 12 months in post had not enabled Ritchie to make his mark, as the programming of what turned out to be his only season was still that of his predecessor and the programming for 1994/1995 was restricted through funding troubles. There was an extraordinary board meeting on 9 September 1994 to discuss the implications of Ritchie’s departure. Between the summer of 1994 and the appointment of a successor, Opera North was run by Ric Green, Christine Jane Chibnall, Paul Daniel and Finance Director David Hogan. The processes to appoint a successor quickly got under way and interviews were held in early October 1994. Richard Mantle, then running Edmonton Opera, having left Scottish Opera in 1991, was keen to return to the United Kingdom and applied for the post of General Director. A glitch at the interview meant he knew who else was in the running: I sat down in the Yorkshire Post board room, and it was Lord Harewood sitting there, and Gordon [Linacre] and Mike Beverly and Paul Daniel and whoever else and in front of me were all the CVs of the candidates which had been put on the table to allow everyone to look at them,

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so I did say to them ‘Are these here for me to give you a critique of my competitors?’ — that was my first question. And there was a great kerfuffle ‘oh, you’re not supposed to have them!’ (Mantle, 2010)

The swift appointment of Mantle as Opera North’s new General Director happened against a backdrop of increasing worry about the looming grant standstill, which meant real term loss of nearly half a million in the budget over three years. The implications would be fewer performances and a downward spiral of fewer audiences and touring dates — and ultimately the threat of not being able to run a full time company, leading to quality issues. The company had no assets at this time and therefore no ‘collateral’ for overdrafts and deficits. Board members wrote to the Friends of Opera North, urging them to write to their MPs, while board members lobbied everyone they knew in politics (Opera North Board Minutes, 30 September 1994). In November 1994, the National Lottery was launched and was to play a big part in arts funding over the coming decades. The busy autumn season featured The Magic Flute, which had premiered in the spring, this time conducted by Harry Bicket, and a new production of Il trovatore, directed by Russian-Israeli director Inga Levant, with designs by Charles Edwards. The production was credited with atmospheric sequences, particularly those involving shadow-play in this nocturnal narrative (‘night and fire were never far away’), but also with occasional distracting detail. The cast comprised four strong singers, Edmund Barham as Manrico, Katerina Kudriavchenko as Leonora, Ettore Kim as Luna and Sally Burgess as Azucena (her role debut) who came ‘nearest to a newly thought-out portrayal’ and provided ‘searing top notes’ (Fairman, 1994). Rodney Milnes mentioned the old saying that for trovatore, only the four best singers in the world were needed: ‘The difference between the four best singers in the world and four best singers readily available to Opera North was not all that great’. He described Levant’s production as ‘having an ENO Power House, school-of-Alden look’ but enhancing ‘a quite magnificent musical performance’ nonetheless (Milnes, 1994). Richard Mantle arrived on 4 November 1994, having been released early from his Edmonton contract. The company was on tour in Sunderland and the first performance he came to was The Magic Flute in the round, followed by a trovatore concert performance next day. There had been crossed lines with Opera North’s regular touring venue, Sunderland, and while the company had a week’s residency lined up, it transpired that the venue was not available. The company had to show quick thinking and a spirit of improvisation to find alternative venues for its touring performances, which included a sports centre and other community spaces. Mantle stated that his quick takeover and recent successes such as Gloriana, the commissions and exciting

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debuts of recent seasons, meant he built on existing strengths. ‘I found the company still feeling very pioneering and Paul was really on a roll at that point. I came in behind all that and supported it hugely’. Mantle credited Paul Daniel with being ‘the artistic glue’ throughout this time (Mantle, 2011). Like all successful Opera North Music Directors, his time commitment to the company was considerable, as was his involvement in artistic and planning processes. There is nothing traditional about Christmas with brave Opera North. Forget Hansel & Gretel, out they trot Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, never previously staged by any of Britain’s fully professional companies. (Kennedy, 1994b)

Oberto was directed by John Tomlinson, who also sung the title role. Ian Judge had been the planned director, but had withdrawn. Most critics asserted it was not an easy opera to stage (‘gloriously barmy’ was one comment). Tomlinson threw himself at the title role, an exiled head of a noble family, ‘like Wotan, with thundering volume’ (Canning, 1995b). He headed a fine cast, including Rita Cullis and Donald Maxwell Anderson in an ‘unembarrassed, full-blooded performance’ (Kennedy, 1994b). Meanwhile, a belated budget for the following season was produced by Mantle and his new finance director, debated and signed off by the board. Board initiatives included considering an Opera North development committee based in Manchester, which would be chaired by Michael Beverley, and discussions regarding a National Lottery application to create spaces for the chorus and the orchestra in which to rehearse (Opera North Board Minutes, 2 December 1994). There were thoughts about further forays into musical theatre, the centring around Gershwin — but the representatives of his estate were still difficult negotiating partners and blocked plans. Instead, the rarely performed musical Love Life (Kurt Weill) was scheduled for the following season. Having already performed two rarities by Verdi and Chabrier in the current season, the company now put its energy behind a production of William Walton’s only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida. With The Trojans, King Priam and various revivals of Dido & Aeneas, Opera North was amassing an impressive track record for performing operas based on the Trojan myth. Walton and librettist Christopher Hassall had used Chaucer’s epic Troilus and Crisedye as a source. Matthew Warchus, then an associate director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, was the director and Richard Hickox tied his musical direction in with preparing a recording for Chandos. Premiered in 1954, the opera had seen a series of revisions and cuts by Walton through the following decades. A 1970 change had turned the role of Cressida into a mezzo for Janet Baker and Opera North’s production restored the soprano tessitura to the part. This ‘combined’ version was called ‘the best of all possible worlds’, not least because of the performance of Judith Howarth as Cressida (Hunt, 1995). Tom Sutcliffe deemed the work ‘more Battle of Britain’ than ‘siege of Troy’; associations with Walton’s scores for post-war films will have enforced that

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association. Sutcliffe credited Opera North’s production with making the opera into ‘a story for today’, also praising the varied nature of Walton’s work — affecting comedy-romance, a sexually charged love scene to orchestral accompaniment, genuine tragedy, its nuances brought out brilliantly by Richard Hickox’s ‘well measured and highly sensitive conducting’ in Matthew Warchus ‘intelligent unpretentious staging’ (Sutcliffe, 1995). The production style oscillated between ‘archaeological detail (armour, costumes neo-classicism (the painted temple-frieze, the massive head of a goddess)) and modernism (aluminium ladders, Meccano watchtower)’ (Rushton, 1995a). The company was invited to bring its production of Gloriana back to the Royal Opera House, site of its world premiere in 1953 — a much happier occasion than the first performance had been. Critics remarked that Royal history had caught up with the opera in the intervening 41 years. In general, 1994/1995 was a critically acclaimed season (the ones before were judged to be strong, too). The Arts Council was pleased with Opera North’s consistent track record of performing rarities and programming them alongside more popular or well-known works and wanted to make a fixture out of this (and add popular repertoire, to balance the books and also audience expectations). The Walton performance with subsequent recording for Chandos was deemed an ideal model. Mantle’s appointment was mentioned as a ‘stabiliser’ to the company after two significant changes two years in a row. Spending was starting to be controlled more effectively (sometimes a little too much at the expense of set and costume budgets, the Arts Council recommendations remarked). For the 1995/1996 season, only 10 weeks of touring were expected of the company, with the hope that an 11th week could be reintroduced in 1996/ 1997. The company’s ambition of mounting more co-productions following past successes with Huddersfield and Cheltenham Festivals was also matched by an Arts Council recommendation, with a focus on Buxton Festival. Ulysses (Monteverdi) was to be the first of these, to open at Buxton, then at Opera North after a year’s break. The spring season had a French theme, with a revival of The Pearl Fishers, Orpheus in the Underworld and a new production of Pelléas and Mélisande by Claude Debussy, a big success for Richard Jones, Paul Daniel and the singers’ ensemble. It was a co-production with Minnesota Opera, where it transferred after its run at Opera North. ENO then bought the production after it had premiered. Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama in Debussy’s impressionist setting featured bold psychological landscapes in striking primary colours by Antony McDonald, who also hand-painted the curtain — associations of a large wave, a forest or a submerged landscape have been recalled by those involved. McDonald turned a forest into a desert, Mélisande’s fountain into one of many doors, stressing the plot’s connection with the Duke Bluebeard story — Debussy, Bartok and Dukas’s operas all reference the Maeterlinck source, Mélisande being one of Bluebeard’s former wives. ‘Is

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Bluebeard the “he” to whom Debussy’s heroine refers in her initial interview with Golaud? Is Golaud her second Bluebeard? These questions are tantalising and suggests a shared theatrical and ideological terrain for at least three operas of the 20th century’s first two decades’ (Canning, 1995a, p. 763). The opera had a production history that associated it with neo-medieval, Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Jones’s and McDonald’s approach was described as both timeless and contemporary, with ‘penetrating psychological direction of the principal characters’ and as providing ‘an important new statement about this elusive, ever-intriguing masterpiece’ (Canning, 1995a, p. 766). Joan Rodgers and William Dazeley very much impressed critics and colleagues with their concentration and their musicianship as the protagonist pair, as did Robert Hayward, who ‘sings and acts the role of Golaud with such conviction that he becomes a central character; this is a very classy performance’ Illustration 19. 1994/1995 — Pélleas and Mélisande. Joan Rodgers (Fallows, 1995, p. 44). Hayward has strong and fond mem(Mélisande), William Dazeley (Pélleas). Photo: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL. ories of the rehearsal process, his first production with Richard Jones: some are amusing (like rehearsing in a space near Tetley’s Brewery, meaning he still recalls the malty smell when thinking of the piece now), some poignant: at the beginning, Richard Jones stressed the importance of asking questions of the piece and the characters and not answering them, but processing them and passing them onto the audience. This has turned into somewhat of a method for the singer, which he sees as challenging the audience through the questions he channels through his performance. Jones was not dogmatic about his own questions or ideas, he let them ‘grow out of the floor of the rehearsal room’. Hayward always felt that the production of Pelléas had a life of its own and was not something that was ever finished or ‘done’. This feeling resulted from the intense collaboration of the small ensemble, having co-created and therefore ‘owning’ the production. He describes Pelléas as an ‘espresso opera’, a scenario of intense concentration, which increases throughout.

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After Pelléas, Joan Rodgers heard a marvellous remark coming out of the stage door (Lord Harewood: Yes, this really is something for your book!) — two Yorkshire matrons walking past — one said: ‘Did you enjoy that, love?’ — ‘It were very good, very good’. (and there was a short pause) ‘Mind you, it were a bit close to home’. [laughter] Can you imagine, life in the West Riding … . what WAS going on?! (Lord & Lady Harewood, 2010)

1995/1996 The French theme of the previous season was continued with a new production of Hamlet, and the revived Pearl Fishers carried over from the previous year. Opera North had carved out a real area of specialism for 19th century French repertoire, both the well-known and the undeservedly forgotten operas. The new production of Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas added to this portfolio. The adaptation from Shakespeare’s play interestingly changes the final act, with Hamlet being crowned king. Dramaturgically, the opera has its flaws: Why does Laertes return, unless to remind us that there are tenors in the world? Why does nobody believe Hamlet when he openly accuses the King at the end of Act 2 (the mousetrap scene), when later they unanimously approve the murder of Claudius? (Rushton, 1995b, p. 680)

McVicar staged the death of Ophelia in a very striking manner, the singer ‘drowning’ in real water, reflected in a mirror (utilising a Victorian theatrical device known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’). He was criticised for giving the gravediggers ‘omnipresence’ in the action by drawing in the audience through eye contact and miming running commentary on the action. They also facilitated the ghostly appearances of Hamlet’s father. In intimate scenes, McVicar showed ‘the right mixture of tact and raw theatrical power’. Anthony Michaels-Moore was credited with ‘magnificent’ singing as Hamlet, Linda Finnie (Gertrude) was noted for her no-holds-barred performance and Rebecca Caine as Ophelia used ‘lots of voice and attacked her lines’. Oliver von Dohnányi conducting was committed and ‘fiery’, orchestra and chorus were ‘excellent’ (Milnes, 1995). Jenůfa rounded off the autumn season. Performed in the restored version by Charles Mackerras and John Tyrrell, it was designed and directed by Tom Cairns. Opera North’s first production of the work had been a revival of David Pountney’s production for WNO in 1980, where Josephine Barstow (the Kostelnička in the new Opera North production) and Pauline Tinsley (the grandmother) had been acclaimed as Jenůfa and the Kostelnička respectively. Cairns’s production was not located in a regionally identifiable environment, a point also made through the costumes of Jenůfa and the Kostelnička, setting them apart

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from the other villagers. The design had the constant of an opening at the back of the stage, pentagon-shaped and lit in different colours for the three acts. All walls disappeared at the discovery of Jenůfa’s dead baby, descending in the final scene when the Kostelnička was taken to prison, turning the set into plain black walls and imprisoning the rigid community in its own morality (see also Dreyer below). The abstraction from village and from nature provided concentration, resented by some critics, welcomed by others as shining a relentless spotlight on the central characters. Leeks (2003, p. 84) called Barstow’s central performance ‘frighteningly committed’ and Martin Dreyer felt himself reminded of the title of Jenůfa’s literary source: Her Stepdaughter, putting the Kostelnička at the centre of the drama, as did Barstow’s riveting performance, ‘the pivot of the drama and the catalyst of tragedy’, with ‘a Mad Scene of Lady Macbeth proportions’ (Dreyer, 1995, p. 1469). Roy Laughlin (Head of Music) left Opera North in the autumn of 1995. He had been on the music staff from the first days of the company. James Holmes, a music theatre specialist and conductor who had previously worked at ENO, was appointed as his successor from early 1996. A tale about a pig who is different from the other pigs, but then meets her prince and is saved from the sausage machine entertained young audiences in November at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (HCMF): Gloria — A Pigtale, composed by H. K. Gruber, adapted from a children’s book by Rudolf Herfurthner and translated from the Bavarian by Amanda Holden. A co-production between the HCMF, Opera North and the Big Bang Theatre in Munich, it premiered at Huddersfield’s newly converted Lawrence Batley Theatre in November 1995. Autumn 1995 yielded disappointing box office results (the lowest ever attendance for a single Opera North season at the Grand Theatre — an average of 66% capacity and 48% box office capacity across all venues). This was, however, part of a national trend at the time, as the Arts Council informed the company there had been a 25% fall off from expectation (box office) at receiving theatres nationally. The Arts Council cuts had also affected planned visits to Hull and the Royal Opera House. The finance committee raised the issue of making savings on production budgets, but scenery had already been minimal in the autumn season, as the company had to work within its means. Co-productions with Welsh National and Scottish Opera were always a possibility, but Richard Mantle expressed a preference for co-producing with companies abroad and hanging on to Opera North’s artistic achievements by taking the creative lead (Opera North Finance Committee Minutes, 22 November 1995). The AC announced that there would be delays in allocating grants, as the government’s revenue grant was cut by £5m for 1996/1997 (Opera North Press Release, 28 November 1995).

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Throughout the 1990s, Opera North built up a track record of performing Verdian rarities and, particularly in the case of Attila, of showing their potential as a more regular programming choice. WNO and the Royal Opera House had done similar things for Ernani and Stiffelio respectively. A new production of Luisa Miller in winter 1995/1996 raised hopes for a similar rehabilitation. Based on Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), the opera presents a tale of murder and blackmail, as well as of class difference. Salvatore Cammarano’s libretto offered Verdi a canvas to add to his collection of moving father–daughter relationships, and a villain (Wurm) in a direct line to Iago. Tim Albery’s direction told a tight story in Stewart Laing’s bold, colourful designs, collage-like and deliberately simple and two-dimensional. Musical highlights of the score, conducted with passion by Paul Daniel, were singled out by critics, particularly the unaccompanied quartet in Act 2. Rupert Christiansen talked about Daniel’s ‘magnificently bold and thrilling conducting’ and ‘loved the pungently raw playing of the ENP’s lower strings and the austere emotional eloquence of the great last act’ (Christiansen, 1996). Susannah Glanville’s Opera North and Verdi debut was praised as a ‘vocal triumph of the evening, perfectly weighted, a radiant sound and a subtle application of the art of acting that, together with Verdi’s wonderfully sympathetic characterisation, help to make hers the most credible personality, simultaneously frail and strong, of the whole opera’ (Pettitt, 1995). The winter season was linked through the theme or romance: Intrigue and Love (Luisa Miller), Love among the Bohemians and Love Life by Kurt Weill (1948, with words by Alan Jay Lerner), in a European premiere. It was seen as an ‘ancestor piece’ to most of Broadway’s post-war hits; Weill extending the boundaries of popular music. Love Life tells the story of a mid-Western American couple who keep revisiting their love life in a time span that stretched between 1790 and the 1940s, without them ageing through the centuries. Critics speculated on the parallels between the plot and the composer’s life, as Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya had been divorced and later on remarried. There are also some echoes of Showboat and also of Carousel. Featuring a divorce ballet and a barbershop quartet about US economics, the musical was very separate from ‘chauvinistic optimism’ of most Broadway musicals of the period and ‘defines the moment when the tone of the genre turned from light to dark. But having plundered Love Life for ideas, Sondheim (in Follies and company) and Bernstein (in Trouble in Tahiti) surpassed it. And that’s the problem’ (White, 1996a). Some critics thought that Caroline Gawn’s production was slowed down somewhat by scene changes (17 scenes) and that the showbiz feel needed increasing — but of course, they were judging the first night. Opera North, unlike commercial musicals in the West End, did not have the advantage of previews and the production would have soon gathered momentum. Geoffrey Dolton ‘held the show together’ performing magic tricks and Alan Oke was praised in the part of

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Sam Cooper and for his recent change from baritone to tenor — and ‘the chorus worked like Trojans’. Wyn Davies scored a big success for himself and for the ENP who demonstrated their versatility across genres and styles once more (Milnes, 1996, p. 460). A list of creative objectives published in an outline business plan for 1996/1997 makes for interesting reading, mainly because it confirms that the company, wherever funding allowed, was already pursuing these objectives: Opera North looked for fresh approaches to the core repertory, included neglected operas, mainly by well-known composers, in its planning and sought to include large-scale repertory where possible. The company also wanted to continue presenting important 20th century works, commission new works (preferably in association with other organisations) and to include repertory which broadened accessibility. Its middle- and small-scale touring needed expansion, as successful productions in the past had shown. The touring venues would ideally include the north east of England, which was seen as Opera North’s catchment area, not Scottish Opera’s. The aim was to concentrate on four cities (Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle and Leeds), which had implications for Hull, Sheffield and York (there were plans to regularly visit these on a particular rota). The company was currently burdened with an accumulated deficit of £433,000: underfunding in the years before 1992 had caused the company’s deficit to rise to £700,000, but it had been reduced somewhat after the 1992 grant increase. Opera North and Leeds Grand Theatre were jointly exploring a development study for a lottery grant application to refurbish the theatre and to develop a rehearsal and administration centre for Opera North. At this point, the total project costs were estimated at £18.5m. KPMG, Opera North’s auditors, were consulted as overall advisors. RHWL architects and planners presented plans for an Arts Square, a new use for St John’s Church opposite the Grand Theatre (restored but unused) and some ‘exterior breathing space’ outside the theatre, dominated by take-aways and generally quite run down (including, of course, the disused Assembly Room). The plans would ideally include an area for watching performance on a screen (modelled on Covent Garden Piazza) and address the current lack of facilities (e.g. bars and foyers, entertaining spaces, disabled access). The Grand Theatre had for a long time had one of the country’s most difficult getins for scenery with a quasiantique lift from street level. The auditorium, the stage and the backstage area also suffered from problems that needed addressing. Since its inauguration, Opera North’s facilities had been ‘piecemeal’. The company existed in a symbiotic relationship with the Grand Theatre, with Opera North accommodation spread out through the building and with very limited rehearsal facilities. The architects proposed a Plan A and a Plan B, with A seeing an existing multi-storey car park replaced by a six-storey Opera North base, with four rehearsal rooms double-stacked above the wardrobe department and a car

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park, and four floors of office accommodation in the adjacent Premier House, a 1960s office building. Plan B would involve demolishing and rebuilding the British Gas and the Maples store behind the Grand Theatre. After discussion, a combination of both plans seemed most beneficial, but it would go through many changes until the eventual go-ahead in the early 2000s (Opera North Board Minutes, 22 March 1996). The winter box office results had been more favourable than the autumn’s returns. Opera North presented a semi-staged open air performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Hampton Court, conducted by Richard Farnes (Opera North Board Minutes, 22 March 1996). In February, the news broke that Paul Daniel would take up the post of ENO’s music director from the 1997/1998 season. After ENO’s previous music director, Sian Edwards, had resigned in November, Daniel had already been asked to take over at shorter notice, but had refused. The new offer, more flexible, proved the one he was happy to accept: I still have a year and a half here and I want to give it all I’ve got. I was handed Opera North on a plate, when it was on a roll, and I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved. I think we’re still on a roll … (Daniel quoted in Canning, 1996)

Everybody at Opera North agreed that losing Daniel, the company’s second music director, was quite a blow — ENP leader David Greed commented that ‘he could have done with being here another year’, while Andy Fairley (cellist and Opera North librarian) added: ‘We seem to be on the crest of a wave that’s still got some way to go’. Other members of the orchestra wondered whether Daniel was ‘too nice’ for the London job in a remarkably frank article that presented official versus straight-talking views: He [Daniel] pays tribute to ‘a unique company: the degree of loyalty and the determination to get to a better standard all the time is almost unbearable sometimes’. (‘He means he hasn’t got enough time to listen to everybody’s questions’, comments an orchestra member. ‘But that’s not his fault — his door is literally open all the time. It’s just a very small administration here’). (Anonymous, 1996)

Richard Mantle was disappointed, as Daniel was integral to his planning and vision. The obvious candidate to consider as his successor was Richard Farnes, who felt the time was not yet right for him to take up the post. There were still one and a half seasons to go for Daniel, so the task of finding the right person commenced — someone who was willing to commit the majority of their time, to find the right balance between ambitious standards and adventurousness. Another rarity, Medea (Cherubini), reunited the winning Gloriana team of Phyllida Lloyd, Josephine Barstow and Thomas Randle. Based on the play by Euripides, the opera was performed in its 1797 original edition in a contemporary

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translation by Kenneth McLeish. The production was set at the time at which the opera was written, at the tail end of the French Revolution, which Cherubini lived through. … and the head-on conflict of one world running into the next is what Lloyd obviously finds most interesting about this opera. Medea becomes a paradigm of passionate barbarism: a relic of the past bursting in on a primly self-contained, slightly effete world of the 18th century reason whose members parade up and down a spiral staircase (nicely designed by Ian MacNeil), striking poses and looking purposeful without going anywhere. (White, 1996b)

Illustration 20.

1995/1996 — Medea. Josephine Barstow (Medea). Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

There were mixed reviews for the fearless performance of Josephine Barstow, acting through her voice. She was criticised by some reviewers for seeming to be in a different opera from the rest of the cast (Kimberley, 1996), but this seemed to be a point the production made — Medea being an outsider, a stranger to the society and its rules that try to govern her. The audience were gripped and strong box office returns for the production were the result. Dominic Gray was appointed as the Head of Education in the spring of 1996 — he had previously worked as Education Manager for the RSC. A board discussion about surtitles was ongoing; they were popular with audiences, but not so much with performers, directors and conductors. There was often still a strong case to perform in the language of the audience — ‘We want our audiences to participate, not simply to spectate!’ (Mantle, 1996).

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1996/1997 This was a season that presented a wide range: early opera (Monteverdi), so far not prominent in Opera North’s repertoire, a solid base in Mozart, Verdi and Puccini and mid-century successes by Britten and Berg. The autumn season consisted of two new productions (Madama Butterfly and Iphigénie in Aulide) and two revivals (Figaro and Wozzeck). The company’s last production of Madama Butterfly (in the score of 1904) had run until 1992; a great success at the time. Young Lithuanian director Dalia Ibelhauptaite and her production team, supported by Paul Daniel, merged several versions for this new production, based on the premise that Puccini had made revisions mainly to please his financial backers. Ibelhauptaite’s ‘Personenregie’ had some admirers among the critics, as did her eye for striking stage images: Butterfly dropping her dagger at the point of suicide and then being crucified and flown upwards like an impaled butterfly caused shock and contradicted the opera’s reputation as one of the safe stalwarts of the repertoire — but critics could not agree on whether this opera was right for risk-taking. While opinions were split on the vocal performance of Chen Sue in the title role, her detailed communication of words and emotions impressed. Iphigénie in Aulide (1774) saw its first production by a major UK company (Opera Factory had produced both of Gluck’s Iphigénie operas in abridged versions in 1987). The opera is based on Racine’s adaptation of the Trojan myth, the story of Agamemmnon being driven to sacrifice his daughter Iphigénie before the capture of Troy, i.e. the material for Berlioz’s epic opera, which had been such a resounding success in the 1980s. Indeed, the opera is a sequel of sorts to Gluck’s Paris and Helen, and Offenbach’s Belle Hélène, a precursor of Berlioz’s Troyens, Tippett’s King Priam and Strauss’s Elektra (Porter, 1996). Tim Hopkins, the director, had never been a favourite with the mainstream critics. Max Loppert bemoaned the production as ‘vacuous’ in Nigel Lowery’s ‘generic post modern, or do I mean “tiresomely clichéd” designs’ (Loppert, 1996, p. 1479). An allusion between fortune and the lottery prompted a quip from Andrew Porter: Gluck, who had come to London in 1746, didn’t write a lottery opera, but in Leeds, for Opera North, bright young Tim Hopkins has made good that gap by devising one of his own to the accompaniment of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. (Porter, 1996)

Julian Rushton thought the production suffered from ‘rub-it-in syndrome’, being over-obvious in places (Rushton, 1996). The aesthetic of its designer, Nigel Lowery, ‘borrows playfully from that of the poster and cartoon strip, but it is so alive, so convinced of its own purposiveness, that it seizes the spectator in a vice-like grip’ (Peattie, 1996).

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A revival of Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck rounded off a busy autumn season. Opera North’s deficit (an accumulation of many years of underfunding and grant freezes) was by now seriously affecting the company’s operations, as the Arts Council was technically unable to accept a deficit budget and the concern was that the company might not be able to continue to trade in the near future. The decision about whether Opera North would be accepted onto the Stabilisation scheme was not due until January 1997. A meeting with Arts Council Secretary General, Mary Allen, with the Opera North Board (20 November 1996), brought the unwelcome news of another freeze and a cut of 1.7% to the ACE grant for 1997/1998. Allen was not able to comment on why WNO received £1.7m more in central government core funding than Opera North, given that the latter gave more opera performances as well as running a major symphonic programme. In response to the 1997/1998 budget, a 4% ticket price increase was going to be necessary, as well as cutting down from seven to five new productions. There was to be no salary increase for Opera North staff. Richard Eyre had been commissioned to produce a report on the future of the two London opera companies and his recommendations were released in autumn 1996. The suggestion that ENO should take up touring activity once more was met with incomprehension, particularly by local media: ‘Why should the regions get pared-down productions from London? I think it’s insulting’. […] In the 20 years since the company was launched […] ironically as the touring arm of ENO […] the North has discovered that it likes opera quite a lot. (Mantle, 1997a)

Richard Mantle commented that it was ‘very Londoncentric to just ignore the existence of companies outside the capital, when there are three which are very successful. […] The suggestion that the artistic lead should come from London … if anyone is the people’s opera, Opera North is. […] we are not in competition, we are compatible’ (Mantle, 1997a). In the winter season, Opera North was seen to be on a high again, with a production of Falstaff, Verdi and librettist Arrigo Boito’s adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, performed in English (beneficial to such a conversation piece). It was a coproduction with ENO, but seen first at Opera North and directed by Matthew Warchus. His ‘three-dimensional’ production in Laura Hopkins’s designs offered an intriguing mix of Tudor style for the inside scenes, contrasted with pared-down, post-modern images for outside: a Windsor forest made of mirrors and a street with a disappearing trompe-l’oeuil perspective, suggesting depth when it was not there. The stage looked like a painting sometimes, as did the production’s poster, showing an ‘old master’ style image of Andrew Shore as Falstaff, groping Frances McCafferty as Mistress Quickly. The production was set in winter. Andrew Shore showed a comic approach to the fat knight, and his Falstaff was described as ‘one of the best things this

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remarkable singing-actor has done’ (Loppert, 1997, p. 345). Some critics found Daniel’s conducting lacked pace, some praised the sound and definition coming from the pit and the sensitivity in leading and accompanying the ensemble cast. Gloriana was revived for the first time since its hugely successful opening in 1993, again attracting audiences and praise from critics. Annabel Arden’s second production for Opera North, Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses, was coproduced with and premiered at the Buxton Festival in the summer of 1995, opening at Opera North in the winter season. It was not an easy opera to appreciate: Rupert Christiansen overheard Illustration 21. 1996/1997 — Falstaff. Andrew Shore (Falstaff), Frances McCafferty (Mistress Quickly). Photo: Donald Cooper. a couple at the interval complaining ‘Nobody’s singing much’ and ‘Nothing happens much’, obviously struggling with Monteverdi’s austere arioso style. He praised the fact that the production did not rely on flamboyant effects or scenic flourishes, displaying instead the ‘honesty of acting and the exercise required of the audience’s imagination’ (Christiansen, 1997). Michael Kennedy praised Arden’s production, ‘the eye is always engaged without distracting the ear from what matters most, the music’ (Kennedy, 1997a). Ulysses was performed in Paul Daniel’s scholarly edition and conducted by Harry Bicket, with organ, lutes and theorbos on the upper tier and the rest of the orchestra in the pit. The scenography allowed for three levels: the palace on the upper tier, a clear front of the stage for various uses as well as an underworld below the palace. The production featured the role debut of Alice Coote, with ‘lustrous tone and expressive phrasing’, a spirited Penelope with remarkable stage presence, sung with ‘dignity and stillness’ (Kennedy, 1997a). The cunning warrior Ulysses of Nigel Robson, singing with intensity and vivid characterisation, was also met with favour by critics.

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The Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, won the General Elections in May 1997. Chris Smith was appointed Culture Secretary. Although Richard Eyre’s report was still being discussed, there was hope the new government might offer more stability to its cultural industries, recognising their contribution to the ‘Cool Britannia’ brand that kept Blair high in the popularity stakes for a while. Opera North premiered another new production in the spring season, Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Paul Daniel conducted the Dresden version of 1845 (excluding a lot of Wagner’s later revisions) in an English translation. It was his last major production as Music Director and the company’s first Wagner for a while. It won unanimous praise for the performances of the chorus and the orchestra. However, Michael White showed that attitudes of ‘the provinces versus the metropolis’ still prevailed in Wapping: ‘provincial opera companies tend to avoid certain repertory like fallen cabinet ministers avoid the truth’ (White, 1997). He praised the work of Paul Daniel, ENO Music Director designate, remarking that ENO was in dire need of a ‘resident Messiah’ (no pressure then!). David Fielding (former collaborator of David Alden), directed the production in his own designs, in a stark, white-tiled aesthetic — for some, this did not present enough of an opposition between the worlds of Venus and Elizabeth. There were mixed reviews for Jeffrey Lawton’s Tannhäuser and Rita Cullis’s Elizabeth, at both extremes of the critical spectrum. Anne-Marie Owens impressed as a brothel madam Venus and Keith Latham was considered a lyrical Wolfram. Conductor Claire Gibault made her Opera North debut with the new production of Così fan tutte, while speculation about the new music director continued. She was credited with a ‘wonderful pace […] and with the perfect balance she achieves between the singers and the orchestra, she proves to be an ideal Mozart exponent’ (Anonymous, 1997). Reviews were generally very positive about the performances of the quartet of lovers: Paul Nilon, William Dazeley, Susannah Glanville (‘a triumph’) and Emma Selway. Tim Albery’s updating was appreciated, his symbolism understood and liked by some — but other critics bemoaned the lack of emotional investment and compassion, repopulating the opera ‘with unsympathetic monsters’ (Ashley, 1997). Some responses repeated stereotypes about pared-down productions and unwelcome London comparisons: ‘Tim Albery’s production is a cut-price version of what we see at Covent Garden. Both set the opera in the present day, but the budget in Leeds does not run to costumes by Armani, even now Harvey Nichols has opened down the road’ (Fairman, 1997). Behind the scenes, two lottery bids were being considered: one to renew core equipment (instruments, lighting, transport etc) and an Arts for Everyone bid for audience development and continuing projects with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Elgar Howarth was appointed Opera North Music Advisor — an ‘interregnum’ until a new Music Director was found. Ian Killik, Opera

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North founder member and successful and popular chorus and orchestra manager, left to take up a post at ENO. Candidates in discussion for the Music Director post were Claire Gibault, who had made an excellent debut with the company, Richard Farnes (although still young, he was firmly associated with a string of company successes) and Steven Sloane, who had an impressive UK and European profile. It was Sloane on whom the board settled and he was subsequently appointed (Opera North Board Minutes, 13 June 1997). The Arts Council undertook a large-scale touring review in 1997. It was agreed to remove York and Hull from Opera North’s touring plans, to aim for an increase of work shown in Sheffield and to have Newcastle as a permanent touring venue. Opera North was also to become the sole opera provider in Manchester, and would continue to tour to Nottingham and Norwich (Mantle, 1997b). Violanta, an opera by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in 1916, was performed by Opera North for the centenary of the composer’s birth, with a concert version first given in Leeds, then at the Proms on 24 June 1997. It ran to 80 minutes in one act and bore some stylistic relation to Salome and Elektra. A 15th century Venetian tale of revenge, Violanta pursues the man who seduced and abandoned her sister with revenge, but is then seduced by him instead and dies in his place by the hand of her husband. David Fanning called the opera ‘eroticised verismo’ and, although positive about the opportunity to hear such a rarity, remarked that Violanta needed subtlety of pacing and a deeper sense of human relationships (Fanning, 1997). It was Paul Daniel’s valedictory performance as Opera North’s Music Director after a highly successful and memorable tenure.

1997/1998 The foci of this season were 20th century American musical theatre, an acclaimed discovery (Julietta), early and late Verdi (both directed by Philip Prowse) and a new production of Eugene Onegin. Elgar Howarth took up post as Acting Music Director/Musical Advisor. The autumn season brought revivals of Così fan tutte and of Prowse’s 1986 production of Aida. Opera North’s production of Julietta gained hallmark status within and outside the company: This is Pountney back on top form, aided by Stefanos Lazaridis’s brilliant and delightful seaside set and Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s stylish and amusing costumes. The worlds of fantasy, mystery, black comedy and farce are as perceptively mixed in Pountney’s direction as they are in

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Martinů’s music. Steuart Bedford conducted with total conviction and the orchestra played as if Martinů was their daily bread. […] Everyone is the star of this show. (Kennedy, 1997b)

Strong performances from protagonists Paul Nilon as the bookseller and Rebecca Caine as the girl added to the musical and dramatic distinction of Julietta. The production was set on a beach, with a big canopy of reflective glass and an unfolding world of the absurd around it. Fiona Maddocks called Julietta ‘more Sentimental Journey than theatre of cruelty, grand lyrical outpouring […] set in Deauville circa 1940, with a touch of Samuel Beckett thrown in’ (Maddocks, 1997). Sweeney Todd, Sondheim’s macabre musical thriller opened a winter season where musical theatre featured prominently. The composer’s own adaptation of Hugh Wheeler’s book, it was conducted by Head of Music James Holmes, a Sondheim enthusiast, and performed without amplification. The balance between voices and orchestra (‘classical exquisiteness’, Marvin, 1888, p. 26) was deemed excellent and critics delighted in the skill and authority of the cast, particularly Beverley Klein and Steven Page’s protagonists. The production’s capacity for horror and disgust were described by critics: ‘Tarantino-style blood fountains’ ‘unexpectedly timed electronic screams from the back of the auditorium had the audience squirming satisfactorily’ (Byrne, 1998). Edward Seckerson thought that McVicar’s considerable achievement in this production lay in the ‘seriousness of purpose, a dark and uncomfortable truthfulness that belies the comedy and thus makes the belly laughs all the more unsettling. Welcome to the abbatoir’ (1998). The production also had an accent on voyeurism, with the chorus, collectively and as individuals, always employed as watchers and witnesses. After a successful run in Leeds and on tour, Sweeney Todd was performed at the South Bank on 30 March in a slightly reduced staged version. With the musical as the season’s centrepiece, Opera North boasted very strong attendance figures (between 77% and 94%), with the only disappointment being Sunderland. Opera North concentrated on Newcastle as a permanent touring venue over the next few years. Steven Sloane’s appointment as Music

Illustration 22. 1997/1998 — Sweeney Todd. Steven Page (Sweeney Todd), Beverley Klein (Mrs Lovett). Photo: Bill Cooper.

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Director from 1999 was announced at a press conference on 20 April 1998. In the wider operatic world, Nicholas Payne left the Royal Opera House and Dennis Marks resigned from his post as General Director of ENO. Eugene Onegin was Dalia Ibelhauptaite’s second production for Opera North after Madama Butterfly. It was conducted by Steven Sloane and Martin Pickard in David Lloyd-Jones’s translation. The sparse setting and (according to critics) a certain lacklustre air were blamed on underfunding. Sloane’s rapport with the ENP and the balance he achieved were praised, but having the interval in the second act was deemed ‘a very, very bad idea indeed’ (Milnes, 1998). While judgements such as ‘realism intervened in time’ and ‘efficient rather than inspired’ (Rushton, 1998) were common for this Onegin, high hopes were expressed for the production to turn into something enduring and to find its stride. This was not least due to a strong singingacting cast, headed by Alwyn Mellor (Tatyana) and Peter Savidge (Onegin). Opera North continued its impressive series of reviving lesser known Verdi operas with Joan of Arc (Giovanna d’Arco), directed and designed by Philip Prowse, in a co-production with Theater im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen, and the Royal Opera House, where it had been seen in 1996. It was adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s Maid of Orleans (Verdi also produced operas on other Schiller plays: Don Carlos, Luisa Miller and I Masnadieri). The libretto is by Temistocle Solera, who had also adapted Nabucco. The scenography was commented on as unusually lavish. Updating it to Second Empire France was seen as ‘a welcome shot in the arm in these austere times of permanent sets and economy costumes’. The production was conducted by Richard Farnes, who drew ‘a kaleidoscopic performance from the ENP’. Susannah Glanville’s fresh, vivid soprano and strong but comely appearance was Joan of Arc to a tee […] visually, it was opera at its most scrumptious’ (Dreyer, 1998, p. 987). Julian Gavin and Keith Latham were praised as Carlo VII and Giacomo. The fact that critics made the straightforward assumption that Opera North’s visual style was simply down to underfunding and that ‘lavish’ sets would be produced if the company had the financial means needs some reflection. The company’s productions always needed to be compatible with the demands of touring and different theatre sizes, so this was not just a cost factor, but a practical consideration. Also, the company’s progressive and at times experimental preferences had resulted in close artistic relationships with directors and designers who were not necessarily interested in directing a period-style ‘lavish’ performance. Of Thee I Sing, Gershwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning US election musical, premiered in May 1998. It had been planned as a concert performance with minimal dramatic action, but director Caroline Gawn and designers Charles Edwards and Nikki Gillibrand

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produced a full performance, to the delight of company, audience and critics. Just as Opera North had a track record in discovering rarities, it was now adding to its successes in musical theatre which had started with Showboat almost a decade earlier — and after a few attempts, it was now Gershwin at last! The musical was a big success and was given a BBC Radio 3 broadcast. It prompted Rodney Milnes to ask the question that Opera North chose as a key quotation in their promotional publications: ‘is there a more versatile company’? Behind the scenes, a distinguished Chairman was given fond and grateful farewells and a new one was welcomed: Sir Gordon Linacre retired from the Opera North Board after over 20 years of fighting for the company with style, humour and cunning. Michael Beverley was appointed as his successor and became Chairman of the Board. He had been a Board member since 1991 and was also the Vice-President and former Chair of the Leeds Philharmonic Society. The Board was still discussing the aftermath of the Eyre Report from the previous year, including the suggestion that the ENO and the Royal Opera House should merge and restart touring. Richard Mantle made his position clear in his Annual Report. In a meeting with the ACE, he had ‘refuted the notion that part of the solution should involve costly touring from London, and reinforced the case for strengthening the regional work undertaken by the national companies outside of London’. After a distinguished and diverse artistic year, the company could look forward to a season with one world premiere, five new productions, four revivals and two works new to the company (Mantle, 1998).

1998/1999 One of the verdicts for Opera North’s The Bartered Bride was ‘different and direct. Daniel Slater’s entirely to-the-point production makes for one of the most enjoyable new shows I’ve seen for a long time’ (White, 1998). The production did not shy away from being nationally specific and responsive to some of the folkloristic elements in the score, but was updated to the 1970s Soviet Union, not allowing for too much escapism, but allowing for the lightness of the piece to survive. Among the soloists, Alwyn Mellor (Mařenka), Iain Paton (Vasek) and Clive Bayley (Kecal) were singled out for praise, as was Oliver von Dohnányi for adding substance and flair to the score. There were indications from the Arts Council that Opera North would be eligible for triennial funding with effect from 1 April 1999. The purpose of stabilisation would be to mitigate the accumulated debt, to invest in income-generating activities, to

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equip the company with better IT facilities, to invest in audience development and access and to launch a capital fund in order to improve rehearsal and performance facilities. Sponsorship and donations were down, and although costs were well controlled, there was a forecast for a large operating deficit for the current season, meaning a reduction of costs by 5% (£500,000) was needed. Lord Harewood expressed concern that production budgets had been cut in the past to disastrous effect; he also warned against ‘pot-boilers’ (i.e. core opera repertoire, generally done too much) to secure income. Mantle outlined plans for the following season, where the company would be experimenting with a basic set as a space for developing three productions by three different directors. Always proactive in doing their bit, the Friends of Opera North increased their individual subscription to £20 p.a. Other plans considered at the time were two condensed seasons (rather than the current three), running up similar numbers of performances, a total of 8 annual productions and 12 weeks touring. The company did not want to undertake any more touring in June, as it had made for uncertain box office returns for some time now. Instead, the early summer should be a time to instigate one-off projects. A new audience development policy was being put into place and interesting results would come about over the following few years (Opera North Board Minutes, 25 September 1998). Following successes of Opera North productions at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and the Munich Biennale, a three-way collaboration took place in November 1998. Simon Holt’s The Nightingale’s to Blame was co-commissioned by HCMF, Opera North and the Munich Biennale (who later backed out). The production marked the 21st anniversary for HCMF, and Opera North had opened exactly 20 years earlier. Holt and his librettist David Johnston, a Lorca scholar, worked from the source of Lorca’s The Love of Don Perlimpin for Belisa in the Garden, a tale of the folly of youth and the wisdom of age — referred to by Lorca as an ‘erotic strip cartoon’. The work had been set by other composers (Rieti, Fortner and Maderna) and Holt had already produced a string of other Lorca settings and felt affinity with the rhythms and poetics of the writer’s work and found a translator who matched these in the English libretto. The production was conducted with ‘clear and unfussy’ competence by Richard Farnes and the 15 strong orchestra ensemble consisted of low strings (no violins), bass clarinet and alto flute, resulting in ‘brightness, variously delicate, romantic of screeching, derives from harp, bells, gongs and piccolos’ (Maddocks, 1998). The work was given a production of ‘vibrant theatricality’ by Martin Duncan (Leeks, 2003, p. 96), the design, particularly the costumes described as ‘18th century gone mad’ by Fiona Maddocks (1998) — she also saw the character of Perlimpin as a mix of Don Quixote, Falstaff and Sir Andrew Aguecheeck. Donald Maxwell expertly balanced his character of Don Perlimpin to elicit sympathy rather than pity and Patricia Rozario contributed a capricious and energetic performance as Belisa. The opera entered the Opera North repertoire in the winter season.

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There are several routes to go down when planning a new production of Carmen: the familiarity of the opera means that adventurous ideas might be accommodated, while the audience can still follow the plot and appreciate their favourite operatic ‘hits’. It could also be performed in quite a traditional setting (meaning a 19th century Seville setting and colourful scenes of folklore) in order to ensure good box office returns and a financial safety net for lesser known work. This production seemed not to pursue either of these options, but to strive for clarity, comprehension and the stripping away of layers of convention that surround Carmen by looking to Mérimée’s novella and tailoring it to its cast through a detailed workshop period at the start of rehearsals. It was sung in English, set in the present and not in any particular country. Director Phyllida Lloyd worked with a young cast, led by Ruby Philogene and Antoni Garfield as Don José and opened up rehearsals for visits by groups of pupils. The responses (more accurately: those which survive in print) complained about a very mixed experience: from ‘the most mind-numbingly dull production of Carmen in living memory’ (Canning, 1998) to ‘a flawed, but very interesting effort, which uses young performers to bring a fresh look at an old favourite’ (R.F., 1998). Anthony Arblaster thought that Phyllida Lloyd’s production had done for Carmen what she had managed for La Bohème in 1993: ‘She has brought seriousness and a sense of reality to pieces that are traditionally treated as soft-centred, feel-good outings’ (Arblaster, 1999a). With only a few performances before the Christmas season at Leeds Grand Theatre, the production was revived for the spring touring season and was very popular with audiences.

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Illustration 23. 1998/1999 — Carmen. Ruby Philogene (Carmen), Antoni Garfield Henry (Don Jose). Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

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In a meeting with Arts Council representatives (13 November 1998), including Chief Executive Peter Hewitt and Graham Marchant (former Administrator of Opera North, now Head of Strategy and Arts at the Council), Richard Mantle and his Chairman Michael Beverley discussed the company’s funding situation. Central funding was to continue, but closer relationships with regional agencies should be developed. Stabilisation funding was the scheme Opera North was aiming to apply for — this would help to address urgent financial needs, most importantly, its historical debt. The fund was to be available from the year 1999/2000 onwards. The ‘old’ problem of funding comparative with other companies was not something the Arts Council staff were prepared to discuss in detail, according to minutes. Opera North was proud of its ability to be artistically distinctive under problematic financial circumstances (two of its productions, Julietta and Sweeney Todd, had been nominated for the Manchester Evening News Awards in the previous year, for example). The company was always thinking of new ways of delivering new work to an expectant public, but often on a smaller budget than for three new productions. There were discussions about delivering two operas in one day, for example, which would be possible with ‘a light-footed’ design, reduced changeover time between performances and a slight increase on labour and overtime costs (Opera North Board Minutes, 20 November 1998). The figures with which the company could plan arrived in the winter, as usual: the Arts Council award for 1999/2000 was to be £5,855, which meant a 5% uplift in core funding and an additional £49,000 as a one-off payment for a week in Hull from the new audiences fund in the autumn of 1999. These one-off payments were, as the Arts Council stated, designed to make sure the company did not slide further into debt until a decision was reached whether Stabilisation funding would be granted. Internal economies were a part of this ‘holding position’ and the good box office returns for the winter season also strengthened Opera North’s case. Ensuring the kind of turnover that a fulltime company needed was an annual battle, and in addition, Opera North wanted to improve working conditions and enable on-site rehearsals at its home base. Sandcliff Fundraising & Development was commissioned with a Capital Fund Feasibility Study in March 1999. This was the first stage (with support from the Arts Council Lottery Department) of what was to become the Transformation Fund and then the Transformation Project. The draft feasibility study detailed the following options: • a newly built Opera North centre near Leeds Grand Theatre, at Quarry Hill • the demolition of Premier House, adjacent to Leeds Grand Theatre, and a new building on Harrison Street, involving the renovation of the Assembly Room

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• the acquisition of Premier House, with rehearsal rooms built at the back of it (then a car park), also acquiring 28 New Briggate (which in the event did not become available) and to construct a bridge to connect the premises with Leeds Grand Theatre • rehearsal rooms and admin quarters to be behind the Grand Theatre and 28 New Briggate (Opera North Board Minutes, 19 March 1999). The Sandcliffe Report stated that Opera North was currently not achieving value for money against industry norms for level of expenditure against income. Interviews as part of the feasibility study also concluded that established opera audiences and the ones the company wanted to newly attract to opera had little common ground or areas of interaction, i.e. it was difficult to cater for both groups through the same productions and marketing campaigns. Opera North was not selected for the main Arts Council Stabilisation programme, as it became known in March 1999, but was recommended instead for a fast track route (also referred to as ‘Recovery Programme’), as suggested by Chief Executive Peter Hewitt. The programming of Richard Strauss’s ‘other’ Viennese opera, Arabella, was partly motivated by its status as a rarity in the United Kingdom (this had worked well for Daphne quite some years earlier) and by what Leeks calls ‘Opera North’s policy of artist development in action’ (2003, p. 96). The now established careers of Susannah Glanville and Robert Hayward, cast as Arabella and Mandryka in the new production, had a close connection with Opera North. Arabella is a strange mix of social realism and ‘Ruritanian romance’, according to Anthony Arblaster, but he applauded the choice, as ‘Northern audiences have been starved of Strauss for far too long’ (Arblaster, 1999b). This, and the popularity of the production with audiences, acknowledged even by dismissive critics, succinctly answered Rupert Christiansen’s question of ‘But why did Opera North bother?’ (Christiansen, 1999). Marketing had stressed the ‘fairytale romance’ aspect of the production, which also contained a critically much-maligned fairy (who turned out to be the ‘Fiakermilli’ in Act 2). Opera North’s accumulated deficit was now at £1.5m. The company was producing the same level of work for less, as fixed costs had risen, and good cost control was essential. Since 1994/1995, the overall expenditure had grown less than inflation, but overheads had risen just above inflation. Opera North delivered more performances than WNO and Scottish Opera respectively — the latter did about 80% of Opera North’s work for the same grant, and WNO did roughly the same amount for an additional £1m. Opera North had the largest single local authority support out of the three companies, as well as a relatively low cost co-operation with Leeds Grand Theatre. For the spring tour, Apollo Leisure had ‘arbitrarily’ moved Opera North from

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the Palace Theatre to Opera House in Manchester. As relations with Apollo had not been easy for some time and both Manchester theatres were not ideal for the company’s purposes, it was good news that the build of the new arts centre, The Lowry, at Salford Quays was under way. Opera North was set to be a partner company and was thus to have more say over touring conditions. Meanwhile, Glyndebourne Touring Opera had pulled out of Manchester. In summer 1999, Helen Dobson joined Opera North as Finance Director (she had previously worked for KPMG, the Funding Agency for Schools, The University of York et al). Malcolm Warne-Holland became Chorus and Orchestra Director (Opera North Board Minutes, 19 June and Arts Council meeting, 27 July 1999). Gloriana was revived at the end of June, to allow filming across three performances. Phyllida Lloyd, whose principle often seemed to be ‘make it new’ was not content to produce a filmed record of a successful stage production, but set different parameters in response to the possibilities of television as a medium. Relishing the televisual possibilities of separating public and private spaces within the opera, the film involved backstage areas of the Grand Theatre. Gloriana won an Emmy in the Performing Arts category (where 549 programmes had been entered) in 2000 and the film is discussed alongside the production in Perspective 3.

1999/2000 ‘Can we do three new productions for the price of one new production and two revivals?’ This question meant that Opera North audiences saw more new productions than normal in one season and the company kept within its financial limitations. The plan was to have a common floor and lighting rig for the new productions of La traviata, Katya Kabanova and Don Giovanni, with ‘light-footed designs’ and a strong focus on human relationships (Leeks, 2003, p. 100). Of course some of the reasoning behind this interesting idea was rooted in financial troubles, but in a manifesto-style introduction to the 1999/2000 season for the company, Christine Jane Chibnall elaborated on the back-to-basics thinking that underpinned the experiment. She stated that ‘artistic ambitions overtook money as a prime mover’ during the planning process. Changearound time for sets in Leeds Grand Theatre had recently become quicker and more cost-effective and it was the ambition to limit the time to one hour between productions. This would also mean two of the productions could be seen on a Saturday (a matinee and an evening performance) and it opened up possibilities for the Education and the Projects departments to devise events and workshops alongside the three productions. All three directors, Tim Albery, Annabel Arden and

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David McVicar, had ‘cut their teeth with Opera North’ and, together with their designers, were involved in lively discussions during the period of preparation. Despite the scenic simplicity, the shows were designed to evoke very distinctive visual worlds, not least due to the distinguished work of lighting designers Paule Constable (‘intricate and eloquent’ for Giovanni) and Peter Mumford. First up, La traviata gained almost unanimously glowing reviews, with Janis Kelly’s Violetta at the centre: an intelligent vocal performance (‘she thinks about every phrase that she sings afresh’, Fairman, 1999), combined Illustration 24. 1999/2000 — La traviata. Janis Kelly (Violetta), Thomas Randle (Alfredo). Photo: Alastair Muir. with an acting performance that was described in superlatives. She was matched in intensity and expressivity by Thomas Randle as Alfredo, director Arden gaining praise for a carefully constructed actor-centric and concentrated production that she had facilitated. Reviewers used word play such as ‘Rich fare on a budget’ (Anonymous, 1999a) and ‘A no-frills Traviata proves to be a bargain’ (Anonymous, 1999b). Richard Farnes conducted with ‘care and imagination’, according to Rodney Milnes, who also reflected on the decision to perform La traviata without the ‘non-naturalistic’ repeats, which had the effect of showing the opera’s affinity to verismo traditions more clearly (Milnes, 1999a). The first of the low-cost trilogy had provided high artistic value, pleasing audiences across the range.

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Katya Kabanova opened next, directed by Tim Albery and designed by Hildegard Bechtler — it was Steven Sloane’s first production as Opera North’s Music Director. Andrew Clark commented: ‘a fascinating mix of heavy stylisation and strict realism, set off a magnetic field of attraction and repulsion between the main characters, and provided a powerful counterpoint to the welling emotions in the score’ (Clark, 1999). The trio of protagonists, Vivian Tierney (Katya), Alan Oke (Boris) and Gillian Knight (Kabanicha) matched the concentrated intensity of the production in their performances. The final production was a ‘fast, furious and fiercely dramatic’ Don Giovanni, conducted by Dominic Wheeler and directed by David McVicar with ‘a directness, a lack of fuzz to match what Wheeler is up to in the pit. Strong narrative thread — he tells you a story. You know who everyone is and why they do what they do’ […] ‘The costumes may be period, but the people wearing them are thoroughly modern’ (Milnes, 1999b). Critics had quibbles however: some complained that the necessary class hierarchies were not shown clearly enough: ‘But roguish characteristics dominate the character of Giovanni in this production — a shock when the peasants address him as “your lordship”’ (Milnes, 1999b). Others pointed out that the production took up the pending shift of the French Revolution and the mingling of classes in Finale 1 (‘Viva la liberta!’) as a pointer to mix up established relationships. In the finale, an angel clad in black leather descended a ladder that had been present throughout the evening to deliver the mortal blow to Don Giovanni (Tim Albery’s production in 1991 had also featured an angel in the finale). This made for allusions to Judgement Day. Garry Magee was applauded as an energetic and erotic Don Giovanni (‘a laddish hero with psychopathic tendencies’, Canning, 1999), with Jonathan Best (Leporello) scoring a particular success. Roderick Williams, an appealing Masetto, performed the title role in Opera North’s next production of Don Giovanni (see section 2004/ 2005). As a general response to the three productions, the company was given tribute for being stimulated by the restrictions and being in the midst of a ‘flush of creative energy’, fielding casts and production teams with a ‘home-grown feel’ (Clark, 1999). All three productions toured to Sadler’s Wells in October 1999. In conversation, both Mantle (2011) and Chibnall (2013) contributed a valid point about site-specificity, remarking that colleagues who had seen the shows in Leeds had a very different experience to those who saw them later on in the touring run. This is, of course, true for all touring productions — they are designed to fit into all the venues technically, but each theatre has its individual acoustics, specific audiences and other characteristics that influence the way in which productions communicate with the auditorium. The season could be considered a success, as the concentration, energy and the quality of the performances seemed more important to audiences than lavish scenography.

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In the autumn, Opera North’s determination to be accepted onto the Arts Council’s Stabilisation process paid off. The company was seen as not in need of fundamental change and therefore able to be on the fast track route (Opera North Board Minutes, 17 September 1999). It was agreed to put together a three-year business plan to outline the company’s strategic route to financial recovery. The company broke the £1m mark for the first time in its history, with over £1m gross take at box office for the autumn season. The preferred option for future expansion (topic of the feasibility study (stage 1 — needs and options) was to have an Opera North centre as an extension to Leeds Grand Theatre — the complex becoming an ‘opera field studies centre’, with the renovated Assembly Room as the ‘lynchpin’ (Opera North Board Minutes, 30 September 1999). The uncertain Manchester situation was to be resolved from summer 2000: the newly built Lowry at Salford Quays, a major marker in an urban regeneration programme, would be Opera North’s new Manchester home from June 2000. 3500 audience names were transferred to its database, with some press coverage about the Lowry ‘poaching’ Opera North and the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s audiences from the Manchester city centre venues (Opera North Board Minutes, 3 December 1999). The winter season had a Shakespeare theme, with a new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed in partnership by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, and a revival of the successful Falstaff from 1997. The season was complemented by a series of events called Play ON, making a pun of Orsino’s opening quotation from Twelfth Night, ‘If music be the food of love, play on’ and Opera North’s abbreviation. It included a concert evening called Shakespeare on Broadway at Leeds City Varieties music hall. A revival of the 1996 Butterfly rounded off a busy season, where the widely acclaimed Julietta also toured to Prague. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was described as having an edge of danger and unpredictability by the critics, starting with the first famous glissando chords, ‘the intensity of the double bass sound made the auditorium vibrate ever so slightly’. Steven Sloane’s second production of the artistic year yielded ‘exceptional playing, even by the ENP’s standards’ (Milnes, 1999c). Normally a tale of interaction between the worlds of the humans (working and ruling classes) and the fairies of the forest, the Athenians in this production were confronted with a lively mixture of contemporary and prehistoric animals — Milnes described Tytania and Oberon as ‘two handsome beasts of prey in bodystockings’ (Milnes, 1999c), Tytania with a lion-like headdress and a reptilian bodysuit, Oberon with a Unicorn on his head, both sporting stegosaurus tails. Some critics did not find enough of the forest in the production’s design: ‘No one is asking for a return to imitation oak trees, but it does look as if contemporary designers have a real problem when it comes to representing the natural world on stage’ (Arblaster, 1999c).

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Others thought Christian Fenouillat’s stage design, strikingly lit by Christophe Forey, was in homage to Peter Brook’s iconic production of Shakespeare’s comedy for the RSC in 1970. Well sung and highly physical performances, particularly by Claron McFadden (Tytania), Christopher Josey (Oberon) and Jonathan Best (Bottom), rounded off the intriguing production. When Opera North was 21, if somebody had written an article in Opera, looking at all the things we’d done — you really couldn’t find a more interesting repertoire, a bit of everything, really everything. I think it’s almost exemplary in that way. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

There is a photo to commemorate the 21 years company anniversary and the gala concert on 16 April 2000. The company’s four music directors sit crossed-legged and smiling on the ground in front of rows of singers, all 25 of them with strong company associations, many of them referred to Opera North as the home company or the mother ship. Among them were Josephine Barstow, John Tomlinson, Andrew Shore, Clive Bayley, Alice Coote, Janis Kelly, Robert Hayward and Sally Burgess. The concert had been put together by a voting public and consisted of extracts from 19 operas. The choice of music reflected not only Opera North’s broad repertoire but also the important contribution to the company’s success made by the ENP and the Chorus of Opera North (CD booklet ‘21 Years On’, 1999). Like the 10-year anniversary gala, the evening was introduced by a witty speech by Lord Harewood. Reminiscing about the orchestra’s first-ever rehearsal on 16 October 1978 in Leeds City Varieties, where the first piece was the overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted by David Lloyd-Jones, Harewood announced that the 21st Anniversary Gala would start in the same way, and he thus hoped that 21 years of rehearsal had now ended. Donations by the Friends of Opera North and other sponsors raised a proud sum for the company. The spring brought revivals of La Gioconda and Orpheus in the Underworld, as well as a new production of Radamisto (Handel). The annual press conference, looking back on autumn and winter 1999 and announcing the 2000/2001 season of work, brought the good news of box office figures consistent at around 80% and a rise of 10% of the company Arts Council grant, thanks to the Stabilisation award. After the Leeds run, Opera North took its season to The Lowry for the first time in June 2000. John Byrne reviewed all three productions in Manchester, calling Orpheus ‘a triumph’ in a revival that seemed to have improved on its already successful first two outings. The new production of Radamisto, Opera North’s second Handel opera, was described as an ideal feast of arias to showcase the new venue. David Walker in the title role and Alice Coote as Zenobia rose impressively to the excessive demands of the opera (Byrne, 2000). The musical performance had some leaning towards period style under the leadership of Harry Bicket and this provided tension with the production’s style — welcome for some, unbearable for others, as some of the negative reviews prove with considerable strength of feeling. Outpourings such as Martin Dreyer’s (2000, p. 971) were something that was by now expected in reaction to Tim Hopkins’s work and presumably

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taken on the chin by those who wanted to keep discussions lively in the intervals and continue to support efforts at deconstruction. Anthony Arblaster called Hopkins’s and designer Charles Edward’s style ‘expressionist acting and gestures’, inspired by the German revival of Handel productions in the 1920s and 1930s at the Göttingen Handel Festival in Germany (Arblaster, 2000). It proved a functional way of communicating a dramaturgically problematic and sometimes repetitive plot full of fairly static arias and ensembles, only turned around in the last few minutes of the opera. During the summer of 2000, Opera North premiered another rarity, Robert Schumann’s only opera: Genoveva, at the Edinburgh International Festival. It was a co-production with Prague Opera and La Fenice, Venice, who were keen to co-operate, partly due to the reputation of director David Pountney of giving seldom performed works a new lease of life. Due to changes in artistic leadership, La Fenice was later unable to commit to the production, which meant a loss of already factored-in revenue for Opera North. Pountney had also provided the English translation and worked with imaginative set designs by Ralph Koltai. ‘Less than a masterpiece, but more than a museum piece’ (Kimberley, 2000) was the verdict most critics seemed to settle on in response to Genoveva. A tangled tale of Germanic knights, wicked witches, revenge and innocent wives, with some leaning towards Chaucer’s patient Griselda, the plot was seen as a weakness of the work, while the music was given advocacy by Steven Sloane’s conducting — he ‘believes in the score; conducting with a combination of subtlety and vigour’ (Kimberley, 2000). There were strong performances from Patricia Schuman in the title role, as well as Christopher Purves and Paul Nilon as the male protagonists. The model of Genoveva is a good example to elaborate on what it means to co-produce work between opera companies. Ric Green explained what the shared and the individual elements to each participating company would normally be (Green, 2011). The physical elements of a production (set design, costumes, larger props), the resulting fees for the director and the designers, as well as the stage plans, drawings, lighting plots and instructions for stage management are shared. All these elements are transferred to each company scheduled to perform the work. Rights, royalties, fees and earnings, the provision of scores, as well as the technical equipment needed to operate the production are not shared. Smaller props, consumables, wigs, prosthetics, shoes and items that need to be hired are also the business of each company individually. There are different reasons as to why companies embark on co-productions or decide to borrow (i.e. not co-operate from the planning stages), but ‘buy’ the production once it has had a run at the originating company. The main advantage is that designs that would normally be beyond budget provision can be achieved — one company alone would not be able to afford the production costs easily. The three-way co-operation between Opera North, WNO and Scottish Opera on The Trojans is a good example, although

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there were also artistic reasons for embarking on the joint product — all three companies bought into the production team’s concept. The suitability of the repertoire for each company and the compatibility of their theatre sizes, as well as artistic compatibility, the reputation of a director and his team are generally very important points of consideration. The arrangement in the case of Genoveva was that Prague constructed the set and Leeds provided the costumes. As often (‘wherever possible’ as Green put it), Opera North took the artistic lead over the production and provided overall production management and set/costume supervision during the making process. The company then opened Genoveva in Edinburgh and transferred it to its autumn Leeds season and tour. Opera North’s costs were therefore £110,000, Prague contributing £40,000 as well as the sets — the latter covered most of the fees for the designs and the designers. After the Opera North run, Genoveva opened in Prague in March 2001 and in Venice in March 2002. Each company engaged David Pountney directly, as well as providing its own cast of performers, paying for its own transportation and insurance. The companies shared potential future rentals and the sales revenues. Ideally, co-productions happen to show lesser known repertoire and contain expenditure on productions which may have limited box office earnings. Opera North’s productions of Billy Budd, The Midsummer Marriage (both with Scottish Opera), Luisa Miller and Giovanna d’Arco (with the Royal Opera House), Pelléas and Mélisande (with Minnesota Opera), Julietta (with Opera Zuid), Genoveva (with Prague) fall into this category. There is a smaller number of more popular works in co-production: Don Pasquale and Falstaff (with Tel Aviv and ENO), The Barber of Seville (with Vancouver and WNO). The following productions are examples of ‘retrospective’ co-productions: King Priam (with ENO), The Bartered Bride (with Opéra du Rhin, Strasbourg) and Pelléas and Mélisande (ENO). The company was developing a Lottery bid for the capital project that would enhance and transform their working environment. If granted, Leeds Grand Theatre would close for around a year and open to the public at the end of 2004; the Opera North section (Assembly Room, rehearsal spaces etc) would be completed a year later. In June 2000, there had been a gift-aid donation from Leeds City Development company (£3.3m), for the acquisition of Premier House (freehold), which was then priced at £2.325m. This was to be the new administrative base of the Opera North centre. The Strategic Planning Group (headed by Ric Green, Technical and Operations Director), reported back to Board and Management Committee regularly with long-, medium-, short-term plans for all transformation activities.

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Initially, a site on Vicar Lane (now a hotel) had been considered, with an adjacent building for rehearsal rooms. There were Council concerns about these plans, which led to the opportunity passing. Premier House became available not long afterwards, for a reasonable price, but by the time Opera North had secured the financial assets to buy it, it had been sold. It would be a few years before another opportunity to purchase it arose, at the inflated price of £2m (Green, 2011). Opera North had a new department from 2000: Opera North Projects, led by Dominic Gray, originally Education Director (Projects and Education co-operate closely). Its remit was an ‘integrated development of the broad range of the company’s work, working with all departments, and with a particular responsibility for project work or specific activities which might fall beyond the “conventional” process, e.g. dramaturgically linked projects, one-off festivals, audience development, artistic development and training, education as an integral aspect of our work’. It was to concentrate on three basic tenets in relation to opera: ‘to develop the art form, to develop specific artists and musicians and to develop the audience’ (Opera North, Organisation and Staffing, Strategic Planning Group, 31 August 2000). The new department won a Lottery Grant (£22,500) for a project to complement L’Orfeo. The first year of the Millennium was a good climate in which to develop these additional activities: according to a Mori poll, 78% of those questioned believed the arts were valuable, 73% believed they should be publicly funded and 95% believed schoolchildren should have more experience of the arts. The Arts Council was asking the government for an extra £100m a year. Grants were increasing under Labour by £125m over three years.

2000/2001 German Romanticism provided a headline that motivated some of the planning for the 2000/2001 season, with Genoveva transferring to the repertory, a semi-staged Tristan und Isolde at Leeds Town Hall, the Projects contribution Forest Murmurs and a new production of Hansel and Gretel, designed to tour smaller spaces and to reach young audiences within Opera North’s catchment area. The autumn season combined the melodrama of Genoveva with more light-footed fare: revivals of Figaro (now in its fourth incarnation of Caroline Gawn’s 1992 reworking of Peter Gill’s 1989 production — she had reworked her own production in 1996, too) and La rondine. The light, Italianate theme continued with a new production of The Elixir of Love, directed by Daniel Slater. It seemed to have a pleasing lightness of touch, credited to David Parry, who made complexity seem effortless in the pit, and to the production team around director Daniel Slater. The production was set in the 1950s in ‘Hotel

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Adina’ on the island of Capri, with Belcore and his soldiers as naval officers. Paul Nilon won praise as Nemorino and a review captures the tragi-comedy inherent to the role: He [Paul Nilon] is on absolutely top form singing the tender lines of the lovesick idiot, and has the most magical variety of bodily gestures; at his most lugubrious he can make his face look like a carved pumpkin, and then he can suddenly light up the entire stage. This is a classic, unforgettable performance. (Fallow, 2001)

Mary Hegarty (Adina) partnered him in a sparkling performance. At the September Board meeting, it was acknowledged positively that Leeds City Council had come in strongly behind Opera North’s capital bid — this had consolidated the Arts Council position towards the Stabilisation process. It was to progress in several stages, the first mitigating the accumulated debt, the second a long overdue IT overhaul for the company, the third providing financial support for developing earned income. There had been a meeting to present the previous year’s Feasibility Study to the Arts Council in London at the end of June 2000 and a plan was to be submitted in December (Opera North Board Minutes, 8 September 2000). In the winter season 2001, Tristan und Isolde was performed at Leeds Town Hall, which was built in the same year as Wagner finished the score of the opera, 1858. There was also a performance at each of Opera North’s regular touring venues. Steven Sloane conducted and elicited a ‘finely etched performance from the orchestra (behind a black gauze and frequently lit as part of the action) and singers’. Keith Warner had directed a production deemed ‘intelligent and full of rewarding detail’ and it was Susan Bullock’s first Isolde, praised for showing the many facets of her character and for her beauty and security of tone: ‘there is nothing her voice cannot master’ (Maddocks, 2001a). The production was a collaboration with Bochum (Steven Sloane was Music Director of the Bochumer Symphoniker, a position he holds to this day). The success of Tristan made it look hopeful that audiences would continue to support the company throughout the pending closure of Leeds Grand Theatre. On 31 January 2000, Opera North took possession of Premier House, its first owned asset, appearing as a freehold property on the balance sheet. It was still partly occupied by sitting tenants, but the company would take over the whole building in due course. Meanwhile, there were notions from the Arts Council that debt mitigation would be addressed through the Stabilisation process, but not through the company’s core funding. It was acknowledged that the support from the City of Leeds was one of the highest made by a local authority to an arts organisation in the United Kingdom and that it was to

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the City’s and the company’s credit that this level was maintained at a time when local authority funding was coming under increasing pressure and, for other opera companies, had been falling or non-existent (Opera North Board Minutes, 1 December 2000). The Forest Murmurs, subtitled ‘an adventure in the German Romantic imagination’ was facilitated by Opera North Projects and performed in the Grand Theatre. It was a collaboration between director Tim Hopkins (who was also responsible for the scenic and the video design), costume designer Stephen Rodwell, dramaturg Meredith Oakes and conductor Steven Sloane. Alluding to the forest as the dominant space of Romanticism, for example in Wagner’s ‘Waldweben’ (the forest murmurs in Siegfried), the project was an experiment in the remediation of opera, ‘an exploration of the sound world, visuality and conceptual journey of work by Beethoven, Berg, Schumann, Schubert, Wagner, Mahler and Marschner, with texts by Tieck, Schlegel and Hegel’ (as described by Hopkins in the Opera North programme). The Forest Murmurs proved to not be ideal as a main house programming choice, as commercial pressures form an uneasy allegiance with experimental work. Looking to the future, the project would have been a good match for the Howard Assembly Room. In a letter from the Arts Council (30 March), Opera North was offered a Stabilisation award of £2.563m, less than sought, but it enabled the company to mitigate its deficit, implement an IT strategy, invest in small-scale touring, invest in fundraising, support marketing and audience development and to provide some staff training. The winter season, although an artistic success, had fallen slightly short of target, with 61% of capacity (against a budget of 64%). In a Board discussion, programming strategies were considered — could Leeds, the venue with the most wide-ranging audience tastes, be programmed with greater diversity and with more thematically linked work? Generally, longer runs of popular operas were being considered, as well as a more selective choice with regard to touring venues. Concert performances, smaller scale productions, and Opera North Projects performances (or sharing of work in progress) could complement the main house, as seen with the Romanticism-theme of the current season (Opera North Board Minutes, 9 February 2001). In spring 2001, two key positions were filled: Ruth Mason was appointed Director of Development and Dougie Scarfe took up a post as Concerts Manager and Executive Assistant to Richard Mantle. He had previously been a horn player in the ENP, but an accident had halted his career. The Duke of York concluded his patronage (the Duchess and Duke had divorced in 1996). Opera Europa, a professional association for all European opera companies, was founded. Nicholas Payne was appointed

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director and Richard Mantle was made a member of the board. The timetable for the Transformation Project was moved backwards — alterations to Premier House, the rehearsal block and the getin bridge, connecting Leeds Grand Theatre and the rehearsal block, were to take place in 2003, the refurbishment of the Assembly Room in 2004 and the work on the Grand Theatre in 2004 (Opera North Board Minutes, 6 April 2001). There were differing opinions about the scale and cost of the work from Opera North and the board of the Grand Theatre (Councillor Bernard Atha regularly reported, as an attempt to have Richard Mantle on the Grand’s Board had not been successful). Leeds City Council had given the Assembly Room space as well as adding funds for the purchase of Premier House, and there was some reluctance to dedicate any more funds in addition. What seemed essential to Opera North was not necessarily a high priority for the Grand Theatre. Mantle and Green argued that if the cost were brought down to around £15m, as suggested, the project would not deliver the value envisaged — a balanced improvement for audiences, artists and other Opera North staff. The two organisations eventually reached a compromise, which meant a reduction of the scope originally envisaged — the project was planned on a scale of around £80m, and would have included the transformation of the area surrounding the Grand Theatre, as well as improvements to the Grand Theatre (backstage and front of house), the refurbishment of the Assembly Room and the expansion to Premier House (rehearsal spaces). The compromise reached meant that certain plans had to be put on hold (e.g. a third rehearsal room, improvements to the dressing rooms, rewiring of the Grand Theatre) and a project cost of £26m (later changed to £31m), delivering about half of the original, approved scheme (Opera North Board Minutes, 8 June 2001). The Arts Council contributed £16.5m. With Paradise Moscow (Cheryomushki), the company combined a rediscovery of a musical theatre piece with an audience hit. Shostakovich’s energetic operetta about unfair housing distribution in Moscow combines mild satire with exhilarating ensemble numbers and dance routines. It was written by Shostakovich in 1957–1958 and only had its premiere by Pimlico Opera in 1994, translated by David Pountney, who also directed the Opera North production, re-orchestrated by Shostakovich scholar Gerard McBurney. The casting combined opera singers (light on their feet — audience favourites such as Richard Angas and Richard Suart) with music theatre stars (Janie Dee as Lidochka and Loren Geeting as Boris), not to forget the versatile Opera North Chorus. Janie Dee in particular enchanted critics and audiences, whose other favourites included the dream ballet sequence, involving a pas de trois for Marx, Lenin and Stalin and the chorus dressed in grass suits and flower pot hats, with witty and elegant choreography by Craig Revel Horwood. Steven Sloane and James Holmes contributed dynamic musical leadership, and the production was invited to Sadler’s Wells.

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Illustration 25.

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2000/2001 — Paradise Moscow (Cheryomushki). Ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

2001/2002 A season where the two London companies were managing to open 17 new productions between them, whereas WNO and Opera North, who serve the rest of England and Wales are managing two and three respectively. Talk about metropolitan bias! Money, as ever, is the sticking point. (Arblaster, 2001)

This was not an easy year for the company. The constraints of the Stabilisation process were felt acutely and had a significant impact on programming, reminding some of the problems 10 years earlier. There was, however, a strong centrepiece to the

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Opera North autumn season, Janáček’s late opera The Cunning Little Vixen, a tale about the cycles of life in a forest. Adapted by Janáček himself from a popular newspaper comic strip, the tale maps the affinities of animals to humans and charts the life of a Vixen, who is held in captivity, ekes out her living in the forest and eventually settles down with the right fox. She is shot at the end, just as her cubs start taking over the forest, renewing the cycle of life. For this production, director Annabel Arden and Janis Kelly (in the title role) renewed their creative partnership, so successful in La traviata a few years earlier. The designs and movement direction (Richard Hudson and Monika Pagneux) added sharp and witty detail to the detailed and clear direction with which Arden was tributed. The score is ‘a buzzing polyphony of constantly altering ideas’ (Driver, 2001) and ‘Steven Sloane, conducting, coaxed lavish, sensuous playing from the orchestra of Opera North, sometimes eclipsing the singers in the process’ (Maddocks, 2001b). One of the marketing slogans for the production was ‘An inviting introduction to opera’ in a season programmed with accessibility in mind. Vixen opened three days after 9/11 and almost no tickets were sold during the week that followed, the box office only slowly recovering in the aftermath of the terrorist event. This shortfall in the autumn season significantly increased the season’s projected deficit (Opera North Board Minutes, 7 December 2001). Phyllida Lloyd’s production of La Bohème was revived by Daniel Slater and performed during the Christmas season. It was also adapted to be broadcast onto two big screens on Briggate (the main shopping area on Leeds city centre) during the busy Christmas shopping period on 20 December. The cost was underwritten by the Friends of Opera North and the live screening was free. The Cunning Little Vixen and a revival of the enduringly popular Gloriana were invited to Barcelona (14–23 November 2001), the first productions from abroad to perform in the theatre, restored after a fire. Baritone and audience favourite Keith Latham, last seen at Opera North as Giorgio Germont in La traviata, had died the day before his 47th birthday in January 2001. The company hosted a memorial concert for him in October. The season celebrated two composers’ anniversaries: The Voice of Verdi concentrated on the political dimension of the composer, a supporter of the ‘risorgimento’ and the unified Italy. Sally Burgess gave a warmly received Richard Rodgers recital, Something Wonderful. Opera North Projects also programmed a season that combined opera with dance, film, visual art and a range of concerts, titled ‘Amaze Me!’, based on the challenge ‘Etonne moi!’ from Diaghilev to Stravinsky (Leeks, 2003, p. 108). The English Northern Philharmonia had been renamed ‘Orchestra of Opera North’ with effect from 2002. Opinions within the company are still split about the validity of the arguments behind the change — earlier suggestions had included ‘Opera

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North Symphony Orchestra’ to reflect both operatic and concert activities. David Lloyd-Jones, who always maintained the orchestra should have its own identity and name, was disappointed. It was fine, but I am so sad that they changed the name, because they were very young and over-sensitive in the orchestra, and even ten years later, after I left, they used to get fed up being called the English Northern Sinfonia and not Philharmonia. And I used to say to them ‘I know it’s very annoying — the London Philharmonic Orchestra is forever being called the London Sinfonic Orchestra (or something like that) … There’s only one decent name and that is the Hallé Orchestra — every other orchestra is confused the whole time — you’ve just got to take it on the chin, get used to it’. (Lloyd-Jones, 2010)

Opera North now occupied two floors in Premier House and a full move would take place after sitting tenants’ contracts on the property ran out. In a private meeting of Board members, initially a one year extension was recommended for Steven Sloane’s contract. Members praised his high standards, but thought him to be better suited to just working with an orchestra, where the standards of his work were truly admirable, rather than with the administrative complexities of a company. His other commitments in Bochum and Carnegie Hall took up quite a lot of his time (and there was a high expectation of time spent at Opera North associated with the post). The conclusion was reached that there was to be no extension to Sloane’s contract (Opera North Board Minutes, 26 September 2002). The winter season and tour concluded with a new production of Albert Herring by Phyllida Lloyd. Contemporary in setting and economical in design, it incorporated and even involved the orchestra on stage. Phyllida Lloyd’s new Opera North production, updated and racy, triumphantly banishes all sense of church-hall claustrophobia while keeping the Englishness intact. Jokes are smart, the pace swift. […] Having bid farewell to Gloriana, Opera North has a new Britten hit on its hands. (Maddocks, 2002)

Meanwhile, the Board concerned itself with the ‘economics of an uneconomical art form’ (Russell Willis Taylor, President of National Arts Stabilisation, former Executive Director, ENO). Opera North found its funding to be more secure than previously, but was still short of money to perform things they wanted to perform. The Stabilisation process had largely wiped out accumulated deficit and was predicated on maintaining current performing and touring patterns, relying on incremental increase in fundraising and giving. However, more and varied productions increased Opera North’s ability to fundraise and there was the danger of existing on too little repertoire with too many performances of individual operas. Ideally, the company wanted to restore the pattern of nine productions per artistic year, increasing the number of new productions, with a secure financial

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base for 12 touring weeks and more small-scale work to attract diverse audiences. Opera North had always been at its strongest when stretched — a blend between large scale and chamber repertoire was needed, as well as ground-breaking work for artistic integrity and distinctiveness. Planning ahead was problematic because of the relatively short notice of the Arts Council budgets, so key artists would often have been contracted elsewhere by the time the company was in a position to make firm commitments. The Board had a fundamental look at how to plan work in the future: the unsatisfactory choices were cutting back on touring or cutting back further on repertoire — and it had become clear that more economical or experimental solutions were not always popular with the public. A significant increase of Opera North’s Arts Council grant was, however, unlikely. The company had few assets or contingencies, and so there was minimal opportunity to manage risk without undermining artistic value and output (Opera North Board Minutes, 8 February 2002). The Council (without being able to change the situation) agreed that the company had not been truly stabilised, as core funding has not increased and it was already running on minimum staff and budget in all areas — it had no further ‘fat’ to trim. In April 2002, the Arts Council and the 10 RABs were joined into a single organisation. Now known as the Arts Council England (ACE hereafter), it was granted a supplementary charter in May 2002, outlining the composition of regional councils with the aim to decentralise funding and grant the regions more control over their arts provisions.17 Discussions continued about Steven Sloane’s successor, including a possible ‘interregnum’ period, as had taken place between Paul Daniel’s and Steven Sloane’s directorships. The new Music Director would have to have worked with the Orchestra of Opera North before being appointed and David Greed, the leader, was to be included in the committee for appointing him or her (Opera North Board Minutes, 12 April 2002). Nicholas Payne resigned from his post at the ENO in July. There seemed to be fundamental differences with the Chairman of the Board, Martin Smith, about the function of state subsidy and the economic model the company worked from. Payne stood down from his role on 12 July 2002, but continued to act as a consultant. In the next five years the two London opera houses were to adopt a new model whereby the executive was led by a business manager and an accountant, with the artistic director answerable to them. By dispensing with the old style, experienced, highly knowledgeable producer,

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Arts Council England, Annual Review 2002: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/past_annual_reviews/2002_annualreview.pdf

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the balance of authority between the board and executive at ENO was altered and the balance between artistic leadership and financial control was to be weighted in favour of the latter. The ‘old mode’ directors — Tucker, Arlen, Harewood and Jonas — had relentlessly pursued artistic excellence, with cost a secondary consideration […] (Gilbert, 2009, pp. 533–534)

There were protests in letters to newspapers and to the ACE by high-profile artists, asking for a review of the decision to oust Payne. Developments at the ENO, who gave more performances than any other company in the United Kingdom, continued to be watched with concern by everyone in UK opera. Sean Doran was appointed as Payne’s successor.

Illustration 26.

2001/2002 — L’enfant et les sortilèges. Claire Wild (The Child). Ensemble. Photo: Bill Cooper.

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An intriguing programming combination, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and Stravinsky’s Petrushka created surreal microcosms on stage in the summer of 2002. Ravel’s opera, adapted from a story by Collette, was directed by Nigel Lowery. Petrushka was choreographed by Amir Hosseinpour with a cast of seven dancers. Oedipus Rex (directed and designed by Charles Edwards, conducted by Steven Sloane) was performed in Leeds Town Hall, which had been transformed for the ‘Amaze Me!’ weekend to evoke Paris between the two World Wars. Martin Dreyer (2002, p. 978) deemed the weekend of events (three short operas, a Town Hall taken over by Parisian nightlife and music, Satie and Milhaud, films and art) a very stimulating experience. For the new production of the two one-act operas, he gave the company ‘two Michelin stars’, but lamented the restrictions Opera North was having to manage. How can we be imaginative for a third of the outlay? For such is the penny-pinching being visited upon us by accountants spurred on by a government that regards opera as ‘elitist’. Of course it is. So is the England football team. And how. Their combined tax assessments could underwrite several opera companies. Can’t the arts be allowed flagship activity too? […] The company has successfully paraded its creativity. Let it return to full-length opera. The soup was fine. Now let’s have some steak. (Martin Dreyer, 2002, p. 978)

The season ended with a revival of Sweeney Todd. There were too many performances in Leeds, which meant it did not perform as well as expected at the box office, but it was very successful in a run at Sadler’s Wells.

2002/2003 A life without culture is life without hope of redemption. Everybody needs to be taken out of themselves, to forget themselves for a while; to have their imaginations stimulated, their withers wrung, their ears ravished and their hearts lifted. Opera does all that; and this company does it very well and for not very much money. Anyway, how could a Yorkshire-based opera company NOT be special? (Bonner, 2002)

The year had a more robust feel in comparison to that of the previous one: there were five new productions in total, two of them co-productions: Der Rosenkavalier with Scottish Opera and Idomeneo with the Dutch Rejisopera. The spring season was concerned with quests and journeys, featuring a new Magic Flute and concert/semi-staged productions of The Damnation of Faust and Troilus and Cressida to mark Berlioz and Walton anniversaries. New productions of Tosca and The Magic Flute strengthened the core repertoire, while high-quality productions Jenůfa, Julietta and The Secret Marriage were revived. Opera North also performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse for the first time: Transfigured Night combined the piece by Schönberg (with an

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accompanying film by Pippa Nissen) with cabaret songs of the period. Film responses to classical repertoire were a theme of the season, with a Winterreise film by artist Mariele Neudecker accompanying a live recital of Schubert’s song cycle. Thanks to a donation by the Whittaker charitable trust, many foreign language productions now had surtitles. Opera North first trialled them with Tosca, where some performances were titled and others were not, and the opinion of the audience was sought on several occasions on their advantages and drawbacks. Illustration 27.

2002/2003 — Tosca. Susannah Glanville (Tosca). Ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

The autumn season had a 1900 theme — all operas were written within a few years of each other. Christopher Alden made his company debut with a new production of Tosca, conducted by Steven Sloane (autumn) and Richard Farnes (spring) and provided material for discussion, his interpretation inspiring and infuriating even within the same review: […] Opera North’s new production is something else — brilliant, original, enthralling, dangerous and downright perverse. After Act 1, I thought it was the best performance of the piece I had ever seen; by the end of Act 3, I was infuriated at its eccentricities. (Christiansen, 2002)

Audiences and critics responded to the relentless energy of the single-set staging (the sacristy of San Andrea della Valle) and the ‘white hot’ performances (Nina Pavlovski, Rafael Rojas and Robert McFarland in the three main parts). Alden set his Tosca

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in the near future (Rodney Milnes called it ‘a Tosca for tomorrow’), the space plastered with ‘Forza Italia’ posters, indicating the takeover of society by a neo-fascist group. The production constituted ‘a real musico-dramatic thriller’ (Allison, 2002a), putting Opera North ‘at the cutting edge of European production style’ (Milnes, 2002, p. 1383). Anthony Holden mused why these radical rethinks of repertoire centrepieces often happened in ‘the provinces’ where he deemed audiences ‘supposedly more conservative, preferring their warhorses not to frighten the children’. He suspected budgetary restraints were the reason for the single set approach used for Tosca, but proceeded to comment lucidly on the unity of time and space Alden had created, thus somewhat contradicting his own hypothesis (Holden, 2002). Der Rosenkavalier, in a production first seen at Scottish Opera in 2000 in David McVicar’s production, opened successfully, with new costumes made at Opera North. It inspired rapturous responses for its ‘Viennese’ finesse of the orchestra, led by Diefried Bernet: ‘Like McVicar, Bernet never forgets Strauss labelled his work “A Comedy for Music”: at no point does he wallow, and even the meltingly beautiful final scene has delicacy’ (Allison, 2002b) and the trio of female protagonists (of which one is a trouser role who disguises herself as a maid). Deanne Meek (Octavian, her British debut), Janis Kelly (Marschallin) and Marie Arnet (Sophie) were applauded for their musicianship as well as their fine-tuned performances in a production that held a functional balance between comedy, romance and social commentary. It had been sung in German with surtitles at Scottish Opera; not everyone was sure about Opera North presenting it in English in a translation deemed to be slightly out of date. But it came across as fresh and original: ‘Even though it is not a new production, it felt like one’ (Allison, 2002b). A strong revival of Jenůfa, also with an inspiring trio of female protagonists (Giselle Allen as Jenůfa, Jospehine Barstow as Kostelnička and Pauline Tinsley as Grandmother Burya) presented the company on top form, as ever meticulous about musical preparation and rehearsal conditions. Unusually, there was an opportunity for audiences to enjoy this trio of productions after the autumn tour, when they returned to Leeds Grand Theatre for two more weeks. Subscriptions in Leeds had gone up by a promising 36%. However, the company was generally under pressure from venues about the repertoire they toured (the Board of the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, asking the company not to bring ‘difficult’ works). The Opera North touring venues were as challenged financially as the company and wanted box office security, which well-known repertoire could bring. The Board was planning ahead for the Transformation Project, which was now to include a long-overdue refurbishment of Leeds Grand Theatre auditorium, the raising of the fly tower, the renovation of the Assembly Room and the adjacent hall and the building of ‘in house’ rehearsal spaces at the back of Premier House, now fully occupied by Opera North. With the support of the ACE

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and Leeds City Council, the company would still need to raise several million pounds in donations (Opera North Board Minutes, 6 December 2002). A concert performance of Walton’s Troilus and Cressida (one in Leeds Town Hall, one in The Lowry as part of the Walton centenary celebrations) in November 2002 made some critics bemoan the fact a revival of Opera North’s 1995 production had not been possible, while others rejoiced in the high musical quality achieved: Susannah Glanville (Cressida), Thomas Randle (Troilus) and Nigel Robson (Pandarus) headed a strong cast with excellent leadership from conductor Martyn Brabbins. In January, it was announced that Opera North had received a £715,000 top-up grant from the ACE. While the core grant remained a problem (Mantle was hoping the top-up money could be integrated into the core grant), there was a sense of optimism around the additional award and the second phase of the joint bid with Leeds Grand Theatre and Leeds City Council for the Transformation Project. Sheffield, Hull and Norwich were to be re-incorporated into the touring schedule, although they would not receive Opera North productions with the same regularity as Salford, Nottingham and Newcastle (Fawkes, 2003). In London, ENO had recently been saved from going into receivership by a one-off grant from the ACE, but in order to make savings, redundancies were being made and the chorus was to be cut to 40 full time members. Scottish Opera remained under severe threat after cuts by the Scottish Arts Council, which put the company’s full-time operation in doubt. Opera North’s winter season opened with a revival of Jonathan Miller’s 1993 production of The Secret Marriage, reworked by Mark Tinkler and applauded with the conclusion ‘Frivolity with a heart is alive and well and available to all in Leeds’ (Thicknesse, 2003a). The new production of Idomeneo, co-produced with the Netherlands Touring Opera (Reijsoper), was directed by Tim Albery, designed by Hildegard Bechtler and conducted by David Parry, whose English translation was also used, shortening the opera to just three hours: Conductor David Parry cuts to the bones of the score, razing any sentimentality or ponderousness from what is a vicious conflict between personal desire and patriotic sacrifice. In Tim Albery’s cool, clear, timeless staging, the characters speak plainly; their gestures at once looking back to the baroque and to a less structured, more naturalistic mode of expression. (Picard, 2003a)

Tim Albery had been responsible for nearly all of Opera North’s Mozart productions over the last decade, often also involving the tenor Paul Nilon, here singing the title role. Albery had chosen to set Idomeneo in a geographically unspecified post-war, clinical environment. His production was noted for its narrative clarity, although some critics thought it was not always aided

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by the costumes — they did not allow distinctions between classes and this was an opera about kingship — ‘classical Crete becomes a bleak contemporary maritime community’ (Canning, 2003). The sea monster, Poseidon’s revenge, was replaced by an unspecified plague. Despite its ‘poor theatre’ aesthetic, the fluidity of Albery’s direction of soloists and chorus led Hugh Canning to the conclusion that, although a ‘connoisseur’s choice, played and staged like this, it comes vividly to life, reaching out to grip theatre as well as opera audiences’ (Canning, 2003). Opera North achieved strong box office returns for the Winter 2002/2003 season and managed to balance the books further by sharing two of their new productions. Meanwhile, Richard Farnes had been approached for the post of Music Director. His track record with the company, his excellent rapport with the orchestra, his willingness to commit the majority of his time to Opera North meant that he emerged as the ideal candidate and agreed to take up post from autumn 2004 (Opera North Board Minutes, 14 February 2003). The new Magic Flute was the centrepiece of the spring season and was a big success with audiences in its first production and several revivals. Tim Supple, a director with a theatre background, described his production as traditional in presentation, though in modern dress. He already had an established partnership with the poet Carol Ann Duffy (including the successful Grimm Tales for the Young Vic company in 1993), who was commissioned with a new translation, presented in folklore-ish rhyming couplets. ‘As with all of Supple and Duffy’s best work, simplicity is a disguise for deep sophistication’ (Hickling, 2003). Supple confronted the issue around archaic racism towards the character of Monostatos by casting all associated with the power of light, Sarastro’s fellowship, with black singers. This prompted Anna Picard (2003b) to ask whether one could really ‘apply an upfront take on race relations to a work written when people visited Bedlam for entertainment?’ A custody battle for Pamina between her mother, The Queen of the Night, and Sarastro, is introduced at the beginning of the opera — this idea had quite a mixed response. Supple, who had been involved in the casting process and had selected young, energetic singers, also put Papageno (Matthew Sharp) centre stage — many thought the production had ‘bags of charm and an eye for the family market’ or ‘less-is-more-enchantment’ (Thicknesse, 2003b). The show boasted ‘magically simple designs by Jean Kalman. Curtains of rope and steel wire descend dramatically from the flies, and creepily subtle lighting paints exquisite visual effects’ (Christiansen, 2003a). But I’m getting rather used to enjoying myself in Leeds. Any shortcomings in Opera North’s performances — usually due to the relative youth of their casts — are offset by excellent ensemble work, committed playing, and stylishly economical designs. (Picard, 2003b)

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La Damnation de Faust, Berlioz’s dramatic legend, was programmed to honour his centenary. It had long been a feature in Opera North’s planning documents — a co-production with Stuttgart Opera in Germany did not come to fruition in the mid-1990s. A concert hall staging, albeit with dramatic action, was something compatible with the way its composer had conceived it, first subtitling it as an ‘opéra de concert’ and ‘You could be forgiven for thinking that the best response to a semiopera is a semi-staging’ (Allison, 2003). Martin Dreyer was not convinced by the semi-staging, partly because he thought the projections onto a gauze distracting, partly because he did not like its sense of hybridity: ‘The nettle has to be fully grasped, costumes donned, and roles properly learned and acted out. Otherwise, leave us to our own imagination with a straight-up concert performance’ (Dreyer, 2003, p. 863). In an analysis of income and expenditure between 1999 and 2003, the Board looked back at the previous years. There had been no significant rise in the company’s core grant, but a series of one-off Stabilisation awards to mitigate debt. The season in the autumn of 2000 had been the most successful of that four-year period. Salaries amounted to about 40% of the company’s total running costs. In April 1999, a pension scheme for permanent administrative and technical staff had been introduced at last (the one for the chorus and the orchestra were already in existence). Opera North’s 25th season lay ahead. After the financial Stabilisation, its artistic profile was now allowed to stabilise again. The ACE’s conditions and the business plan Opera North had agreed to adhere to had resulted in some slim seasons, but the company was now turning towards new adventures and ways of engaging and delighting audiences.

2003/2004 Opera North celebrated its 25th anniversary year with the announcement of a new Music Director and a wildly original programming choice of eight short operas in its spring season. Firstly, the autumn season, subtitled ‘Women on the Edge’, brought a revival of audience favourite La traviata (Janis Kelly alternating with Anne-Sophie Duprels in the title role), a new Manon and a new Rusalka. The latter was directed by Olivia Fuchs in her Opera North debut and was appreciated as an intelligent and visually arresting production and sung in Rodney Blumer’s English translation originally commissioned for ENO. The forest of Act 1 was a permanently frozen landscape, the water sprite (a touching performance from Richard Angas) sitting high above a hole in the ice on a swing. The frigid world of the court showed each of the characters trapped

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by ice cubes in turn, man handing on unfeeling cruelty to woman. The transitions between the wood and the court scenes (design: Nikki Turner) were startlingly transformed by the colouring of Bruno Poet’s lighting plot. The production’s central performance by Giselle Allen ‘wrings our hearts as surely each of her fiendishly challenging arias rings with effortless beauty’ (Holden, 2003). Manon concluded the season. Composer Massenet had fallen out of favour with the ‘discerning’ operatic public during the early and mid-20th century, dismissed for his ability to please by Debussy and others (some Illustration 28. 2003/2004 — Rusalka. Giselle Allen (Rusalka), Richard Angas (Water Sprite). critics claim that his erotically evocative Photo: Alastair Muir. music and sources such as Thaïs were rather libertarian choices for high minded opera audiences). Works such as Werther and Cendrillon made a steady comeback from the 1980s onwards and Manon is now the most popular of Massenet’s operas in the European repertoire. Daniel Slater’s Opera North production, designed by Francis O’Connor, staged the autobiographical notions of the source where author Abbé Prévost turned out to be the aged Chevalier des Grieux, Manon’s lover. Slater believed that the score and the plot could not be separated from their 18th century context and that it was crucial to show ‘the pre-Revolutionary atmosphere of superficial glamour and underlying sleaze’ (quoted in Hickling, 2003). In a striking final sequence, Manon, dying in a New Orleans desert, was surrounded by the by-products of her short and turbulent life, while Des Grieux returned to his desk and transformed the scene into the opera’s story. Malin Byström was able to convey the heroine’s youthfulness, as well as her precociousness and occasional cruelty ‘in a rich, high-flying voice’, while Julian Gavin contributed an intense acting singer’s performance as Des

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Grieux and William Dazeley as Manon’s brother Lescaut was applauded for stylish singing and diction. Grant Llewellyn’s conducting framed an evening of ‘classy, erotic and at times deeply moving piece of music theatre’ (Ashley, 2003). In a lecture to the Royal Philharmonic Society (October 2003), Graham Vick asserted that the future of opera depended on it embracing the whole of contemporary society. ‘And that means being a part of it and being prepared to change as rapidly and radically as society itself’ (quoted in Holden, 2003). Journalist Anthony Holden, examining Vick’s points, concluded that opera audiences were younger and more diverse than ever after mingling with ‘the high index of young people — teenagers and twenty-somethings — coming out of Opera North’s La traviata with shining eyes and excited chatter. Some were still dabbing away tears […]’ The announcement of Richard Farnes’s appointment came on 15 November 2003 (the actual date of Opera North’s inaugural performance 25 years earlier) and was received with unanimous enthusiasm. The company had supported Farnes’s studies at the National Opera Studio, he had then assisted Paul Daniel on Gloriana, first conducting the production when it visited Barcelona in 2001 and building up a diverse repertoire with the company over the following years. It was the right time to take up post, and the excellent working relationship between Farnes, the orchestra and the rest of the company has become one of the lynchpins of Opera North. Farnes asserted that Opera North had always been welcoming and inclusive and it was this ethos, as well as its innovative and professional attitude, that attracted him. In an interview with the Yorkshire Post, he recalled a journey to Leeds to audition as rehearsal pianist. It cost a fortune to come from London by train, and having been given a 10-minute audition and then told to go away and gain more experience, I was left counting the cost per minute. It has turned out to be the most sensible expenditure I ever incurred. (Farnes, 2003)

The company celebrated its 25-year anniversary the following day, on 16 November, with a concert titled Music of the Gods at Leeds Grand Theatre. Singers Iréne Theorin, Stuart Skelton and Mats Almgren performed extracts from Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and Act 1 from Die Walküre, conducted by Oliver von Dohnányi. The orchestra was on stage for the concert, and ‘our way of doing Wagner’ was another milestone towards the company’s ambitions to produce Wagner and Richard Strauss as part of their repertoire. In an article titled ‘Many happy returns to great opera’, Rupert Christiansen gave two recommendations for opera newcomers: the first was to ‘go anywhere and pay anything to hear one of the greats on stage’, the second one was

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to take out an annual season ticket to Opera North, as he could not ‘think of any institution in the country that consistently presents opera with such infectious vitality and warmth’. Opera North is madly in love with what it’s doing, and although it sometimes falls flat on its face, none of its performances is ever merely routine or thoughtless. For seat-of-its pants energy and skin-of-its-teeth pluck, there’s nothing to beat it. Opera North takes risks and breaks the rules. It has never been content to present standard repertory in safely traditional productions. […] A very happy birthday — and God bless the annual £9m of subsidy that makes the adventures possible. (Christiansen, 2003b)

A revision of the Capital Project (Opera North Board Paper, 8 February 2004) detailed the changes to the original proposal in order to scale down the cost to £30m. As a result, the building of a third rehearsal room had to be postponed (leaving the chorus without a dedicated music rehearsal space) and repairs to Premier House had to be put on hold. The closure was now going to extend from March 2005 to May 2006, meaning the loss of a Leeds spring, autumn and winter season each. Opera North was to spend longer in touring venues, with the addition of Bradford, and perform across a number of venues in Leeds, mainly the Town Hall. The company expected to use the refurbished Grand Theatre again in June 2006, with the official opening in September 2006. Donations were close to £1m by April 2004 (Opera North Board Minutes, 6 February 2004). Anticipation was building up for the season of Eight Little Greats. The idea had originated in a conversation between Christine Jane Chibnall and David Pountney during rehearsals for Paradise Moscow in 2001. Pountney had expressed the wish to do a triple bill of short operas by Rachmaninov. David wandered off, but left me staring at the patchwork of bricks that makes up my office walls with a lot of vaguely connected ideas running through my head. The bricks became in my mind a pattern of short self-contained operas. There are scores of marvellous pieces that are never performed because no-one is quite sure what to pair them with. (Chibnall, 2004)

Two things emerged: pairings of short operas should be flexible to avoid the rigidity of some operatic ‘forced marriages’, as Chibnall put it, and tickets should be sold individually for the ‘little greats’: if they had worked late or wanted a meal first, patrons could go to the theatre later, or those who wanted an earlier night or a later meal could go to the earlier slot. ‘Operagoing can after all become very anti-social with only a brief chance to exchange a word between queuing for the loo and struggling to buy a drink’ (Chibnall, 2004). Pieces were long- and then shortlisted with Pountney, David Parry and also Christopher Alden, whittling down a large number of short operas to arrive at a range of eight works from Rossini to Weill. Cavalleria Rusticana (one of Chibnall’s favourites) turned into Pagliacci (one of Parry’s favourites), this being the only opera that

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most audiences would have heard of, although The Seven Deadly Sins was decided upon because it was better known than the first Weill choice, The Protagonist. Alden was asked to choose a short Rossini opera, ‘the one he could make the most artistic sense of’. The eight short operas chosen covered a big range from comedy (Love’s Luggage Lost) to tragedy (The Dwarf, Francesca da Rimini), from an unfamiliar piece by a familiar composer (Djamileh) to familiar favourite (Pagliacci). The programming was designed for three groups of audiences: experienced opera-goers would be able to see pieces they were unfamiliar with, or which they had not yet seen in performance; for less experienced audience members, the well-known names of composers would provide a draw (as well as the fact the works were all performed in English); finally, people new to the genre would be able to sample ‘manageable, bite-sized chunks. […] If a handful of people try opera for the first time then the season will have been worthwhile’ (Chibnall, 2004). Those production schedules have got more and more detailed — the one for the Eight Little Greats, was a masterpiece, which Louise [Holley] and I did together. Louise, me and David Pountney are probably the only people who really understood it — we did that almost while we were finishing off casting. I’d ring up Louise and say ‘can I have someone who is singing that role and covering that role — I think I can but can you check?’ And I thought if our system can actually make that season work then the system can do anything. (Chibnall, 2004)

Chibnall captures the spirit of endeavour within the company, also commented on by Rupert Christiansen: ‘[Eight Little Greats] poses a series of logistical problems that would make literally any other company in the world blanch. Opera North, however, characteristically finds them exhilarating’ (Christiansen, 2003b). Two operas were performed each night in different pairings and four shows on Saturdays. This flexibility was backed up by affordability — each ticket was half of the regular price — and many felt that each opera alone packed enough of a punch. Pountney and Alden directed four productions each, designs by Johann Engels provided a visual red thread, with costumes shared between Sue Willmington and MarieJeanne Lecca. It felt as though Opera North was bouncing back from a few years of having to play it safe due to financial restrictions, the company trying to reclaim its reputation for adventurous programming. There was a lot of interest in the Little Greats season: Radio 3 broadcast all eight operas in one week and there were also features on Newsnight and on other radio programmes. The tenor seemed to be that Opera North had made a good choice in presenting unknown works in an accessible format, rather than catering to the audiences’ preferences of familiar work and that this was a valid way to celebrate the company’s 25-year anniversary. Comment in The Times asserted that Raymond Gubbay could take care of the popular end of the scale,

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the Carmens and Traviatas in large venues with colourful sets and folklore and that Opera North was following its mission to develop audience and art form alike: In a season where operatic entrepreneur Raymond Gubbay was trying to show the UK companies how it was done, Opera North's creative programming was mentioned as a true way forward for the industry: This is shaping up as a hell of a season in Leeds: nothing like it has been since English National Opera of the 1980s. When the company comes touring down your way, go and remind yourself what opera is all about. (Thicknesse, 2004a)

Charlotte Higgins introduced a critical note: Opera North are offering music theatre in handy, bite-sized chunks. Which isn’t necessarily a good idea. […] The season, called Eight Little Greats, has ‘audience development’ written all over it […] The trouble with sounding as though you are trying to sweeten the pill is that it assumes there is a pill to be sweetened, that ‘full-length’ opera is a hair shirt experience, a buttock-bruising, exhaustion-inducing event. Is it somehow admitting defeat to suggest that going to the opera need be no more than an amuse-guele before dinner at Harvey Nicks? (Higgins, 2004)

Eight Little Greats won a Southbank Award for the overall season, and there were also two Theatrical Management Award nominations for director Christopher Alden for La Vida Breve and Djamileh. There is more context on the eight operas in Perspective 3. Even the Board Minutes have a ‘buzz’ of excitement about them during the Eight Little Greats season. Board members discussed a new business plan with the first header of ‘developing the audience’. It was decided to concentrate on smaller scale work in the company’s commissions, including some for a family audience, and on presenting opera in new and unexpected venues. The other two headers, ‘developing the artists who work in opera’ and ‘developing opera as an art form’ fuelled a wish list of more commissions for the Opera North chorus, orchestral work with other media, the exploration of new spaces for performance and for recitals, work in (or with) film or video — generally an expansion towards mixed media projects (Opera North Board Minutes, 23 April 2004). These three headers still form the mission statement of the company. In June, the Board discussed the 19% shortfall on budget by the Eight Little Greats season (the winter season had created a small surplus). The ‘core audience’ had been positive about the experiment, coverage had been very beneficial and the ‘conversion’ of non-opera goers had certainly taken place, but unfortunately not in the numbers that were projected (Opera North Board Minutes, 18 June 2004). In summary, the Eight Little Greats season earned Opera North five industry awards, high critical acclaim, a new audience and four nights on BBC Radio 3. It also made for a deficit, which would trouble the Board over their following meetings.

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2004/2005 Orfeo ed Euridice, conducted by Nicholas Kok and directed/choreographed by Emio Greco and Peter C. Scholten, opened at the Edinburgh Festival, where their company had been regulars and audience favourites for a while. This collaboration with Opera North caused controversy with audiences and critics. Some bemoaned that the creators’ philosophical considerations did not transfer well to the stage, some called the evening ‘respectable and respectful, but dull’ (Christiansen, 2004). Raymond Monelle (2004) was astonished at this outright rejection, arguing that Greco and his team offered ‘an honest attempt to get to grips with an opera that has become unstageable’, meaning that realism was a problematic style for a myth. Monelle described the visual style of the production as severe and neo-classical, offset by the manic, at times quite disturbing nature of the movement. The singers were counter tenor Daniel Taylor as Orfeo, Isabel Monar as Euridice and Claire Ormshaw as Amore (the latter paired with Greco as her double or counterpart). The production transferred to Opera North’s autumn season and was invited to Monte Carlo. Manon Lescaut was Richard Farnes’s inaugural production as Music Director. It was ‘a thoroughly auspicious beginning’ according to Andrew Clements (2004), his excellent rapport with the Orchestra of Opera North praised across the board. Farnes had also conducted Manon (Massenet) in the previous season, and Daniel Slater was the director for both productions. He set the production in France after the Liberation of 1945 and also proposed the device of the protagonists appearing in a film made by the character of Edmondo. This suggested Manon as the product of the mostly male gaze associated with the cinema industry of the 1940s, in a similar way the character of Lulu is often portrayed. This confused some, excited others and made others recall the framing devices Slater had used for Manon the previous year. Tim Albery’s new production of Così fan tutte was praised for its clarity of vision and its 18th century setting, including visual references to old laboratory equipment (a camera obscura or an observation box?) to accompany Don Alfonso’s controversial social experiment. Conductor Yves Abel ‘created harmony between pit and stage’ and a strong singers’ sextet contributed energetic, yet moving performances ‘the ending crackles with suspense — you really worry who goes home with whom. […] an evening to open jaded ears and eyes to its many wonders’ (Thicknesse, 2004b). Così was a co-production with Glimmerglass Opera (Cooperstown) and New York City Opera. The winter season presented an interesting mixture: Weill, Mozart and (revived) Rossini.

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One Touch of Venus was first produced in 1943 and ‘is as close to the tonal world of Cole Porter as Weill ever came’ (Hickling, 2004). Hickling called the plot, where a statue of Venus is inadvertently brought to life in pre-war New York ‘screwball surrealism’, others discussed Pygmalion as an influence. Generally reviewers delighted in the rediscovery: ‘What a joy when a “forgotten masterpiece” proves to be so!’ (Davies, 2004), embracing the whole score and not just its well-known hits, ‘Speak Low’ among them. Anthony McDonald had devised a set that made reference to many different artists, including Georgia O’Keefe and Edward Hopper, an excellent setting for Illustration 29. 2004/2005 — Così fan tutte. Peter Savidge (Don Alfonso), Claire Wild (Despina). Tim Albery’s ‘intelligent direction’ and Photo: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL. the committed cast, led by Karen Coker as Venus. James Holmes ‘had the style of the music at his fingertips’ (Fairman, 2004). The new production of Don Giovanni, in an English translation by Amanda Holden, was conducted by Richard Farnes, who ‘lifted the company onto a level it had never previously achieved with Mozart’ Best of all, Farnes seemed to weave his players in and out of the voices, so that the singers were always allowed buoyancy, yet colours were touched into melodic gaps, however small. (Dreyer, 2005, p. 344)

Director Olivia Fuchs, whose Rusalka had been warmly received in the previous season, set this production in the Spanish Civil War, during a carnival party, potentially juxtaposing two of Don Giovanni’s essential ingredients: violence and of disguise.

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Some critics thought there was too much blurring of period signifiers (costumes, dance styles etc), others found a ‘chilling immediacy’ in the mixture (Pettit, 2005). Dreyer (2005, p. 344) found the Don’s character ‘neither one thing or the other’, even though Roderick Williams's smooth and elegantly sung protagonist was praised by many, as were Susannah Glanville (Donna Anna), Giselle Allen (Donna Elvira), Iain Paton (Don Ottavio) and Andrew Foster-Williams (Leporello). Venus successfully played at Sadler’s Wells in London for two weeks in November 2005 and Giovanni, often a box office favourite, surprisingly made for ‘particularly disappointing’ winter season sales 2004/2005. As the tour was in the company’s regular venues with the same amount of productions, but for double the time, it was felt that the repertoire was being spread too thinly (Opera North Board Minutes, 3 December 2005). In February, the ACE announced a £13.5m National Lottery arts capital award ‘to create national centre of excellence for Yorkshire’, funding the redevelopment of the Leeds Grand Theatre (Opera North Press Release, 2 February 2005). ACE Chairman Sir Christopher Frayling commented that the award would breathe new life into a very significant arts venue. The grant was made to Leeds City Council. After many years of distinguished service, Councillor Bernard Atha left the Opera North Board. The three pieces of the winter season went on an extended tour, with the company’s first visit to the Grand Opera House in Belfast (in part financed by the ACE) and, among other venues, to Hull, the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield and Theatre Royal Norwich. In July 2005, Opera North performed One Touch of Venus and Julietta at the Ravenna Festival. The theatre closure began at the end of May 2005. Opera North’s return to the Grand Theatre was still anticipated for June 2006, with the formal opening in the autumn of 2006, with a new production of Peter Grimes (Mantle, 2005a). As well as expanding its touring schedule, the company maintained a lively presence across several concert and performance venues in the north of England during the Leeds Grand Theatre closure. Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was conceived for concert venues in a production by Giles Havergal and conducted by Richard Farnes. It premiered in Leeds Town Hall and toured to halls in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Gateshead. It was formidably cast, with John Tomlinson and Sally Burgess as Bluebeard and Judith. The production used colour-coded projections for the unlocking of each door, but the overall notion was of restraint and an intense focus on the performers, as well as the orchestra, sometimes referred to as the third character in this opera. Havergal allows Bluebeard and Judith to play out their horrific marital endgame among the orchestral players entrusted with the task of creating the castle’s musical presence. The plutocratic late-Victorian décor of Leeds Town Hall, illuminated by the flickering lights of music stands, adds immeasurably to the oppressive atmosphere of it all. (Ashley, 2005a)

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Richard Farnes mentioned the seventh door sequence as his key Desert Island Aria choice in 2013 (Festival of Britten 2013, Opera North programme). Bluebeard intrigued audiences at The Lowry and at The Sage, a new concert venue in Gateshead on the banks of the River Tyne, which had opened in 2004. With its striking design by Sir Norman Foster and its concert hall where virtually every surface is wood-panelled, with acoustics among the best in the country, The Sage quickly became a popular venue for Opera North’s work and Bluebeard was the introduction to a strong musical relationship. Richard Farnes had not yet been Music Director for a full year, but the feeling of a perfect match between him and the company was tangible, both from internal and from press sources. He took an active part in programming, casting and other artistic considerations and was present at rehearsals and performances, even if he was not conducting himself. In a profile ‘The Accidental Maestro’, Farnes talked about the principles that underpin his work: It’s not in my nature to go round terrifying people or faking charisma. And I’m not insanely ambitious either. I just want to enjoy making music with people I trust. There are two essentials in my book. One is to recognise that your players are professionals and appreciate the difficulties of what they’re doing. The other is to know the score back to front — that’s what gets you respect, not tantrums. (Farnes quoted in Christiansen, 2005)

Meanwhile, press sources called the 2004/2005 season Opera North’s most successful to date and work was under way that would eventually provide the company ‘with its own front door’ after over 25 years of existence (Opera North 2004/2005 Review). The project will enable us to do what, as a national opera company, we should be doing. […] The theatre is the biggest tool we have (Mantle, 2004). The first £20.7m funding for the first phase were in the bank and there was optimism about the fundraising campaign to contribute to the following phases.

TRANSFORMATION AND STABILITY 2005/2006 But, Opera North made its name on a splendid chorus, a quality orchestra, and, above all, its ability to adapt. (Byrne, 2005)

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While the company was constructing alternatives to its main house performances, contractors were delivering construction work in Leeds Grand Theatre. Nabucco at Leeds Town Hall opened Opera North’s travelling season — and given its success, the chorus of the Hebrews was not an allusion to the company’s temporary homelessness during the Grand Theatre’s transformation. Singers Alastair Miles (Zaccaria), Leonardo Capablo (Ismaele), Jane Irwin (Fenena), and particularly Claire Rutter (Abigaille — ‘the performance of a lifetime’, Ashley, 2005b) and Alan Opie in the title role contributed a formidable ensemble achievement. David Parry had championed Chandos’s ‘Opera in English’ series for a long time through his musical contributions, led an acclaimed recording of Nabucco with the Opera North cast. In November 2005, Saul was approached as a semi-staged performance in contrast to the concert setting of Nabucco. Handel turned to oratorio when the bottom fell out of Italian opera. Opera North has turned to oratorio while the roof has temporarily come off its theatre. But as the company’s base gets an overhaul, it’s a perfect opportunity to explore the hinterland between dramatic and concert performance. (Hickling, 2005)

John Fulljames, who had previously worked for the company as an assistant director, was responsible for the pared-down production. Some critics bemoaned the absence of surtitles to help them through the plot of this biblical oratorio–opera hybrid. Robert Hayward in the title role produced a nuanced and expressive vocal performance and the ability to ‘remain in a jealous fury for the best part of three hours’ (Hickling, 2005). The closure of the ‘main house’ helped to throw more focus on Opera North’s substantial other activities — the orchestra, as well as Opera North Projects and Opera North Education. The Kirklees Concert series was now in its third year under the management of Opera North, with the orchestra giving 8 concerts per season (out of a total of 12). Attendance had risen about 20% since the start of the partnership. The chorus performed Britten’s cantata St Nicholas in Harrogate on 10 December 2005. In September, a commissioned new family opera, The Pied Piper (composer Kate Pearson, libretto by Jane Buckler), had toured the region with workshops for primary schools. Richard Mantle was voted ‘Overall Yorkshire and Humber Director of 2005’ by the Institute of Directors. In September, he threw his and the company’s weight behind calls for a new concert venue in Leeds (Mantle, 2005b), arguing that Leeds should move up the league with other cities of its size and build a dedicated concert venue with the Orchestra of Opera North as its resident orchestra. The idea of a new

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purpose-built concert venue was dismissed, however, with recommendations the Town Hall should receive a multimillion upgrade instead. Nonetheless, there were some developments in the city: the Carriageworks Theatre opened, replacing the Civic Theatre venue nearby on Millennium Square, which in turn had been transformed into the Leeds City Museum. An extension to Leeds City Art Gallery was agreed, as was in principle the scheme for a new large-scale arena for live music (Leeds Arena was to open in 2013). In the wider operatic world, ENO saw the abrupt departure of Sean Doran, artistic director, and (greeted with relief by some) the resignation of its dynamic and controversial chairman of the board, Martin Smith. Scottish Opera was now without a permanent chorus, a sad development. For the Christmas season, Opera North presented Hansel and Gretel as a family show in Leeds Town Hall — not the easiest of venues in which to create close audience interaction, although the venue’s ‘chocolate box’ interior was a good match for the opera’s food theme. The greatest single cause for pleasure was having the orchestra of Opera North on stage, so that it could be heard to full advantage: I don’t imagine that any other orchestra in the country would have sounded finer. (Tanner, 2006a)

John Fulljames’s ‘witty and contemporary’ production ‘has grown, like the silver birch foliage around the platform of Leeds Town Hall, out of the orchestra itself’ (Walker, 2005). Instruments were the central scenographic element in the production, with Hansel trapped by the witch between the gong and the trombone, the Dew Fairy emerging from the harp and the witch being thrown into a kettle-drum cauldron. The voices of Julianne Young (Hansel) and Jeni Bern (Gretel) blended beautifully, their performances convincing and touching. Richard Farnes’s interpretation was of a quality Michael Tanner had ‘previously only heard on records’ (Tanner, 2006a) with Wagnerian touches, stressing the kinship of the score to the sound world of Siegfried. Of all the places for Salome to cast off her seven veils, Leeds Town Hall must count as one of the most incongruous venue — slogans on the wall (Goodwill to all Men, Honesty is the Best Policy etc). And even if King Herod was reluctant to execute John the Baptist, I doubt ‘trial by jury’ was high on his list of priorities for dealing with the awkward prophet imprisoned in his basement. (Fisher, 2006)

Salome was the final concert staging before Opera North took up residency at the Bradford Alhambra. The orchestra was at the heart of the performance, critics and audiences revelling in the fact they were centre stage visually as well as

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acoustically. Richard Farnes was praised for his nuanced interpretation and for the support he provided for the stellar performance of Susan Bullock as Salome, achieving a ‘thrilling unity’ between her and the orchestra: ‘And whatever Farnes got from the orchestra, she [Bullock] had more tone to match it. The audience’s silence after the final crunch was less of emotion than of shock’ (Tanner, 2006b). Although in concert dress, Salome clearly impressed as a performance, not just a musical rendition. In spring 2006, Lord Harewood retired from the Opera North Board after 28 years of continuous service (and of course as the managing director of ENON for its first three years). He was honoured by a Spitfire fly-past at Harewood House and made a Vice-President of Opera North. The company had not performed at Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre since 1992 and was welcomed back enthusiastically. Touring productions of The Marriage of Figaro and a revival of La rondine were joined by Weill’s satirical opera Arms and the Cow (adding to Opera North’s Weill portfolio, which already consisted of The Threepenny Opera, Love Life, The Seven Deadly Sins and One Touch of Venus). Arms and the Cow was conceived by Kurt Weill and his librettist Robert Vambery after both had been driven into exile from Germany. The opera is a political satire, warning about war, with Hitler, Göring and Goebbels as thinly disguised models for the protagonists. The opera (then called A Kingdom for a Cow) premiered in London in 1935, when the nation was more in the mood for the tunes of Ivor Novello than Kurt Weill, due to the Silver Jubilee of King George V. Weill’s assistant, Lys Symonette, produced a version in 1981, on which Opera North’s production was based (see also Kennedy, 2006, pp. 714–716). It was a co-production with Bregenz Festival and Vienna Volksoper. David Pountney and Jeremy Sams were jointly responsible for the translation and revised lyrics. Critical responses varied: some felt Weill’s satire lacked the sting of works by Offenbach on whose satirical works the opera was modelled, some felt the score was overly long and at times repetitive, despite conceding that Weill had no better advocate than conductor James Holmes. Other critics thought Pountney’s production tried to compensate for some the work’s dramaturgical flaws by overloading it with satirical signifiers of contemporary dictatorship. It’s just a pity it is such a dud; none of the tunes is (sic) all that good, never mind the plot […] On the other hand, the first-night audience laughed a lot and cheered vociferously at the end. On the way out I heard someone remarking how important a piece it is and how its message is really potent today. And Opera’s Bregenz correspondent (Nov 2004, pp. 1333–1334) found Pountney’s production ‘electrifying’ and the score a ‘goldmine of tunes’. So, you see, it takes all sorts … (Kennedy, 2006, p. 715)

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La rondine, in Francesca Zambello’s well received 1994 production, pleased audiences in Bradford. It was summarised as ‘tender melodies’ in an ‘elegant production’ for this ‘hybrid opera-operetta’ (Brown, 2006). The Marriage of Figaro, directed and also revived by Caroline Gawn and now 10 years old, won praise for its energetic young cast, particularly Jeni Bern (Susanna) and Linda Richardson (Countess Almaviva). The month at Bradford was followed by Opera North touring for nearly three months to its regular venues (Nottingham, Salford, Newcastle) and additionally to Aberdeen, Belfast, Hull, Norwich and Sheffield. A recording based on the previous season’s Leeds Town Hall production of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (Chandos’s Opera in English series) was awarded five stars for performance and sound from the BBC Music Magazine (July 2006), credited with recreating the disturbing atmosphere of the production on disc (Anonymous, 2006a). In an update on Opera North’s and Leeds Grand Theatre’s Transformation, we learn from the Board Minutes (28 April 2006) that the raised fly tower roof was now completed, that the hydraulic lorry lift had ‘not quite left Germany’ (it was installed in June 2006) and acoustic panels for the rehearsal room were being fitted. The floor for the stalls was about to be laid, and then the seating reinstalled. A new flying system was also installed. Opera North had made good progress on eliminating its accumulated deficit, as it had been able to make savings on production costs during the season spent outside the Grand Theatre — new productions were semi-staged and performed in the Town Hall, with the exception of Arms and the Cow. With fundraising campaigns focused on the capital campaign, there was slight concern that attention might be diverted away from ‘regular’ fundraising. The development team were looking for principal partners to contribute £500,000 each over a period of three years. Yorkshire Bank became a Principal Sponsor, which benefited both the Transformation Project (following a donation of over £700,000, the auditorium was called ‘The Yorkshire Bank Auditorium’) and Opera North’s Education work, the latter continuing over a number of years (Opera North Board Minutes, 28 April 2006). The other partnership that was under discussion with the University of Leeds was going to expand a mere business scheme into a partnership on multiple levels: professional, educational, artistic and intellectual. Chairman Michael Beverley had initiated discussions for this large-scale partnership by spring 2006, involving a donation of £500,000 from the University over a period of five years. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, Professor Michael Arthur, was invited to join the Opera North Board (Opera North Board Minutes, 28 April and 30 June 2006). The season saw the company looking forward to the end of its nomadic period. There were many positives to come out of it, however, as Richard Farnes pointed out: ‘We made new friends for our operas in concert and we used our homeless year creatively. We intend to build on that’ (quoted in Canning, 2006).

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2006/2007 Autumn 2006 marked a new beginning: the company moved back into extended and improved accommodation and settled into a newly renovated Grand Theatre. As this had been delayed, it was a challenging time for all technical departments. While the production rehearsal cycles ran in the company’s established timeline, there was little time for staff to familiarise themselves with the new features and mechanisms, such as the lorry lift and the new flying system. The completion of Phase 1 of the Transformation Project was greeted with enthusiasm. Richard Farnes and the Orchestra of Opera North were delighted that the auditorium now had a wooden floor. ‘The Grand has always had difficult acoustics. I hope it will be easier for us to produce a warmer glow to the sound, particularly for the Puccini repertoire and the bigger orchestrations, where I feel we need a bigger, glowing quality to the bass sound’. Wagner, Otello and The Queen of Spades were all mentioned as future ambitious plans for the company (Farnes quoted in Canning, 2006a). Opera North’s seasons ahead looked healthy at a time when both WNO and Scottish Opera had to impose damaging cuts (WNO limiting its touring venues in 2007 and Scottish Opera opening four stage shows across Glasgow and Edinburgh without touring them). In mid-September 2006, the new rehearsal rooms at the back of Premier House, with the dimensions of the Grand Theatre stage, had been opened by the two gentlemen after whom they were named: Sir Gordon Linacre and Lord Harewood. Sir Gordon and Lord Harewood, both accompanied by their wives, arrived in a Jaguar which was lifted up to the rehearsal rooms on the £750.000 scissor lift that will be used to lift articulated lorries carrying scenery up to the stage. Sir Gordon, President of Yorkshire Post Newspapers, joked that Lord Harewood asked him to be chairman because: ‘We had a boardroom we could use at the Yorkshire Post. We had a wonderful chef there who made fantastic scotch eggs which were a favourite of Lord Harewood’s’. (Anonymous, 2006b)

Illustration 30. 2006/2007 — The Elixir of Love. Ladies of Opera North Chorus. Photo: Richard Moran.

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The Leeds Grand Theatre reopened with a new production of Rigoletto. Charles Edwards was responsible for direction and scenography and presented a mid-20th century telling of the jester’s tale. It was appreciated for its ‘strong cast, a modern, claustrophobic setting and a fast-paced sense of movement throughout’, stripping ‘intense emotions to their barest level and gripping the audience throughout’ (Byrne, 2007). Alan Opie won praise for his range of emotions and powerful singing in the title role. Jonathan Summers performed the role for some performances of the run. Other critics praised the renovated Grand Theatre and felt let down by the production, arguing it should have been the new production of Peter Grimes with which the company reopened their artistic home. However, it was acknowledged that at a time when all subsidised companies were cutting down on performances ‘the only company boasting ruddy cheeks is Opera North, which returned to its renovated home at the weekend after two years on the road’ (Clark, 2006). Rupert Christiansen, in an article titled ‘The City that Needs to Think Bigger’ thought Opera North had done things in the right order to make the functionality of the Grand Theatre’s stage and rehearsal rooms the first part of the Transformation Project. But he criticised Leeds City Council for continuing to ‘think small in terms of the arts at a time when its neighbours have been boldly expansive and big-spending’. The relative financial health of the city meant it was not (like, e.g. Newcastle/Gateshead or Liverpool) eligible for EU funding, but Christiansen felt Leeds was ‘punching beneath its weight and shelving awkward decisions about anything inessential’. This ‘parking’ of issues had delayed developments concerning Leeds City Varieties, Leeds Museum and the renovation of Leeds Town Hall (prompting a wistful look back at the voluntary subscription scheme that facilitated its construction) (Christiansen, 2006). Peter Grimes, the second new production of autumn 2006, was chosen as a showcase for the chorus and orchestra’s virtuosity and also brought Phyllida Lloyd back to the company to produce another Britten opera — Gloriana in 1993 had earned her plaudits as one of the finest directors of the composer's work: There is no finer interpreter of Britten’s work than Lloyd. Her Gloriana and Albert Herring were landmark productions for Opera North and here she unites the pageantry of the one with the parochialism of the other to produce what may be the perfect Peter Grimes. (Hickling, 2006)

Critics, often divided, commented almost in unison that Grimes was ‘the highlight of the British operatic year’ (Allison, 2006; and ‘the operatic event of the year’, Canning, 2006b). Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts made a role debut that also attracted superlative rhetoric, Giselle Allen lending depth and gentleness to Ellen Orford. The acutely sketched characters of the borough (‘luxury cast’), the individual characters the Opera North Chorus contributed in the Boar Inn or the lynch mob scenes and the evocative

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realisation of the sea-infused score resulted in what was called ‘a collective triumph’ (Canning, 2006b). This landmark production is discussed in more detail in Perspective 3. La Voix Humaine was the third production of the autumn season, presented on its own and possibly an offering for audience members who had enjoyed a shorter evening at the opera at Eight Little Greats. In Deborah Warner’s production (design: Tom Pye, lighting: Jean Kalman), Joan Rodgers performed the solo piece of a woman’s descent into despair after being left by her lover, her only connection to him being an unreliable telephone connection. Responses covered a large range: some deemed Rodgers’ performance too ‘controlled’, others relished the tension between her stylish singing and her simultaneous disintegration, resulting in suicide. Lynne Walker commented that Rodgers provided the ‘dynamic and tonal range’ of the part, as well as the ‘emotional curve’, while still giving a polished performance. A screen above the set otherwise leaning towards realism provided intermedial commentary on the disintegration of the phone connection and the protagonist’s mental state (Walker, 2006). Meanwhile, the Board of Leeds Grand Theatre had decided on a rental increase of 23% (from £22,000 to £25,000), a decision that was ‘rigorously challenged’ by Richard Mantle and his Board. Subscriptions to Opera North seasons were up by 8% and the Friends of Opera North, supporters of at least one production per year, discussed how to broaden their initiatives (Opera North Board Minutes, 1 December 2006 and Opera North F&GP Minutes, 26 January 2007). The autumn tour did well in critical and in financial terms, as all venues apart from The Lowry (Salford) overachieved on their budget. The partnership agreement with the University of Leeds as a Principal Partner for the following three years, followed by a more open-ended, project-based partnership, reached contract stage and would begin in early 2007. Some collaborative ventures preceded its official launch, with two AHRC-funded PhD bursaries shared between the University and Opera North. Groups of students visited a number of Peter Grimes rehearsals. The production went on to win a South Bank Show Award for 2006 and was also nominated for an Olivier Award. 2007 started with a revival (reworking where some of the costumes were concerned) of The Magic Flute, first shown in 2003. It still had a multi-cultural feel, with some new additions to the cast. The year also marked the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, defining the transition from accompanied recitative to the operatic form of numbers connected by recitatives; a generic and stylistic benchmark for opera, but named favola in musica in 1607, for want of the term ‘opera’. For this new production, commemoration was mixed with innovation, in a way Opera North have often reacted to centenaries, bicentenaries

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or anniversaries. Christopher Alden directed L’Orfeo, which was received with excitement and rejection, with strong emotions from critics and audiences, but hardly any indifference. The production ran without an interval and took place in a single setting throughout — hermetic to the point that there were no doors and the only entrance was through a window. With unchanging scene and costumes, the cast of 13 sang the opera’s parts and the choruses (wedding guests, mourners, furies), also providing an audience for Orfeo delivering his aria ‘Possente Spirto’, set as an audition before the inscrutable Caronte. The production delivered striking images, for example Eurydice fixed to a wall with masking tape. The sticky tape, not least the sound it made when ripped off the set’s surfaces, caused some distress to some critics and audience members. Only the fine actor-singer Paul Nilon emerged from this fiasco with his reputation intact. Those contemplating to purchase tickets should pause to reflect on the inscription defied by Nilon’s Orpheus as he braves Cerberus to enter the underworld. ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’. (Holden, 2007)

Some saw references to the court of Monteverdi’s patron, the Duke of Mantua, some read it as a reference to the Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain and the ‘grunge’ aesthetic of the early 1990s (Niemtus, 2007). Lynne Walker drew links with Andy Warhol and his Manhattan entourage of the 1970s (Walker, 2007a). It seemed to be a production of open signifiers, allowing interpretative space to map associations onto the mix of period and aesthetic — Alden’s refusal to ‘tell the story’ incensed many, of course, but his decision to deconstruct rather than to narrate generated positive responses, too. An orchestra of 20 players, many on period instruments, was expertly led by Christopher Moulds. The production also exceeded expectations at the box office. A revival of Daniel Slater’s sunny Riviera-style L’elisir d’amore was warmly received as ‘just the tonic we all need’ (Dreyer, 2007, p. 464), with praise also directed at the quartet of soloists (Anna Ryberg, Andrew Kennedy, Riccardo Simonetti, Peter Savidge). The DARE partnership between Opera North and the University of Leeds had been launched officially in early spring 2007 and had already won a Unilever brand identity prize for its potential to create knowledge exchange and new research and artistic opportunities. Together with Opera North’s new ambassador scheme for young people, TONAL, audience development was

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receiving more investment. Figures for ‘regular’ audiences varied between touring venues, but there had been a 40% increase in Opera North subscribers since 2001. In May, Peter Grimes won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award. Morale was also high in the orchestra, evidenced by the fact that there had only been a staff turnover of 20% over the last 10 years (Opera North Orchestra Report, 20 April 2007). Since 1978, the orchestra had given in excess of 650 concerts, widened access across the region, particularly in Kirklees, but also in the Sheffield and Bradford areas. There was also a constant stream of interaction with schools, e.g. through the Education department’s Play ON scheme and through concerts in schools. Apart from its established role in the Leeds International Concert Season, Orchestra Manager Dougie Scarfe was pleased to report that the orchestra now ran its Kirklees Concert Season across Huddersfield and Dewsbury Town Halls. It has managed the season in the latter venue since 1996 and some criticism had been overcome, after Huddersfield was added as the other main venue after a century of links with the Hallé Orchestra (Scarfe, 2006). The Transformation Project was approaching its second phase: the conversion of the Howard Assembly Room and the Emerald Grand Hall and surrounding spaces: the footbridge (also an art work), connecting Premier House and Leeds Grand Theatre, the new stage door on New Briggate (the old one was tucked away on Harrison Street) and the tiled staircase leading up to the Howard Assembly Room. The vaulted ceiling had been hidden behind plaster and needed restoration, and work to provide wooden panelling on all the walls was also planned. The space was to be first and foremost for orchestra rehearsals, then a space for Opera North Education work, then a performance space and, finally, given over to private hire for the remaining dates. A new production of Katya Kabanova opened in April 2007, directed by Tim Albery and designed by Hildegard Bechtler. It was performed without interval (some critics remarked that there should be a time lapse between Katya and Boris’s affair and her descent into madness); Michael Kennedy admired the production’s intelligent sparseness, which contributed to the neurotic tension of the score: ‘this is not a revival of that cash-starved and over-economical production but a totally new, radical and vastly improved re-think’ (Kennedy, 2007). Albery managed to link the repression that leads to sexual guilt to a demand for social change, strong in the opera’s final image: Katya walks into the Wolga to commit suicide ‘weighted down with stones like Virginia Woolf. There is, however, a twist. A black-clad bourgeoisie looks on, initially implacable and judgmental. But at the end, they turn away from Kabanicha in revulsion as the atmosphere becomes shrill with protest’ (Ashley, 2007a).

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Richard Farnes conducts with a magisterial, almost Mackerras-like authority, which draws the best from the cast and the excellent orchestra and which finds all the savagery and tenderness in the wonderful score […] Giselle Allen has sung Rusalka, Tatyana, Ellen Orford and Jenůfa for this company and her Katya crowns those achievements, marking her emergence as a singer actress of the first rank. (Kennedy, 2007, p. 728)

In May, a new production of Les Noces (Stravinsky) and Dido and Aneneas (Purcell) opened, directed by Aletta Collins and conducted by Nicholas Kok. Some critics questioned the pairing of the two operas. Both Les Noces and Dido and Aeneas juxtapose dance and opera — and they can also be connected by one opera having a wedding and the other the disintegration of a relationship at its centre. Les Noces is based on ancient Russian wedding rituals and Collins’s choreography showed stylised competition, conflict and resolution between the sexes (six male and six female dancers). The singers and the musicians were all placed on stage, without having an active part in the choreography. Anna Picard commented on the transferability of the rituals shown: ‘Stravinsky would’ve felt right at home in Leeds — inspired by pagan marriage rites, Stravinsky’s choral ballet Les Noces might have been written for Leeds: a city where the sexes hunt in packs, circling their quarry with little more than a smear of St Tropez or a spritz of Eau Sauvage to protect against the icy winds’ (Picard, 2007). Although more about Leeds than about Opera North’s latest work, this reaction presents a useful snapshot of the area around the Grand Theatre, with a big night club next door and many late night bars nearby. Dido was very different to Les Noces, reduced in set and sparing and stylised in its choreography, concentrating on the centrepiece of Illustration 31. 2006/2007 — Dido and Aeneas. James Laing (Spirit). Photo: Bill Cooper. Susan Bickley’s performance — her

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colouring and phrasing unanimously acclaimed by critics — ‘hearing Bickley sing “death is now a welcome guest” is almost worth the price of a ticket alone, that, and Kok’s immaculate stewardship of the orchestra’s stirring strings’ (Fisher, 2007). In an article in The Guardian, Germaine Greer made a spirited case for decentralisation of the arts: ‘Hard as it is for Londoners to believe, the capital isn’t the centre of the arts universe’ […] ‘The best opera I have experienced in England has been in “the regions”. Opera North’s 2005 production of La Vida Breve was everything opera should be, but Londoners might never have found out what they missed unless they managed to squeeze into their two nights at Sadler’s Wells. […] Parochial Londoners should give themselves a treat by sampling some regional art’. (Greer, 2007)

BBC Radio 3 announced that three Opera North productions were to be broadcast live in the 2007/2008 season, making the company’s work nationally accessible, at least on an acoustic level. During spring 2007, there had been discussions about Opera North taking over as Chief Executor of Leeds Grand Theatre and the company had been invited to present the business case to Leeds City Council (Opera North Board Minutes, 25 April 2007). The suggestion was for Opera North to have independent governance (the freehold retained by the Council) of the Grand Theatre, the other Council-run theatre spaces, City Varieties and the Carriageworks to be administrated together, and for Hyde Park Picture House to be leased to an independent operator. Opera North pointed to the impact the Transformation campaign had, proving that together Leeds City Council, Opera North and Leeds Grand Theatre were ‘a force to be reckoned with’. Opera North had facilitated considerable improvement to the Grand Theatre already and the ambition was now on the improvement of visitor services, box office functions and on improving ‘levels of audience loyalty’, all judged to be performing ‘short of potential’ at the time (Opera North Board Minutes, 29 June 2007). The year 2006/2007 had marked an exciting transition for the company. Having rehearsal and administration spaces on the same site made the production process feel more connected than previously, where the sessions were split between multiple sites for orchestra, studio and chorus rehearsals and only started to be assembled in one place two weeks before a production. The company, always an entity where artistic output was concerned, now felt spatially unified, too.

2007/2008 The autumn season opened with a new production of Madama Butterfly, directed by Tim Albery, designed by Hildegard Bechtler and conducted by Wyn Davies. It was a big success and provided the company with a rare thing: a production that

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was successful with critics and audiences alike, and which was a so-called top 10 opera. It exceeded box office targets, suggesting it would do well if revived in future seasons. Among the most enthusiastic responses was that of Rupert Christiansen, who declared he was ‘blown away’ by this Butterfly and as for Anne-Sophie Duprels ‘for sheer sweetness of personality, for sheer pathos, I have seen few to match her’ (Christiansen, 2007). Chibnall (2013) remarked on the creative chemistry between cast members and production team. This production was a hybrid between the original 1904 version (previously used in other Opera North productions) and the version revised by Puccini. There were mixed responses for the silent narrative at the start and the end of the opera, involving Goro and a Geisha, which was reworked in later revivals. Showing Madama Butterfly in the context of the effects of imperialism had been a production trend for quite some time; Albery instead focused on Butterfly as ‘the victim of a cynical trade-off between cultures’ (Ashley, 2007b), shown aptly by the staged quality of Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton’s wedding and her transformation away from the ‘orientalist’ ideal towards US beauty standards of the mid-20th century, while Sharpless takes a journey in the opposite direction. Matthew Warchus’s Falstaff from 1997 was revived by Peter Relton as the second offering of the autumn season. Robert Hayward, formerly Ford, now performed the fat knight, leading to the comment that ‘adding Falstaff’s layers to his repertoire confirms that he is one of Britain’s most rounded bass-baritones’ (Hickling, 2007). An intriguing rediscovery premiered in November, also a British premiere: The Fortunes of King Croesus by Reinhard Keiser, a forgotten opera by one of Germany’s leading baroque composers. Tim Albery had long harboured the wish to direct the opera and Opera North accepted his suggestion, co-producing it with the Opera of Minnesota (where it was premiered the following year). Shortening the opera from its 1730 revised version, Albery was also responsible for the paraphrased translation of Lucas von Bestel’s libretto (based on Herodotus) and for the edition, together with conductor Harry Bicket. Leslie Travers’s scenography (his first collaboration of many with Tim Albery) was dominated by gold and black and had a 1930s look, with a costume ball on the eve of war at the start of the opera. There was a striking use of golden spitfire aeroplanes, both in miniature in an operations room for fighter control in Act 1, and in fragmented real-size in later acts. Paul Nilon presented a strong performance of the fall and rise of the legendary King. Gillian Keith was hugely admired in the role of Elmira as was male soprano Michael Maniaci as her love interest (and Croesus’s son) Atis. The intricate, sometimes over-elaborate subplots were illuminated by ‘exactly the right cast’ (Walker, 2007b), including William Dazeley (Orsanes), Henry Waddington (Cyrus) and John Graham-Hall (Elcius). Croesus was less successful at the box office than the other operas of the season, confirming concerns that audiences prefer well-known works.

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The decision on the Grand Theatre’s management had been deferred and the temporary manager’s contract extended. It is not evident from documentation as to when it became clear that Opera North’s suggestion of running the theatre was not going to be accepted; there seemed to be no ‘appetite’ for it, as Ric Green put it (Opera North F&GP Minutes, 21 September 2007). The winter season was dominated by the highly anticipated Opera North commission of a family opera: The Adventures of Pinocchio, music by Jonathan Dove, libretto by Alasdair Middleton, opened just before Christmas 2007. Tidings of great joy — a Christmas miracle in Leeds! A modern composer has produced a new opera that is funny, poignant, tuneful, spectacular — and, best of all, conceived for all the family! (Morrison, 2007)

It was Dove’s 21st opera, but with a cast of around 30, a large chorus and a big orchestral score, this was his largest-scale one to date. The project had originated through conversations with ENO and Opera North had taken it over in a co-production arrangement with Sadler’s Wells and Chemnitz Opera in Germany. While the latter were going to make a financial contribution, this proved not to be possible and an ‘in-kind’ scheme was agreed instead: Chemnitz has excellent carpentry facilities and strong craftsmen working for the company, so the largely wooden set for Pinocchio was constructed there. Opera North took on the costumes (some made in house, others commissioned from a range of regular contributors). The ensuing financial gap was closed by a generous contribution from philanthropist Dr Keith Howard. Pinocchio was Opera North’s first commission for some time and its first main house commission for a family audience. It was directed by Martin Duncan in an ingenious design by Francis O’Connor and conducted by David Parry. After they had been cast in their roles, Jonathan Dove wrote with particular singers in mind, such as Mary Plazas (Blue Fairy), Victoria Simmonds (Pinocchio) and Jonathan Summers (Gepetto). Starting as a singing block of wood, then being transformed into a wooden boy, being chased, imprisoned, robbed, hung, transformed into a donkey, swallowed by a whale, to finally be turned into a real boy required monumental vocal and physical stamina from Simmonds. Both the new opera and its first production were received triumphantly, with five-star reviews from critics and large and audibly appreciative audiences. Children from around eight years found it unproblematic to sit through the 2 hours 45 minute performance and were delighted by potentially frightening elements of the production and amazed by the trick that made the lying Pinocchio’s nose grow. The music had ‘wood’ running through it, but in woodwind and in the sound of wooden blocks — there were also resonances of Britten, Sondheim and (on occasion) Philip Glass in Dove’s score.

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Illustration 32.

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2007/2008 — Pinocchio. Ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Butterfly continued in repertoire in the winter season, which also featured the first revival of Peter Grimes. It retained the same cast as for its opening run in 2006 and was hailed again as an extraordinary ensemble effort by soloists, chorus and orchestra. ‘This is sheer, unforgettable music theatre, opera red in tooth and claw: opera at its very best, indeed’ (Dreyer, 2008a, p. 326). The company received a one-off grant of £3.5m from the ACE (lottery money), designated for the final phase of the Transformation Project, the refurbishment of the Howard Assembly Room (Anonymous, 2008). There was a funding surplus from the other phases of the project, which also went into Phase 3. The Spring season was titled ‘Shakespeare Resounding’, with three operatic adaptations from different epochs and national backgrounds, performed in three different languages. There was to be a common base for each of the sets, all designed by Johann Engels. Verdi’s Macbeth opened first. Tim Albery’s production was seen as a psychologically driven chamber play. Michael Tanner called it ‘wholly de-tartanised’, in a monochrome set, where stage blood provided the only splashes of colour (Tanner, 2008). Some startling images occurred through the positioning and presence of the chorus, some through poignant images, such as the murdered Duncan’s shoes being left on a bare stage, for Macbeth to fill. The witches were more than just metaphorical midwives to the unfolding tragedy, as a flashback of Lady Macbeth suffering a miscarriage was incorporated in the action. A bed took centre stage as the scene of Duncan’s murder, of the prophecy of Banquo begetting a line of kings in the apparition scene and of the murderous couple’s eroticised anticipation of planned murders. Robert Hayward and Antonia Cifrone were credited with intensity in their singing and acting performances as the Macbeths. Andrew Clark also saw the orchestra as a cast member: But the best singing comes from Richard Farnes’s orchestra. Farnes uncovers a wealth of detail, nuance and character […] and sets everything in the context of a dramatically paced, superbly sculpted, but never ‘drilled’ reading: this is Verdi conducting of the very highest order. (Clark, 2008)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten) was the second Shakespeare opera of the season. ‘Martin Duncan’s transgressive staging reminded us that Britten’s Dream, along with LSD, psychedelia and swinging, was a product of the 1960s’ (Hickling, 2008a). Engels’s set showed translucent perspex trees and some giant bubbles, moving with the eerie string sound of the forest in Act 1, lit in a psychedelic colour range by Bruno Poet. The production seemed to be positioned on the verge of a nightmare at certain times — the blonde-wigged, black winged serious child fairies were a case in point, associated by some with an ‘Aryan’ dystopia, others seeing them as ancestors of the children from the film Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960). A dynamic cast across the opera’s three distinctive sound worlds (the fairies, the mechanicals and

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the noble lovers and Royals) was led with distinction by conductor Stuart Stratford; the Oberon and Tytania of James Laing and Jeni Bern, the young quartet of Athenian lovers and the hilarious mechanicals all noted successes with critics and audiences. ‘A dark fantasy of our times’ (Finch, 2008) was the final Shakespearian opera of the season: Roméo et Juliette (Gounod). Directed by John Fulljames and conducted by Martin Andre, the basic stage elements common to all three operas of the season by Johan Engels here had the addition of a shiny black box with a raisable platform, alternating as Juliette’s balcony, a bed and the grave at the end. The two young lovers (Leonardo Illustration 33. 2007/2008 — A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jeni Bern (Tytania), Opera North Children’s Chorus. Photo: Tristram Kenton. Capalbo and Bernarda Bobro) impressed the critics, particularly the latter, with a sparkling vocal and physical performance as Juliette. Christiansen (2008a) called the season a ‘magnificent Shakespearean hat-trick’ and Hugh Canning (2008) praised Opera North for their ‘well-balanced repertoire when our other companies increasingly cleave to popular favourites’. In 2008, a plan emerged to bring productions by the Royal Opera House to Manchester for several seasons a year, with the possibility of a new building on the site of the now disused BBC building. While the official reactions from other companies on this idea were polite, nobody seemed entirely sure who would benefit from this proposal. The market for opera in Manchester seemed to be quite uneven, with Opera North not always managing to fill the Lowry in its three annual seasons (Opera North F&GP Minutes, 23 May 2008). Meanwhile, the Assembly Room’s transformation was progressing well, despite being slightly over budget. A phased opening was planned, with some events in December, an official opening in January 2009 and a steady

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build-up of events during 2009/2010 (Opera North Board Minutes, 22 August 2008). Public funding was enhanced by the generosity of individual and corporate donors, most notably the Emerald Foundation and its founder, Dr Keith Howard, contributing significant funds to the Howard Assembly Room, the improvement of the Opera North music floor (the third floor of Premier House) and the Emerald Grand Hall (which the company was to manage jointly with the Grand Theatre). The University of Leeds was a ‘Principal Partner’ as part of the DARE agreement and also made substantial contributions to the scheme.

2008/2009 There was a political note to the autumn season, starting with a revival of Tosca, first seen in the autumn of 2002. What to some was an ‘arrogant revisionist production’ (Hickling, 2008b), to others was ‘opera red in tooth and claw. Not exactly Tosca as prescribed, but a shattering experience nonetheless’ (Dreyer, 2008b, pp. 1486–1487). As for updating the production, Dreyer quoted Rodney Milnes, who in 2002 had explained that the source, Victorien Sardou’s Tosca in an 1800 setting (‘supposedly veristic’) did not exactly have the ring of authenticity. The breathless energy that characterised Christopher Alden’s production carried a powerful evocation of what the return of fascism might mean on a day-to-day basis. Rafael Rojas again took the part of Cavaradossi, but the two other main parts were newly cast, with the enthusiastically received and highly charged Tosca of Takesha Meshé Kizart and Robert Hayward as a thuggish Scarpia, showing ‘the banality of evil’. Andrea Licata ‘wrang every drop of anguish from the score’ (Dreyer, 2008b, p. 1487). Opera North had staged a version of the Gershwin musical (George the composer, his brother Ira the lyricist) Of Thee I Sing in 1997/1998, and with the US presidential elections in the autumn of 2008, this was the right time to expand to a fully staged and equipped production. The work of the creative team, Caroline Gawn (director), Tim Hopkins (design) and Mark W. Dorrell, was generally met with acclaim. The work itself met with mixed responses, some critics applauding its satirical and timely relevance, others (such as Christiansen, 2008b) thought it to be ‘light-hearted escapism, without satirical teeth or moral stance’. He also observed that the score relied too heavily on reprises of the title tune and, although Gilbert & Sullivan influences were detectable, the finales were overly long. The quartet of protagonists (some of whom had appeared in the production over 10 years earlier) were praised: William Dazeley (Wintergreen), Heather Shipp (Diana Devereaux), Bibi Heal (Mary Turner) and the farcical Throttlebottom of Steven Beard. The sequel to Of Thee I Sing, Let ‘Em Eat Cake, was produced in January 2009 by the

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same creative team and many cast crossovers. By this time Barack Obama had been elected US President, and the satire on an ex-president desperate to return to office seemed ill-timed. The new production of I Capuleti e i Montecchi, another adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, made connections with the Shakespeare season earlier in the year and linked with the autumn’s politics theme through its interpretation. Orpha Phelan had directed it as set in a sectarian conflict zone, juxtaposing political conflict with a tight focus on the lovers, at times illustrated through doubling (an aerial artist performing as Juliet in a hallucination sequence). Leslie Travers’s austere setting seemed in part to echo the relative austerity of Bellini’s Shakespeare adaptation; different in character from Gounod’s opera. The loose series of Opera North’s concert performances, started so successfully during the period of renovation in 2005/ 2006, continued with Richard Strauss’s Elektra under Richard Farnes. The company was not limiting itself to operas that could be performed at the Grand Theatre (the pit is too small for a full Wagner or Strauss orchestra) and were exploring new ways of presenting work. Tim Ashley was seduced by the ‘sensational’ playing of the Orchestra of Opera North and intrigued by Farnes’s uncompromising and ‘eruptive’ interpretation, putting it in opposition to Mark Elder’s at Covent Garden around the same time, also with Susan Bullock in the title role. Her Leeds interpretation was deemed to strike an impressive balance between the dramatic needs of the role and the demands of the score. Alwyn Mellor was a ‘superior Chrysotemis’ (Ashley, 2008). The opening of the Howard Assembly Room (HAR) completed the final phase of the Transformation Project, brought about by patience, competence, flexibility and excellent project management by Ric Green and his team. The space was on leasehold for 97 years (rent: one peppercorn) with rights of access through Leeds Grand Theatre, both organisations holding joint insurance. Opera North holds the entertainment/alcohol licenses for the Howard Assembly Room, whereas Leeds Grand Theatre operates the bar in the Emerald Hall for public performances (Opera North Finance Report, September 2008). It functions both as an old and a new space. Designed by George Corson and James Watson, it opened in 1879 for ‘respectable entertainment’, with a name to set it apart from pub or music hall based establishments. It was used as a cinema from 1911 and had seating for over 1000 patrons. It was closed in 1985, with patched up fire damage, false ceilings and other problems taking their toll. There was an initial attempt by Leeds City Council at restoring the space in the early 1990s, but there was an under-estimation in relation to the costs, and so the core space was refurbished and then money ran out for the front of house areas. While it

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was made usable then as much-needed rehearsal space for the company, it was not in a state to be put to use as a public space, due to safety and access issues. Over the years, Opera North had acquired money from various agencies to restore areas of the Grand Theatre — a pigeon-infested space above the Grand Hall was turned into a new office suite, which linked through to the technical offices. It was handed back to the staff of the Grand Theatre when Opera North moved into Premier House next door. Now at last the company had a flexible space, refurbished to high standards, with a lot of consideration of its acoustic properties. The Grand Hall, including a gallery space, next to the Assembly Room, was also restored and could now be used as an interval bar for the Grand Theatre, a foyer for the Assembly Room, or as a space for pre-show talks and receptions. Hansel and Gretel was the first public performance in the space opening on 11 December 2008. Projects Director Dominic Gray, his department in charge of programming events, wanted the Assembly Room to feel ‘a bit like a kitchen, a place where you make things, whether you are an orchestra or a bunch of nine-year-olds’. Charlotte Higgins called the space ‘a unique laboratory in which to mix the elements of opera’s future’ (Higgins, 2009). To stress the interdisciplinary agenda for the space, its first event after the official opening was the sound and light installation Chorus by United Visual Artists, with a soundtrack by Mira Calix. A site specific response to the newly restored performance space, Chorus was ‘a kinetic array of giant pendulums of light and sound, suspended from the ceiling’. The concept arose from the search for a simple and unifying relationship between light and opera. The movement of light and sound invited people to move through the space and be immersed in the experience. Each repeated performance had subtle rhythmical variations, with no two performances the same. Each pendulum had a unique score, an individual voice which could be appreciated by the audience as they moved through the space. The installation attracted more than 3000 visitors.18 A new artists’ entrance for the Grand Theatre, the Howard Assembly Room and Premier House opened in April 2009 on New Briggate. With the two new public spaces and an emerging programme of arts, screen and recital events, early 2009 was a heady time for Opera North. The premiere of the new commission, Skin Deep, added greatly to this atmosphere. A satirical take on plastic surgery, it had a score by David Sawer and a libretto by successful comedy writer Armando Iannuci. Director Richard Jones had been heavily involved with the work’s development form an early stage. It focused on plastic surgery in quite extreme forms — the surgeon Dr Needlemeier’s clinic ran with the slogan ‘Putting right what nature got wrong’. Stewart Laing’s alpine setting made for some ironically twee imagery, juxtaposed by a pink waste bin which all but filled the stage by 18

Chorus Installation: http://www.operanorth.co.uk/projects/chorus

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the last act (anti-septic, five-star and largely pink’, Dreyer, 2009, p. 344). This bin contained discarded body parts and was being developed into an elixir of youth by Dr Needlemeier. Skin Deep was labelled as an operetta, a genre where new compositions and commissions are quite rare, and greeted with high expectations. It also attracted attention for its marketing campaign, coordinated with design themes and trading heavily on the satirical and parodic. Indeed, the libretto made amusing and sharp reading, but critics and audiences seemed to miss exactly these elements in performance. There was too much detail in the text for the audience to follow and the libretto lacked the ‘pared down quality’ needed. While score (inventive rhythms and writing for percussion, ‘Stravinskyan clarity and economy’, Christiansen, 2009a) and libretto were admired individually, they were not necessarily an ideal match, as the libretto was deemed too dense to communicate effectively. The brisk pace of the score (to accommodate all the words?) was seen as lacking variation overall and the plot did not always enable clear comic signifiers. Martin Dreyer (2009, p. 344) commented that ‘Richard Jones’s production bends over backwards to extract some theatricality from an inherently verbal scenario’ for what could be ‘an amusing one-acter’. The opera’s topic ensured that puns to do with ‘cutting’ and ‘surgery’ were fairly prominent in reviews — the cast, chorus, orchestra and conductor Richard Farnes won praise for their committed performances, however, particularly Geoffrey Dolton (Needlemeier), Heather Shipp (Donna) and Janis Kelly (Lania). Overall, plastic surgery seemed to be too obvious a target for satire and Iannuci might have engaged with something that had more relevance to contemporary UK politics. In spring 2009, the ACE-commissioned report on the Royal Opera House North scheme was made public. The proposal was that the company would lend its name to work shown in Manchester (it was understood from the report that no personnel from the Royal Opera House would transfer to Manchester). The report, fronted by Graham Marchant, concluded that the scheme was not currently viable. The considerable cost (estimated at around £400,000 per performance and requiring £15m extra funding from ACE per year) was a factor, but so was the effect of the economic downturn that had started in 2008. Manchester City Council was still keen to increase the number of opera performances to a Leeds level and to have opera produced in Manchester. The success of the biannual Manchester International Festival, which specialised in new work, went some way towards this. One of the 2009 Festival’s most prominent features was a new opera by Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, Primadonna. It was produced and rehearsed at Opera North with some of the company’s regular singers, such as Janis Kelly in the title role and Jonathan Summers as Phillipe. Opera North had shown some interesting ‘clusters’ of work by programming seasons — the Shakespeare season of 2008 was an example of this. The whole 2008/2009 season had a red thread of light work (without using the term in a derogatory

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manner) running through it: the two Gershwin musicals, Skin Deep and the revival of Shostakovich’s operetta-musical hybrid Paradise Moscow, in April 2009. This production had previously been shown in 2001 and now once again split the critics between the assertions that this was ‘the silliest thing Shostakovich ever wrote’ (Hickling, 2009a) and that its imperfections should be embraced, and Pountney’s intelligent, energetic and pleasingly surreal production relished: ‘When did you last see a dancing Stalin or a fridge with legs?’ (Brown, 2009). It was revived by Caroline Clegg, starred Stummer Strallen in the role of Lidochka, and was once again conducted by James Holmes. Opera North has recently become so engrossed with the lighter repertory that it had started to seem more like Operetta North. And if a new, uneven satire on plastic surgery at least showed invention the mounting of two obscure musicals about electoral politics didn’t repay the investment. But to see the company crackle through Verdi’s Don Carlos with such conviction is more than enough to make you forgive past eccentricities. […] this is possibly his [Richard Farnes’s] finest achievement yet. (Fisher, 2009)

The spring season’s highlight was a revival of Tim Albery’s 1993 production of Don Carlos, conducted by Richard Farnes. Andrew Porter’s translation was projected with ‘startling clarity’ by the cast lead by Julian Gavin (Carlos), William Dazeley (Posa), Brindley Sherratt (Philipp II) and Janice Watson (Elizabeth). The production communicated the life-draining atmosphere of the Spanish court. Richard Farnes extracted Verdian ‘essence’ (Tim Ashley, see above). Andrew Clark remarked that Don Carlos was written ‘for a bigger platform than the theatres of northern England, but the chance to eavesdrop on intimate conversations in the corridors of power reminds us that Don Carlos is a private drama trapped inside a great opera’ (Clark, 2009). The season was rounded off with a new production of The Abduction from the Seraglio (Mozart). The opera is written in the ‘Singspiel’ tradition with linking dialogues between arias and requires singers of great virtuosity. Seraglio had not been performed as frequently as his other works in the United Kingdom for various reasons, including translation and its complex, historically specific context (less flexible than works such as The Magic Flute or Don Giovanni). Richard Morrison, more directly, cited the problems of a ‘tissue-thin plot and fiendishly stratospheric extended arias’ (Morrison, 2009). Seraglio is often quoted as representing Westernised notions and stereotypes about far and middle Eastern countries and cultures, first formulated by Edward Said in his well-known study Orientalism (1978) and requires either an approach that historicises its inherent world view, or re-contextualises it. Tim Hopkins had chosen the latter and his production, in his own stage and video designs, and in a translation he had collaborated on with academic Nicholas Ridout, blended deconstruction with political provocation. Pasha Selim, a ‘Westerner’ who has embraced an Islamic worldview in this production, denounced Western violence towards the end

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of the opera, and created a deliberate confusion between East and West. While some critics rejected the production outright, others found it thought-provoking and surreally amusing in turn, with a light, ‘Pythonesque touch’ (Morrison, 2009) to counteract the tug-of-love between Constanze, Belmonte and the Pasha. The cast (including a speaking Mute, sometimes appearing in a Panda costume and commenting on the action) won favour: Kate Valentine in her role debut as Constanze, Allan Clayton as Belmonte, Nicholas Sharratt as Pedrillo, Elena Xanthoudakis as Blonde and the Osmin of Clive Bayley. In August 2009, Opera North took three of its recent ‘light’ productions to the Bregenz Festival on Lake Konstanz: Paradise Moscow, Skin Deep and Of Thee I Sing were well received in the ‘Festspielhaus’, the site of smaller and more leftfield choices that accompany the spectacle of the stage on the lake productions each season.

2009/2010 The autumn season started with Tim Albery’s reworking of his Così fan tutte, first seen in 2004, its visual hallmark, a camera obscura, put the audience in the role of observing a scientific experiment (or in a voyeurist position, depending on their reading of the device). A strong quartet of lovers found critical favour: Elizabeth Atherton (Fiordiligi), Victoria Simmonds (Dorabella), Allan Clayton (Ferrando) and Quirijn de Lang (Guglielmo). Geoffrey Dolton performed a shrewd Don Alfonso, initiator of the opera’s experiment, the fidelity test, and Amy Freston was a lively and versatile Despina. Werther by Jules Massenet, the first new production of 2009/2010, is not an opera that is frequently performed in the United Kingdom. Tim Ashley described the opera, an adaptation of Goethe’s 1774 epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, as ‘a very French examination of late 18th century German anguish’ (Ashley, 2009). Tom Cairns directed the production in Hildegard Bechtler’s design, set at the end of the Weimar Republic, the early 1930s, in provincial Germany. The German television serial Heimat, which chronicled life in a small West German village throughout the 20th century and was popular in the United Kingdom, was a significant visual influence on the production’s aesthetic. The troubled outsider Werther’s seemingly unrequited love for Charlotte was here put in the context of a society lacking self-awareness and being helpless in the face of his strong and relentless feelings. It is typical of an evening that deliberately asks more questions than it answers that we should be left wondering which is the greater obsession: his desire for her, or her almost pathological determination to live by the frightful codes of bourgeois rectitude she has adopted. (Ashley, 2009).

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Paul Nilon (Werther) and Alice Coote (Charlotte) were praised for potently emotional and musically intelligent performances and Richard Farnes in the pit gave the score a ‘pulsating grandeur, never letting it sink into lugubrious pomposity’ (Christiansen, 2009b). Another ambitious new production, The Adventures of Mr Brouček, added to Opera North’s commitment to the work of Leoš Janáček. Adapted from the satirical novels by Svatopluk Čech, the opera and its protagonist (a character that represents both strengths and weaknesses of his country) have nationalistic colourings, posing complexities in intercultural translation. Other complexities include the two journeys Brouček undertakes: to the moon, and back in time to 1400s Czechoslovakia. Here, the production (design: Alex Lowde) used projection to imaginative effect. John Fulljames’s production was updated to 1968, a year before the first moon landing and the Prague Spring, where Soviet tanks flattened the country’s developing liberalisation during the Cold War. Given its rare status in the UK repertoire, Andrew Clements lauded the production as a ‘collector’s item, well worth collecting’, singling out John Graham-Hall’s impressive and intelligent performance as the protagonist, with stalwart support from company regulars Donald Maxwell, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Jonathan Best and Anne-Sophie Duprels. Conductor Martin Andre made sure that some ‘unmistakably top-drawer Janáček’ was presented with appropriate musical polish’ (Clements, 2009). With the UK elections coming up in the spring of 2010, the company went through an exercise to model different funding scenarios in order to be prepared for a likely period of austerity and funding cuts (Opera North Board Minutes, 6 November 2009). Opera North took the sixth highest cut of any UK arts organisation when the ACE had to absorb a cut of £19m in early 2010 (Hammond, 2010). In its third commission over a period of just two years and its first opera production in the Howard Assembly Room, Opera North premiered a new opera for children, Swanhunter. It was another collaborative venture by the successful Pinocchio partnership, composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton. The plot was adapted from the Finnish national epos, the Kalevala, and told the story of Lemminkäinen, who travels north to find a wife and encounters many obstacles and dangers before his dead body is ‘reassembled’ by the power of his mother’s singing. Dove’s distinctive style and scoring for six instruments and six singers, incorporating many allusions to Stravinsky and Orff, among others, was called ‘consummately theatrical’ by Richard Morrison: It conjures a multitude of moods from scanty means — only six singers, multiparting, and six instrumentalists, including a prominent accordion. It bulges with memorable lyrical contours (I hesitate to call them good tunes, in case that monstrous accusation gets Dove drummed out of the Very Serious Composers Union). (Morrison, 2009)

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As the opera was set to tour small spaces throughout the north of England in the following months, simplicity and versatility were key ingredients in Clare Whistler’s staging — for some this meant the production showed ‘resourcefulness without the resources’ (Morrison, 2009), for others it was too sparse: ‘it felt like a rare instance of an opera company biting off less than it can chew’ (Hickling, 2009b). In the close-up space of the Howard Assembly Room and its touring venues, accompanied by workshop activity led by the ensemble of excellent and versatile singers, Swanhunter proved a memorable introduction to opera for many northern children. Così fan tutte was revived with a partly new cast in January, which also featured a revival of the enormously popular Bohème by Phyllida Lloyd. The central event of Opera North’s winter season was a new production of Ruddigore, which turned out to be one of the company’s biggest successes. Jo Davies, well known at Opera North due to her work with directors such as Phyllida Lloyd, directed a production that had both period and contemporary appeal. Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1887 follow-up work to the hugely successful Mikado was here set in the 1920s instead of the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Richard Hudson (set) and Anna Watson (lighting) created a sepia-coloured, silent film-inspired scenography. The story of the witch’s curse on the Baronets of Ruddigore comes with farcical, naval and ghostly elements in turn and has plenty of memorable characters — notably the eager-to-reform Baronet and Mad Margaret, whom he marries after he is freed of the curse, as his brother is rediscovered. Heather Shipp’s Mad Margaret, wheeling the detritus of her life about in a pram, is the victim of a world only fractionally less crazed than she is. Wickedly funny, yet unsettling, Shipp’s performance is typical of the evening as a whole. […] this is one of the great G&S stagings — on a par with Jonathan Miller’s famous production of The Mikado and just as worthy of cult status in years to come. (Ashley, 2010)

The apparition of the ancestral ghosts at the Murgatroyd residence (‘When the Night Wind Howls’) was achieved through traditional magicians’ tricks, startling audiences and prompting comparisons with ghostly scenes in The Flying Dutchman and Der Freischütz. The famous patter song ‘My eyes are fully open’ was complemented by Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd alluding to the MP’s expenses scandal in his updated aria. John Wilson conducted an ensemble of singers that was showered with praise: Grant Doyle (Robin Oakapple/Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd), Amy Freston (Rose Maybud), Richard Burkhard (Sir Despard Murgatroyd), Anne-Marie Owens (Dame Hannah), Steven Page (Sir Roderick Murgatroyd) and Hal Cazalet (Dick Dauntless). The chorus, including sailors and highly strung bridesmaids, throwing confetti at the slightest mention of a wedding, contributed carefully observed and comical character studies.

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2009/2010 — Ruddigore. Grant Boyle (Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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In early 2010, Opera North received an ACE Sustain grant and stronger box office sales provided a welcome boost, with a slight surplus in sight for end of financial year. West Yorkshire Grants confirmed its financial support for Opera North over the following three years (Opera North Board Minutes, 12 February 2010). The new production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda was directed and designed by Antony McDonald and conducted by Guido Johannes Rumstad. Following Schiller’s 1800 play about the two Queens in 1587, the opera shows a confrontation between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I, something that has no historical foundation, but clearly prioritises dramaturgy over documented events. Taking liberties with history is commonplace in film and stage adaptations, and Antony McDonald juxtaposition of the Elizabethan period, Donizetti’s lifetime and more contemporary times through costume seemed justified and provided a stimulating and credible context for one of history’s great feuds (Morrison, 2010). Sarah Connolly gave a dramatically complex and virtuosic performance as Mary and Antonia Cifrone countered her with imposing and forceful intensity as Elizabeth. Opera North’s acclaimed production of Rusalka was revived (and set for a transfer to Opera Australia in Sydney soon after) and proved to be capable of rousing strong emotions once again: ‘Fuchs’s presentation is quite capable of chilling the blood, though it comes at the expense of melting one’s heart’ (Hickling, 2010a). Since the opening of the Howard Assembly Room, Opera North Projects had been able to expand its commissioning. An example of their wide-ranging activities: a series of workshops between singer and writer Jessica Walker and director Neil Bartlett led to a show named The Girl I Left Behind Me, premiered in late May 2010. It adapted songs of famous male impersonators with stories from their lives as caught between their male and female identities. The show toured to other cities and was seen as ‘a celebratory yet also piercingly poignant one-woman guide to a neglected chapter in showbiz and lesbian history’ (Taylor, 2010). In a climate of actual and looming funding cuts, a strategy of maintaining Opera North’s high artistic standards, of keeping the company structurally intact, of maintaining performance numbers and touring was agreed. Costs were to be reduced in all areas where possible and new venues and their financial implications were to be explored. In actual figures, this meant a 5% cut across all departments (non-salary and administration budgets), a pay freeze, a 5% guest fee reduction, the postponement of a new production of The Marriage of Figaro, more short-term contracts, rentals, co-productions and reliance on the Future Fund for certain types of expenditure. Michael Beverley’s term as Chairman of the Opera North Board came to a close after 12 years. In his valedictory thoughts, he stated that the key to Opera North’s identity was its artistic excellence. This long-term success required judgement and courage — the judgement to assess how to balance the various competing forces of financial

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prudence and artistic ambition; the courage to eschew the commonplace and defend artistic goals at a time of austerity (Opera North Board Minutes, 13 August 2010). Beverley was succeeded by Derek Netherton, who was the Chairman of Greggs PLC and had a track record in investment banking. Netherton’s mission was to build on Opera North’s achievements, and not to change the company’s core values. The challenges awaiting his judgement and leadership included tackling the deficit and finding alternatives to ACE bailouts, addressing falling box office figures and the relationship with Leeds City Council, as well as managing the relationship with Leeds Grand Theatre. The board also had the ambition of raising the relatively newly established Future Fund to £10m over the following three years.

2010/2011 The Adventures of Pinocchio was revived by Martin Duncan to start the 2010 autumn season. The production had lost none of its appeal and came mostly with the same cast as in 2007, Victoria Simmonds repeating her success in the demanding title role. Since 2007, the production had travelled to Chemnitz and to Minnesota and was to be revived in Moscow soon after its Leeds run. The opera had also been newly produced by the State Opera in Stuttgart, Germany, countering the trend of many new works being performed just once. Pinocchio was released on DVD in 2009, also winning a Manchester Evening News Award. The first new production of the season was The Turn of the Screw, not previously performed by Opera North, directed by Italian-South African Alessandro Talevi, with designs by Madeleine Boyd (set/costumes) and Matthew Haskins (light). Rupert Christiansen expressed excitement at the production’s musical, visual and conceptual qualities — not least its ambiguity: ‘Talevi’s interpretation poses many questions but offers no answers. Subtle, suggestive and ridiculously rehearsed, it keeps us guessing and imagining. I found it absolutely enthralling’. He described Richard Farnes’s conducting as ‘fiercely urgent’ and the cast, led by Elizabeth Atherton as the Governess, as ‘possessed by the drama they are enacting’ (Christiansen, 2010). As part of the government’s spending review, cuts to the ACE budget of around £100m between 2011 and 2015 were announced in late October 2010. Touring and audience development funds were to be reduced by up to 64% and the ACE was to halve its administration costs. Although it was yet to be determined how the cuts were going to be distributed, it was

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already clear that regularly funded organisations like Opera North would have a 15% grant reduction in real terms to contend with, spread over three years and starting in the autumn of 2011.19 The autumn season extended into Christmas time, with Pinocchio for the family audiences and The Merry Widow for light and festive entertainment. Some critics made connections between the looming government cuts to the arts and the financially beleaguered state of Pontevedro, the widow Hannah Glawari’s home country. In the operetta, she is spending her considerable fortune in Paris, and the task of making sure her money stays in Pontevedro is given to her old flame, Count Danilo. For a work that oscillates elegantly between abandon and cynicism, designer Leslie Travers had conjured up a set that was as versatile as it was simple, giving centre stage to the lavish costumes, for which an appeal had been launched earlier in the season. Donors could see the result of their generosity, as Stephanie Corley (Hannah) entered in ‘a blaze of bling. ‘Yet this striking young soprano, making her Opera North debut, has a diamond-sharp delivery that is never outshone by her costume’ (Hickling, 2010b). Director Giles Havergal had thought about the story that takes place before the curtain rises and staged it as a ‘prologue’ during the overture. It showed young love destroyed: Danilo was forbidden from marrying Hannah by his father and Hannah was married off to a rich man, much older than her, who then died on their honeymoon. The point of the prologue was to show that not much time had passed between Hannah and Danilo’s enforced separation and their meeting in the Pontevedrian embassy. For this reason, it was decided to cast Hannah and Danilo with younger singers than has become the convention. It gave their tempestuous interactions a different edge from the nostalgic glow they can sometimes exhibit. There were many highlights, notably the sassy Grisettes from the Opera North Chorus, led by Amy Freston’s Valencienne: her stylish singing and her Can-Can skills were an enormous success with audiences. As Opera North had performed through the Christmas season into January, there was hardly any interruption between seasons. The next work was based on the ongoing creative partnership between David Pountney and the company, and once more demonstrated Opera North’s adventurous spirit. The Bregenz Festival (of which Pountney was the director until 2014) had led the way in a retrospective and rediscovery of Soviet composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who had to flee both Nazi and Stalinist prosecution in his lifetime. His opera The Passenger in Pountney’s own, acclaimed production, had also premiered in

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For further details on the 2010 announcement of cuts to the Arts see: www.artscouncil.org.uk/.../further_information_funding_decisions_271010

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2010/2011 — The Merry Widow. Ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Bregenz, and transferred to ENO in September 2011. Another opera, The Portrait, based on a short story by Gogol, was given a new production at Opera North, directed by Pountney. It is the story of a starving artist, Chartkov, who buys what turns out to be a portrait with magical properties. His fortune is suddenly made and fame follows suit. Responding to the high society’s wishes and producing less relevant art, he loses his muse, an allegorical figure, but here personified on stage. Hugh Canning thought that ‘Pountney’s use of Katie Mitchell’s “instant camera” technique is perhaps the most compelling example of this kind of theatre I have seen: we witness Chartkov’s extended death rattle in close-up, and luckily Paul Nilon is a sufficiently penetrating actor-singer to rivet the attention’ (Canning, 2011a). The production found aesthetically and conceptually poignant ways of showing the effects of Stalinism on artistic integrity — Weinberg himself had to produce work where artistic choices were coded. In March, the Opera North Board considered the impact of the funding cuts, announced in the autumn of 2010. The view was that the company’s status as a national company in the north had not been given enough weight of consideration, as it had fared less well than all other major opera companies and symphony orchestras in the United Kingdom. By comparison: ENO would have its grant frozen in 2012/2013 and would suffer a cut of 2.3% (11% in real terms) over a period of three years. Opera North’s grant was to be cut by 5% in 2012/2013 (7.5% and 7.8% over the following two years), meaning a cut of 6.6% in real terms and a reduction of 15% compared to 2010/2011. The company also had to absorb a 15% funding cut from its two other main funders, Leeds City Council and West Yorkshire Grants, with the latter cancelling its contribution entirely in 2012/ 2013. The threats (or worst case scenarios) arising from this situation were changes to the Opera North main-stage programme, cessation of the Education and Projects departments, or the realignment as a part-time company. In the short term, the 2012 spring season and some touring were also threatened, and the possibility of increased ticket prices needed to be considered. A reduction of overheads by 5% was decided, as well as a renewed pay freeze and some targeted staff reductions (Opera North Board Paper, 30 March 2011). A new Carmen was met with anticipation, the cast being a mix of established singers, well connected with the company (Peter Auty as Don Jose, Anne-Sophie Duprels as Micaela), role-debuts by well-loved singers (Heather Shipp in the title role) and new young artists (Kostas Smoriginas as Escamillo). Director Daniel Kramer had received attention for the energy and inventiveness of his productions and Carmen was a highly paced, confrontational interpretation, set in Sevile, Ohio. Much was made of the fact that its inhabitants spoke French, although this is rarely brought up as a criticism when La Bohème, set in Paris, is performed in Italian, or when Fidelio, set in Seville, is performed in German. The look of the production, designed by Soutra

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Gilmour and Gabrielle Dalton, included trailer trash, pensioners in leisure wear, factory girls in no-frills working clothes and Escamillo owning a fighter dog rather than wearing a torero attire. The production appealed to younger audiences (and those tired of the clichés associated with Carmen) and made other viewers miss the folklore and regional flair they expected of the opera. Stripping back the narrative to focus on Carmen’s personality and independence, and on the men who want to control and own her, revealed some hard-hitting and at times violent content. ‘The scenario starts off intriguingly, with Kramer establishing a powerful atmosphere of small-town corruption and macho sexuality’ (Christiansen, 2011). Critics’ opinions were split: some believed the production started strongly and tailed off after Act 2, others thought the first two acts were too busy and overloaded, whereas the later ones were ‘sharper and leaner’ (Christiansen, 2011) — Andrew Clark remarked that the ‘abstract black frame silhouetting the crowd as a Greek chorus could have come from a different production’ (Clark, 2011). The decision to make some cuts angered some, too, notably the absence of the smugglers’ quintet. Andreas Delfs conducted the first run, and Oliver von Dohnányi took over in the spring season. Following the success of the Howard Assembly Room as a space for small-scale and family opera, a new commission premiered in the space in Spring 2011: Cautionary Tales! was a collaboration between composer Erollyn Wallen and Pia Furtado, who had adapted Hilaire Belloc’s 1907 stories and also directed the production. The stories of Matilda ‘little liar’, Henry King who ate lots of string and Rebecca who slammed doors might seem archaic to the 21st century child at first, but when asked, the young viewers invariably named Jim being eaten by a lion or the deaths of the other children as their favourite parts. They understood the tongue-in-cheek nature of the stylish production and placed it in the past, while still being thrilled by being close-up to performers, set and musicians in the round (design: Madeleine Boyd). The excellent multi-tasking cast were Mark LeBrocq, Katherine Broderick, Emma Carrington and Geoffrey Dolton, led from the piano by Anthony Kraus. Fidelio was a revival of Scottish Opera’s 1994 production, conducted by its former Music Director, Richard Armstrong, and revived by its director Tim Albery. The musical contrasts of the score were reflected in the poignant scenographic contrasts between the claustrophobic boxes in which the lives of the protagonists (imprisoned or not) unfolded and the exterior world, resembling a Caspar David Friedrich landscape. ‘The set suggests dramatic fractures between Singspiel and heroic opera’ (Cooper, 2011). The production, sung in German, was not heavily coded, although the final image of Leonore and Florestan walking to freedom, but towards an urban ghetto, offered reflection to the aftermath of their story as well as the world’s progression into the 20th century in a ‘flash forward’ moment.

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Yet at the very end, where the performance is delirious with joy, Leonore and Florestan escape to a world of high-rises and urban bleakness. It would be interesting to know if they retain their high spirits in the face of that more ubiquitous tyranny. (Tanner, 2011)

Carmen was carried over into the spring season, which also featured a new production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, a ‘genuine and complete artistic triumph’ (Anonymous, 2011). Some want to confess, some to justify their crimes. Janáček makes no judgement, but performs the authorial miracle of letting them speak for themselves. (Picard, 2011)

This production is discussed together with The Makropulos Case in Perspective 3. Together, Carmen, Fidelio and From the House of the Dead constituted a themed season on the issue of liberty. There was a great air of expectation building up before Opera North’s first instalment of its first own Ring Cycle. The givens: firstly, this was an excellent and timely challenge for the orchestra under Richard Farnes, secondly, Leeds Grand Theatre could not accommodate the number of musicians necessary and finally, the climate of recession and cuts was not conducive to a fully staged Ring. The success of Opera North’s semi-staged performances in Leeds Town Hall in recent years had fostered a concept that added projections to the staging, but also embraced the concert aesthetic, with the orchestra behind the singers on stage. Tim Ashley called it ‘one of the most enthralling Wagner performances of recent years. There’s none of the reverential solemnity that has a habit of creeping into some Wagner interpretations, and the whole thing is thrillingly clear and intense’ (Ashley, 2011). Hugh Canning remarked that ‘this Rheingold demonstrates exactly what is at stake if cuts further damage Opera North’s infrastructure’ (Canning, 2011b). Cast and creative team were lauded almost unanimously and the acoustics of Leeds Town Hall, often described as echoing and somewhat problematic, seemed to match the work extremely well. On tour, The Sage was a particular favourite with cast, audiences and critics, captured below: To cap it all, as I crossed the Tyne after the performance, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge was illuminated with the colours of the rainbow. I felt like a god entering Valhalla myself. (Canning, 2011b)

Das Rheingold is discussed as part of reflections on the Opera North Ring in Perspective 3. The community project Beached (composer: Harvey Brough, librettist: Lee Hall) was planned as the culmination of Opera North Education’s residency in Bridlington after several years, in July 2011. In the event, it was an inclusive and imaginative project, enjoyed by audiences and its 400 performers, but a storm of controversy hit the process around 10 days before it opened.

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Librettist Lee Hall wrote an article for The Guardian, published on 3 July 2011,20 in which he outlined problems with the primary school where the majority of the children involved went: after several requests for changes to the libretto, there was one with which Hall did not feel able to comply: one of the main character’s explanation why a climate of homophobia drove him away from his hometown. This seemed to be partly about terminology (the word ‘queer’) and partly about the children involved being considered too young to understand references to characters’ sexuality. In its efforts to save the project, Opera North was seen by some to not sufficiently support Hall, and the company was attacked for homophobia alongside the primary school. This turned into a veritable media storm, with thousands of people joining Hall’s Facebook group or tweeting their support, hundreds of comments under articles online, hundreds of protest e-mails to Richard Mantle and interviews with him and Hall on BBC Radio 4 Front Row and BBC TV Breakfast. While the official position was that the school had pulled out of the project, which would therefore not be able to be performed, talks were going on away from the media spotlight and community groups made a decision they wanted to carry on rehearsing. About five days after the story broke, Opera North was able to confirm that the project was to go ahead (the word ‘queer’ had been replaced by ‘gay’) — and that it was the parents’ decision as to whether their children would still be involved. In internal analysis, it was concluded that the story going viral had escalated the problems, but that diplomatic efforts and eventual compromising on all sides had at least meant that a substantial sum of public money and a community’s huge commitment to the project had not been for nothing. There is a summary of the crisis as it unfolded on Lyn Gardner’s Guardian theatre blog.21 The Opera North stores had been at Gildersome for a number of years, and the sets for 36–40 productions were held there. The co-production and rental stream of the company’s work had grown over the last decade. Space was getting tight and the building was in a poor state of repair. In 2011, a new warehouse at Evanston Avenue in Kirkstall was purchased, which suited requirements better (Opera North Board Minutes, 16 September 2011). In July, the company was saddened by the death of Lord Harewood, its founder and first Managing Director between 1978 and 1981. The last Opera North performance he had attended was Das Rheingold at Leeds Town Hall just a month before he died, managing to stay for the duration (no interval) despite his evident frailty. Harewood had been an invaluable supporter Lee Hall: ‘I Will Fight This’ (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jul/03/lee-hall-opera-north?guni=Article:in%20body%20link&commentpage=1) Lyn Gardner: ‘Lee Hall and Opera North: How the Story Went Viral’ (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2011/jul/05/lee-hall-opera-northfirestorm?intcmp=239&guni=Article:in%20body%20link).

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and critical friend of the company and the Vice-Chairman of the Opera North Board for over 25 years. The company made a big contribution to the memorial service at Harewood House in the autumn of 2011, with Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music and singers such as Dame Josephine Barstow and Sir John Tomlinson performing in George Harewood’s honour. Richard Mantle paid a personal tribute: Speaking personally, there is no one who has had more impact on my career in opera than George Harewood: he taught me the willingness to take risks, determination to stand up for what we do, resilience in the face of financial challenges and courage to allow artistic vision to flourish. He was also a loyal friend, counsellor and an inspiration. The fact that Opera North has blossomed into one of the most innovative and successful opera companies in the UK, critically regarded and admired by audiences, is a testament to Lord Harewood’s vision and we and our communities are all the better for it. (Mantle, 2011)

2010/2011 had been a very exciting year of work, with some benchmarks, such as the start of the Opera North Ring and the UK premiere of The Portrait, and plenty of critical acclaim. It had also been extremely eventful, the company having to confront cuts to its core funding and media controversy.

2011/2012 The autumn season opened with revivals of Madama Butterfly and Ruddigore and a new production of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, an adaptation of Pushkin’s story of the same name. Neil Bartlett’s new production of The Queen of Spades is perfectly respectable. Unflamboyant and perfectly observant, it puts Tchaikovsky’s opera on the stage with a minimum of fuss. With no axes to grind and no concepts to impose, it allows Pushkin’s story of obsession to unfold clearly enough. (Clements, 2011)

Adventurous opera-goers might have been discouraged by the review above, those longing for more literal readings of the repertoire might have rushed to book their tickets. Opinions over Neil Bartlett’s new production in Kandis Cook’s design were split, but it was an exercise in clear storytelling. The production was sung in a new English translation by Neil Bartlett and Opera North’s Head of Music, Martin Pickard. The principal parts were cast with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Hermann), Orla Boylan (Lisa) and Dame Josephine Barstow (Countess). Parallels were drawn with Lloyd-Roberts’s portrayal of the outsider Peter Grimes

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and of Hermann, who cuts himself loose from society and the woman he is in love with. Barstow’s compelling and intense performance showed the Countess as a woman who could still draw on her former erotic magnetism. Jonathan Summers (Tomsky) and William Dazeley (Jeletzky) contributed fine character portraits, with powerful and differentiated musicianship from the chorus, children’s chorus and orchestra under Richard Farnes. For the winter and spring seasons, productions covered a wide range of period and genre. Strong and controversial women from the 18th (Cleopatra), the 19th (Norma) as well as the early (Cio-Cio San in Butterfly) and mid-20th (Julie in Carousel) century provided a red thread. Firstly, Giulio Cesare opened on a revolving set of great versatility, designed by Leslie Travers. Its dark exterior, reminiscent of the base of a pyramid, bore the letters SPQR and showed Egypt under military occupation. The set transformed into ramparts of a palace and, once turned, revealed courtyards and narrow passageways, then turning into a gilded interior, Cleopatra’s palace and later on the prison where Cornelia is held by Achilla. Tim Albery directed with clarity, keeping monarchic pomp to a minimum — Cleopatra and Ptolemy were dressed in royal blue, with long golden fan-like fingernails for ceremonial occasions. Cesar’s appearance showed the reality of his military campaign, rather than a glorified image of an emperor, and Pamela Helen Stephen lent the character an elegant simplicity, both vocally and physically. As the heavy swirl of the overture erupts into a biting fugue, we see Pompey’s murder at the hands of Tolomeo (James Laing). A giggling sociopath in an electric blue suit, he is the polar opposite to Pamela Helen Stephen’s weary, austere Cesare. (Picard, 2012)

‘Sarah Tynan’s Cleopatra’ sent critics and audiences into raptures, and there was a much-noted company debut from young mezzo Kathryn Rudge as Sesto, with stalwart support from Ann Taylor (Cornelia) and Jonathan Best (Achilla). The next exceptional female heroine, Norma, served a hermetic community of pagans and druids as their priestess, hiding her love for the occupier Pollione (and their two children). The Roman-Gallic plot was here set in the 19th century, showing the rural, religious community exploited by rich landowners. The action was placed in a wooden frame (Charles Edwards, with costumes by Sue Willmington), with a giant fallen tree, full of runic carvings, diagonally dividing the space. It was from this tree that the famous aria ‘Casta Diva’ was delivered by Dutch soprano Annemarie Kremer in her UK debut, with powerful intensity. Keri Alkema matched her as Adalgisa, Pollione’s new love interest. Christopher Alden’s production provided interesting impulses for this love triangle, as well as attention to detail for the portrayal of the pagan community, ‘Nothing played by the book but his Norma touches greatness’ was one of the verdicts. Praise was also won by the ‘scarily stern’ chorus for their

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singing and by the orchestra under Oliver von Dohnányi for their ‘elegance and finesse’ [where] ‘scene after scene pierces the core of the drama’ (Hall, 2012). The production won an ‘Achievement in Opera’ award at the Theatre Awards UK, as well as being nominated for an inaugural Opera Award. The production had been made possible through a generous gift from the legacy of Gertrude Pfaffinger, who was a highly respected maker of props and costumes and had worked for Opera North many times over the years. ‘Opera North mounted this production in her memory, with affection and an enormous sense of gratitude’ (Opera North Press Release, January 2012). The shadow of the 2011 cuts loomed large and while the second instalment of the Ring, Die Walküre, was preserved, plans for the spring season had changed. No planned productions were cancelled, but Don Giovanni and The Makropulos Case were postponed to the autumn season and Ruddigore went on a short tour with the Northern Sinfonia. It was decided to build on the company’s excellent track record in producing musical theatre of the highest standard, and the choice was made to programme Carousel (Rodgers and Hammerstein). Reactions to the announcement were not unanimously positive at first. The company was criticised for programming a musical to plug financial gaps, and Carousel was seen as a strange choice by some (‘a mawkish and sentimental piece about a wife-beater is no replacement for a real opera season’, Allison, 2012, p. 131). These reservations were expressed before the production opened, however. This was the first production of Carousel by a UK opera company. The story, adapted from the Austrian playwright Ferenc Molnar’s source Liliom, is set in a fishing village on the US East Coast by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It tells the story of determined Julie Jordan and her wayward husband Billy, who gets killed in a robbery gone wrong. With hits such as ‘June is bustin’ out all over’, ‘If I loved you’ and ‘You’ll never walk alone’, Carousel has enormous audience appeal — the story of a dead father who is allowed back to earth briefly to see his daughter struggle with growing up and then graduate, touched a nerve after World War II. Billy Bigelow is a complex character, and the forgiveness of his quick temper and violence towards Julie and his daughter can sit uneasily with contemporary audiences. Jo Davies directed the production, in Anthony Ward’s elegant and versatile design, with the choreographers Kim Brandstrup (for the Act 3 ballet) and Kay Shepherd. The simple but very effective transformations from fairground to village, and to the gates of heaven in the third act, maintained the production’s fluidity and polished performances. Eric Greene as Billly and Gillene Herbert as Julie led a strong cast, including John Woodvine as the Starkeeper — ‘a top notch Opera North ensemble’ (Riches, 2012). ‘Add into the mix one of the most brilliant, pragmatic, adventurous, playful and down to earth choruses in the world — and one is hard pushed to want to create work anywhere else!’ as director Jo Davies remarked (2012, p. 2). The production played in Leeds for three weeks, toured to The

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2011/2012 — Carousel. Alex Newton (Louise), dance ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

Lowry in the spring and played the Barbican in London for a month from the middle of August. A transfer to the Théatre du Châtelet in Paris was also planned for 2013. The second part of the Ring Cycle (or the first part after the Rheingold prologue), Die Walküre, was prepared in the spring and opened at Leeds Town Hall. The incestuous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde were thrillingly captured by Erik Werner Nelson and

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Alwyn Mellor and Béla Perencz offered a differentiated portrayal of Wotan’s descent from authoritarian patriarch to tragically flawed father. There was a last-minute cast change, Kelly Cae Hogan replacing the indisposed Annalena Persson for the first two performances. Both Brünnhildes thrilled audiences (see also Perspective 2). The magisterial Fricka of Katarina Karneus, the chilling Hunding of Clive Bayley and an electrifying ensemble of eight Valkyries completed the impressive cast. Huge cheers greeted the orchestra (once again, audiences had enormously enjoyed them being an integral part of the action) under Richard Farnes. Musically, the performance was nothing less than a sensation from the first bar. (Tanner, 2012)

During the summer, there were two Opera North companies: Carousel transferred to London, with the ladies of the Opera North Chorus and a double cast for its month-long residence. The Makropulos Case was rehearsed in Leeds and then opened the Edinburgh International Festival, featuring the gentlemen of the chorus and the Orchestra of Opera North under Richard Farnes. It intrigued, delighted and confused audiences and critics and is discussed in more detail in Perspective 3. What had been deemed to be ‘an austerity year’ earlier in the year by some journalists, ended up as one of Opera North’s busiest summers. In addition, the Howard Assembly Room was now averaging around 100 performances a year and had gained a reputation for world music, folk, new commissions, chamber music recitals as well screenings and events that added contextual range to the main house productions.

2012/2013 The spring’s postponements now meant there was a strong season with three new productions lined up. The first to open was Don Giovanni, directed by Alessandro Talevi, whose house debut had been The Turn of the Screw two years previously. He had the interesting idea of Giovanni as a kind of time traveller — Donna Anna, Don Ottavio and the Commendatore were situated in the Victorian period, whereas Zerlina and Masetto lived in the 1950s. Donna Elvira was able to follow Giovanni and Leporello into the different periods, making her of an equal match for the serial seducer. The differing periods were expressed through costume and through dances in the first finale. The production also featured puppetry — see Perspective 2. William Dazeley was an elegant Giovanni, adjusting slickly to the demands of periods or situations. Alastair Miles as Leporello was equally adept at the Leporello’s clowning as he was in the darker moments of the character. Meeta Raval and Christopher

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Turner contributed vivid role debuts as Anna and Ottavio and Elizabeth Atherton excelled at the complexity of Donna Elvira’s character and arias. The rehearsals for this production are discussed in detail in Perspective 2, where there is also an account of a performance from a backstage perspective. Faust (Gounod) was delivered as a new production with a scenography that used projection onto screens and elements of the set. Directed and designed in partnership by Ran Arthur Braun and Robert Kearley, it offered a contemporary reading of the Faust myth, with opportunities for psychological insight in the simultaneity of the screen and stage narrative. Although intriguing, some were critical of the technology for lacking content, others were unhappy with what they thought was a mismatch between the plot and its 20th century realisation. Since it was produced for the cost of a revival, however, it was a valid experiment for the company and its developing relationship with new media. Peter Auty (Faust) tackled the title role with stamina, James Cresswell (Mephistophèle) played on the character’s sinister appeal and Juanita Lascarro interpreted Marguerite with lyrical intensity. The winter season spanned four centuries: Verdi, Mozart, Purcell and Poulenc, the latter two in a double bill. Tim Albery’s production of Otello was set during World War II and politicised the opera at the start, suggesting social envy and racist issues as a reason for Iago’s campaign of destruction. This context was then juxtaposed with a differentiated psychological reading of the unfolding tragedy. Ronald Samm showed an Otello ‘in extremis’, ‘wonderfully committed’, while David Kempster’s Iago oscillated between normality and ‘lethal charm’. Elena Kellessidi offered a nuanced performance as Desdemona and ‘Richard Farnes’s conducting, at once detailed and visceral, is outstanding’ (Ashley, 2013). Not exactly a ‘rarity’, Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito is nevertheless not performed very often in the United Kingdom. Conor Murphy’s minimalist set, a partition on the revolve, in turn transparent and a projection space, made for an elegant fluidity between scenes, punctuated in its monochrome style by splashes of red, supplied mainly by Vitellia’s costume and wig. The story of political manipulation overcome by true statesmanship was vividly realised through John Fulljames’s clear direction by a very committed ensemble, with Paul Nilon as Tito as ‘primus inter pares’ — a characterisation that evoked parallels with Nilon’s King Croesus some years previously. There was also a captivating trio of female voices in Annemarie Kremer (Vitellia), Helen Lepalaan (Sesto) and Kathryn Rudge (Annio). Captivating and troubled females were also the theme for a bold double bill: Dido and Aeneas and La Voix Humaine. Dramaturgically, there was a clear connection between women abandoned and their descent towards death, stylistically, it made for a ‘centuries hopping night of abandoned women’ (Morrison, 2013). Elle’s former lover in La Voix Humaine was

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performed by the same singer who sung Aeneas in Dido and there were other connections between the two operas through costume. Aletta Collins gave La Voix Humaine an unflinching directness, bordering on voyeurism, in Lesley Garrett’s intense performance (her return to the operatic stage after a long period concentrating on touring, recording and presenting). Dido, set in a single space, was also a close-up look at the Carthaginian Queen’s unravelling, achieved through multiplications of Dido (three dancers and the three witches were dressed and made up identically). Collins had made them demons of the mind, only visible to the troubled Queen. The low-ceilinged space (set: Giles Cadle, costumes: Gabrielle Dalton) and the chorus singing from the orchestra pit further enforced the entrapment felt by Dido, sung with warmth and style by Pamela Helen Stephen. Opera North Education had won a major grant from the ACE and the Department for Education to run one of the four In Harmony Sistema schemes in England. Modelled on the successful Venezuelan El Sistema, the scheme enabled the company to be in residence at Windmill Primary School in Hunslet (South Leeds), impacting on the musical education of around 450 children and their families. Run by Opera North’s Head of Education, Rebecca Walsh, the project was launched in January 2013 (see Perspective 2 for an account of the opening event) and continued with a successful concert in Leeds Town Hall, also involving the company’s chorus and orchestra. Handel’s oratorios have been given stage productions for several decades now, with The Messiah the most prominent example, but Belshazzar’s Feast also a popular choice. Having already performed a semi-staged version of Saul in Leeds Town Hall during the Transformation period, Opera North now programmed Joshua for Leeds Grand Theatre. With cuts still not allowing a full spring season, the production was not able to tour and had to be produced on a minute budget. This did not affect the vision of the director, designer and lighting designer Charles Edwards, an Opera North stalwart: he set the old testament story in the late 1940s, the period of the foundation of Israel and used the historical images of Czech photographer Rudi Weissenstein both as stimuli and as projections. Even though the near-empty stage of the Grand Theatre, open to the back wall and the wings, was only modified through the lighting design, it revealed itself as a cavernous, almost unfamiliar space. The arrival of the exhausted Jewish refugees from a hostile diaspora framed the narrative, with the ensemble of Daniel Norman (Joshua), Henry Waddington (Caleb) and Fflur Wyn and Jake Arditti as the young lovers Achsah and Othniel. Albert Herring marked the start of Opera North’s productions to celebrate Benjamin Britten’s centenary, to be continued with the Festival of Britten in the autumn. This was the first time the Howard Assembly Room was used to stage repertoire

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opera — there had of course been two family operas, commissioned by Opera North Education. The production, directed by Giles Havergal and conducted by Justin Doyle, was played in the round. Leslie Travers’s design was illuminated by many jars with light bulbs hung above the space. Lady Billows’s drawing room was cleverly transformed into Mrs Herring’s greengrocer shop and into the setting for the village fete by the cast themselves. With spectators surrounding the traverse stage on three sides and with the chamber orchestra in view, audiences found the close-up performance appealing. An ensemble piece, Herring featured many regular Opera North artists, Dame Josephine Barstow as Lady Billows, William Dazeley as Mr Gedge, Joe Shovelton as Mr Upfold, Mary Hegarty as Miss Wordsworth and Fiona Kimm as Mrs Herring among them. There were also noted company debuts by three excellent young singers in Alexander Sprague (Albert), Mark Callahan (Sid) and Katie Bray (Nancy). At the other end of the operatic scale, the third instalment of the Ring Cycle, Siegfried, opened in Leeds Town Hall on 15 June 2013. The refinements to the projections that had come into effect for Die Walküre meant that there were very few changes to the format of three screens with integrated titling and colours and imagery that evoked the settings and the plot. Peter Mumford’s ‘unity of intent was all-pervasive and all-persuasive; the clarity of his style was seductive’ (Dreyer, 2013, p. 1056). Estonian tenor Mati Turi showed stamina and differentiation between the dramatic and tender extremes of the title role, with Richard Rogers’s comic yet complex characterisation in the role of Mime (he had sung the character in Rheingold two years previously). His brother and fierce antagonist Alberich was characterised with sonorous and menacing tones by Jo Pohlheim. Michael Illustration 37. 2012/2013 — Siegfried. Annalena Persson (Brünnhilde), Richard Farnes (conductor), Orchestra of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. Druiett, Wotan in Rheingold, sung the part of

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the Wanderer (Wotan in disguise), and Annalena Persson returned as a charismatic Brünnhilde. There was a ‘coup de théâtre’ from Mats Almgren’s dragon Fafner, whose profound bass seemed to rise from the depths of the large hall, invisible until Siegfried had fatally wounded him. Ceri Williams (Erda) and Fflur Wyn (Woodbird) contributed resonance and lyricism in turn. Audiences and critics alike, as in the previous two years, delighted in the work of Richard Farnes and the Orchestra of Opera North, the centrepiece of the performance. During the summer of 2013, the company took the productions of Faust and Albert Herring to Tallinn and preparations were made for the high-profile Festival of Britten. This season comprised revivals of Opera North’s productions of Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Yoshi Oida’s production of Death in Venice, originally produced for Snape Maltings. The season was nominated for the What’s on Stage Award for Outstanding Contribution to Opera in 2013. It was dedicated to Opera North’s founder, Lord Harewood, whose imagination, diplomatic skill and vision of opera being produced in the north of England had resulted in a national company that has been going from strength to strength for three and a half decades. His efforts frame the start of this section, so it is appropriate that the Britten season programmed in his memory concludes it.

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Perspective 1: Opera North — A History from Many Sources

Morrison, R. (2009). The Times, 16 November. Morrison, R. (2010). The Times, 7 June. Morrison, R. (2013). The Times, 16 February. Niemtus, Z. (2007). Metro, 20 February. Oliver, C. (1987). It is a curious story … The tale of Scottish Opera 1962–87. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Opera North. (1999). CD booklet ‘21 Years On’. Opera North. (2004/2005). Review. Opera North Press Release. (1989). Announcement of 1989/1990 season, 9 May. Palmer, P. (1992). Tempo, March. Payne, N. (1984a). Letter to David Pratley, 15 March. Payne, N. (1984b). Letter to Luke Rittner, 2 April. Payne, N. (1984c). Letter to Luke Rittner, 11 May. Payne, N. (1986/1987). Season forecast, 14 March. Payne, N. (1987). Letter to Peter Jonas, 11 May. Payne, N. (1988). Ten years of Opera North. Tutto nel mondo è burla. Opera, September, p. 1040. Payne, N. (1989, spring). Boris Godunov programme. Leeds: Opera North. Payne, N. (1990a). Letter to Anthony Everitt, Secretary General of the Arts Council, 30 July. Payne, N. (1990b). Opera North Annual Review, 1989/1990. Payne, N. (1990c). Letter to Minister David Mellor, 15 October. Payne, N. (1990d). Letter to Peter Palumbo and Anthony Everitt, 2 October. Payne, N. (1990e). Opera North Annual Report. Payne, N. (1992). Opera North Annual Report. Payne, N. (1993). Opera North Annual Report. Payne, N. (2011). Interview with author. London, 7 October 2011. Peattie, A. (1996). The Independent, Section Two, 3 October. Pettit, S. (2005). The Sunday Times, 23 January. Pettitt, S. (1995). The Sunday Times, 31 December. Phillips, R. (1977). Memo to David Lloyd-Jones, 29 July. Phipps, J. (1976). Letter to Rupert Rhymes, no further date given.

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Phipps, J. (1979). Memo to Arts Council Deputy Secretary General, 4 January. Picard, A. (2003a). The Independent on Sunday, 2 February. Picard, A. (2003b). The Independent on Sunday, 27 April. Picard, A. (2007). The Independent on Sunday, 13 May. Picard, A. (2011). The Independent on Sunday, 15 May. Picard, A. (2012). The Independent on Sunday, 22 January. Porter, A. (1994). Opera, January, p. 103. Porter, A. (1996). The Observer, 6 October. Price-Waterhouse Report. (1987). pp. 166–170. Quoted in Payne (1987). Pugh, H. (1984). Memo to Arts Council Music Director, 11 January. Pugh, H. (1986). Arts Council Internal Memo to Music Director, 1 April. Pugh, H. (1987). Internal AC memo on 20 November. Opera North Board meeting, 24 November. R.F. (1998). Financial Times, 29 December. Rees-Mogg, W. (1984). The glory of the garden. London: Arts Council. Report. (1993). Opera in Britain — The threat and the challenge, May. Rhymes, R. (1976). Memo to Lord Harewood, March. Rhymes, R. (1997). Memo to Lord Harewood and David Lloyd-Jones, 24 August. ENON Draft budget, February 1978. Riches, C. (2012). Daily Express, 7 May. Ritchie, I. (1994). Opera North Annual Report. Rosenthal, D. (2013). The national theatre story. London: Oberon. Rosenthal, H. (1983). Interview with Nicholas Payne. Opera, October, p. 1079. Rushton, J. (1986). Mimi in the vernacular. The Independent, 20 December. Rushton, J. (1990). The Independent, 14 April. Rushton, J. (1992). The Independent, 21 September. Rushton, J. (1995a). The Independent, 16 January. Rushton, J. (1995b, autumn). Musical Opinion, p. 680. Rushton, J. (1996). The Musical Times, 1 November. Rushton, J. (1998, autumn). The Musical Times. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge.

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Perspective 1: Opera North — A History from Many Sources

Saint, A., et al (1982). A history of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. London: Hamish Hamilton. Scarfe, D. (2006). Interview. Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 8 September. Seckerson, E. (1993). The Independent, 17 May. Seckerson, E. (1998). The Independent, 20 January. Sinclair, A. (1995). Arts and cultures. The history of the 50 years of the Arts Council of Great Britain. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Sutcliffe, T. (1995). The Guardian, 16 January. Sutcliffe, T. (1998). Believing in Opera. London: Faber & Faber. Tanner, M. (2006a). The Spectator, 14 January. Tanner, M. (2006b). The Spectator, 21 January. Tanner, M. (2008). The Spectator, 10 May. Tanner, M. (2011). The Spectator, 7 May. Tanner, M. (2012). The Spectator, 29 June. Taylor, P. (2010). The Independent, 25 May. Thicknesse, R. (2003a). The Times, 14 January. Thicknesse, R. (2003b). The Times, 19 April. Thicknesse, R. (2004a). The Times, 23 May. Thicknesse, R. (2004b). The Times, 9 October. Turnbull, O. (2008). Bringing down the house: The crisis in Britain’s regional theatres. Bristol: Intellect. Walker, L. (2005). The Independent, 28 December. Walker, L. (2006). The Independent, 8 November. Walker, L. (2007a). The Independent, 21 February. Walker, L. (2007b). The Independent, 24 October. Walsh, S. (1978). The Observer, 19 November. White, M. (1996a). The Independent, 28 January. White, M. (1996b). The Independent, 21 April. White, M. (1997). The Independent, 11 May. White, M. (1998). The Independent, 27 September. White Paper. (1983, autumn). Streamlining the cities.

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Illustration 38. The Magic Flute. Helen Williams (Queen of the Night), Mark Coles (Sarastro). Photo: Richard Moran.

ETHNOGRAPHIES

PERSPECTIVE 2 OPERA NORTH’S PRODUCTIONS IN REHEARSAL

The ‘opera’ is not to be found just in the score. It is distributed across a number of texts and sites: the libretto and the score itself, the mise-en-scene, the costumes, wigs and props, the scenery, the production book, the lighting design. (Atkinson, 2006, p. 33)

Opera North’s history has been introduced in the previous perspective in a number of ways — through production records, Arts Council and other funders’ documents, through the documents which have been retained by the company and through narrative, interviews and informal conversations. This perspective takes a different approach. It describes and analyses findings from a lengthy period of observation within the company, focusing on collaborative practices through which social order is achieved and collaborative practices through which theatrical meaning is achieved ‘as the outcome of collaborative interactional practices’ (Martin, 2006, p. 7). Atkinson has shown in his study on WNO that ‘the dramaturgical perspective can be turned back on theatrical encounters themselves’ (Atkinson, 2006, p. 42), ‘onto the discipline that provides it with its vocabulary’ (Atkinson, 2006, p. 52). The aim is therefore to produce an ethnography with a focus on the making of opera in a permanent company — in rehearsal and in other spaces linked with the operatic creation process. The observation considers the phases of production relating to the spaces in which they take place, the different kinds of social performances within the company and codes generic to operatic production or specific to Opera

Illustration 1. Entrance to Opera North and the Grand Theatre, New Briggate, Leeds. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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North. In brief, the focus is more on the ‘social as performance’ than on the ‘social in performance’ (Frith quoted in Martin, 2006, p. 6).1 According to naturalism, in order to understand people’s behaviour we must use an approach that gives us access to the meanings that guide that behaviour. Fortunately, the capacities we have developed as social actors can give us such access. As participant observers we can learn the culture or subculture of the people we are studying. We can come to interpret the world in the same way as they do. (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1983, p. 7)

For this perspective, the dominant methodology is long term, selective participant observation — overt, particularly at first, but as familiarity between me and the company grew, I was increasingly forgotten about. This did not constitute a shift to covert observation, however, as everyone was always aware why I was present. The period covered is August 2010 until September 2013. No areas were specifically ‘off limits’, although I chose not to go to company meetings and did not attend any other meetings unless they were connected to any of the projects with Opera North and students from the University of Leeds. I was privy to all exchanges that took place in the company’s open plan office spaces. Certain kinds of information I chose not to include, either because the material was of a sensitive or personal nature, might have compromised the trust of my hosts, or might not have fitted this perspective’s focus of social and theatrical acting. A large part of my observation happened in rehearsals. As an observer, one inhabits a curious space: hovering between outsider and insider, not a member of the company, nor a critic or a journalist. When company members remarked on my ‘unobtrusiveness’ in rehearsals, I felt delighted, whereas this compliment would not resonate with me in my day-to-day working life. I would enter the rehearsal microcosm as a privileged in-betweener, people gradually getting used to me, even warming to me, but then there would follow a state of quasi-invisibility, which meant artists did not seem to feel very self-conscious about being observed in rehearsal. Their work is much more demonstrative than mine and roles are highly defined, whereas the invisibility of my process meant a lack of visible result — this would make me grateful for my principal prop, a netbook, which acted as a reminder of work in progress. Company members would sometimes look over my shoulder or ask friendly questions

A note on tense: field notes are written in the present and are here presented in a ‘historical present’, meant to replicate the immediacy of observation and the thoughts and associations that accompany them. My process is now in the past, but presenting observations in the past tense made them too ‘remote’.

1

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about the notes I had been making. Each production would turn into a microcosm of its own, its spaces away from the administrative goings-on and its dynamics highly specific to the group of artists and the particular rehearsal space they inhabited for over a month. Participant observation often implies the condition of a ‘relativist stance’; a concentration on the ‘how’, while ignoring the ‘what’, to summarise it somewhat simplistically. While a rehearsal room certainly provides rich material in terms of behaviourism, the artistic work being created has enormous phenomenological and intellectual impact and appeal. Being present in opera rehearsals means witnessing hours of sustained collaborative musicianship at a very high level, an environment where dramatic and musical impact blend and where most ideas are put into practice in order to examine their viability. ‘The things that are to be discovered are not known by anyone before rehearsals begins’ (Moloney in Cole, 2001, p. 162). These discoveries make for exhilaration and positive bias on behalf of the observer. One wills the performers to perfect something they have spent months, sometimes years working towards and one wills the audience to be able to read what the production is trying to convey. I would sum up this state of mind, created by witnessing artistic achievement, as ‘protective enthusiasm’. This personal investment is slightly at odds with established notions of ‘resolute indifference’ or ‘methodological philistinism’ (Gell, 1992, p. 42) within the ethnographic field of work. Watching the social and the performance scripts unfold simultaneously in the rehearsal room, one is necessarily a component in the social environment — observation is participation, however invisible one tries to be. When I started the project, I expected to be able to channel my approach in accordance with my brief — I aimed to focus on social scripts in productions within this perspective and on the analysis of theatrical scripts in Perspective 3. This has not been possible and, I believe, would also have constituted a limitation on the brief set out above — if we utilise sociological methodologies so closely linked to performance by nomination and by model and turn them back on emerging performance, this very performance needs to be our object of study, too. ‘Dramaturgy’ in its broadest application (or as an umbrella term) provides a welcome common denominator here: it concerns itself with the way a story is told and information is communicated and distributed, something that can here be applied to sociological, dramatic and musical findings. Within production dramaturgy, a multidisciplinary approach to analysis is part of the brief — it is not the dramaturg’s remit to express preferences or judgements based on taste or expectation, but to balance the eye of an outsider with a sensitivity that sees the work through the eyes of those who are making it. So a dramaturg’s role involves sociological approaches in rehearsal, and at first glance there is little difference between their and my methodology. The key distinction is that a dramaturg’s contributions stay internal to the productions they are co-developing (and come in the specific language a production develops during a

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rehearsal period) whereas my findings are externalised through publication and (ideally) formulated in a way that is accessible to someone who is not part of the production microcosm. There is, however, the issue of ‘value judgement’, a particularly emotive topic within opera reception: […] it is not the business of the sociologist of music to make value judgements about it. For some, especially those committed to textual interpretation, this is an evasion of responsibilities […] I submit, however, that there is no evasion, but simply a difference between the discourses of musicology and sociology, with their divergent disciplinary commitments, assumptions and procedures. For sociologists, the collaborative practices through which social order is achieved and sustained are of prime concern. These practices include music. (Martin, 2006, p. 6)

This is liberating because music is included as an object of analysis. It is slightly restrictive because Martin in his study (if not in the quotation above) still seems to privilege music as the main perspective from which to explore opera. The aim here is to create parity between dramaturgies of social behaviour and evolving texts of performance, including the dramatic interpretation of a musical score. If the objective of the sociologist is to see the world through the eyes of those she observes, then this can extend to seeing the opera work being produced from the perspective of those producing it. So, the balance between the different theatricalities (performing the self or rehearsing another character) and also the balance of perspective (looking through others’ eyes, but being aware of one’s own pre-conditioning and expectations as an observer) need balancing. ‘The point is to reflect upon the subjective preconditions of the process of reading/observing/listening. Why do I see what I see?’. Risi (2011, p. 285) here offers a reminder that it is important to consider the ‘I’ of the observer (a welcome pun with ‘eye’!). One approaches this work with pre-knowledge and particular objectives, constantly shifting between analytically observant and spontaneously reactive states of mind. Atkinson elaborates on the difference between everyday behaviour and operatic acting: [the] natural, naturalistic, plausible [gesture] draws on repertoire of everyday interaction rituals, but is transmuted: it is projected onto a scale that differs from the mundane. It inhabits a dramaturgical domain that is both larger than life and slower than life. Operatic acting resembles everyday action, but is, as it were, a reflection in a distorting mirror. (Atkinson, 2006, p. 84)

Rehearsal observation means processing questions about aesthetics, of representation, of decision making, while keeping the conceptual framework of the production in mind. Many observations fall into the category of production analysis, but do not constitute production analysis as it is generally understood, i.e. the discussion of the ‘finished’ production (see also Chapter 6 of Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt’s study Dramaturgy and Performance 2008, p. 146). My method includes observing smaller

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exchanges which contribute to an overall vision in progress, considering trial and error, taking into account what is discarded or what comes about by accident or by happy coincidence. While the sociological gaze is of importance, it is not the only perspective employed when looking at an evolving production. So the novelty of this study lies neither in the application of ethnography nor in the consideration of rehearsal, but (hopefully) in giving a sense of developing production aesthetics in the company-specific context in which they are produced, also supplied by Perspective 1, while suspending value judgement. Occasional self-censorship occurred when findings might have disturbed the delicate balance of an emerging production in the protected space of the rehearsal room. Sometimes company members would give subtle clues in the form of worried looks or body language when it was best not to be listening or recording, sometimes I would make these decisions myself. The time delay (i.e. this study is published in 2014, by which time something that was said in 2011 is company history) was very helpful in dispersing nervousness at times. Productions in rehearsal are in some ways segregated from the day-to-day business of the rest of the company, as they work to their own particular schedules and inhabit a space removed from the administrative headquarters. This separation becomes particularly noticeable when unforeseen changes occur. While openness and accessibility are often shown to anyone not part of a production, as soon as things become uncertain, there will be ‘clamming up’ that seems to originate from ‘inside’ the production and is taken on by those ‘in the know’ who are inside the production, but also have a presence in Premier House (e.g. music staff, company management). One will catch hints of atmosphere, pick up a sense of tension or worry from the ‘business as usual’ front performed by insiders. When subtle warning signs suggested that there was tension in a rehearsal room, the impulse was to ‘give space’ to the production team and the cast. The productions discussed in this perspective are generally those where access was granted from an early stage of rehearsals. I cannot claim 100% coverage for any of the productions discussed, however. While there are practical reasons for this, I can once again claim dramaturgical methodology to justify it. Things gain a sharper focus when they are not continuously observed, but interrupted and then revisited. This is a common way of working as a production dramaturg and it is also helpful within a sociological perspective. Being allowed into rehearsals was not a matter of approval from senior management, but it is the prerogative of the director and sometimes the conductor in the rehearsal room. Access was nearly always granted, but if there were any problems, artistic differences or changes in casting, the production personnel would contract and form an ‘inner circle only’ mode, a movement that on a small number of occasions would travel outward through the company and ‘seal off’ the problem until it was solved. The activities of the company are mainly determined and connected through the timeline of an opera production, even outside the rehearsal spaces. This is true to a lesser extent for Opera North Education, Opera North Projects and the Orchestra of

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Opera North, who run their own schedules of projects, but also link in with main house productions cycles to various degrees. Apart from rehearsals, production-connected activities include compiling rehearsal schedules, attending meetings, looking after contracts, delivering copy to deadlines for advertising or the programme, public relations, social media, organising patrons’ events around a new production and many others. Figure 1 gives a basic overview of the company’s work in a typical year. Continuous lines mean year-round activity.

FULL TIME COMPANY IN LEEDS Autumn season Leeds & tour

Winter season Preparation

Leeds & tour

Spring season Preparation

Leeds & tour

Orchestra of Opera North: opera performances and concert seasons (Leeds, Huddersfield, Dewsbury) Opera North Projects: performances and concerts in the Howard Assembly Room Opera North Education: projects in Leeds and the North-East of England

Figure 1.

The work of Opera North in a typical year.

So, the three seasons of main house opera sit alongside the year-round rollover of concerts, screenings, workshops, installations and other events. Sometimes the basic template (Figure 1) would become more complex. Take, for example, the summer of 2012: Die Walküre, in a ‘fully staged concert version’ opened in Leeds Town Hall, then toured three other venues until the middle of July. The Makropulos Case opened the Edinburgh Festival mid-August, while the musical Carousel, which ran in Leeds for three weeks in the spring, moved to the Barbican for a five-week run. When Makropulos finished its short festival run (it opened in Leeds in the late autumn and then toured), Opera North in Leeds started with preparations for Don Giovanni and Faust, the new productions of the autumn season. Whilst Leeds Grand Theatre is the company’s home base, Opera North is a touring company and can seem as at home in Newcastle, Salford and Nottingham as it does in Leeds. A company does not just consist of its spaces, but of its people, its principles and schedules, its ways of doing things, its achievements — and the ways in which it is perceived in its field and in comparison with other companies.

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THE COMPANY AT HOME AND ITS SPACES Opera North’s home since 1978 for its seasons in Leeds. All of the company’s main house work is premiered here.

Illustration 2.

The Grand Theatre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Illustration 3.

The Grand Theatre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Illustration 4 (top left). Harrison Street (Premier House, including lorry lift and footbridge); Illustration 5 (top right). Bridge between Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera North’s headquarters, Premier House; Illustration 6 (bottom left). The Linacre and Harewood rehearsal studios at the back of Premier House, with the scene dock bridge; Illustration 7 (bottom right). Leeds Grand Theatre, raised fly tower. Photos: Malcolm Johnson.

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Premier House is Opera North’s headquarters, where administrative, music and costume departments are based. No direct production or rehearsal work takes place here (the piano/practice rooms are in Leeds Grand Theatre). The stage door and the staircase are part of the Grand Theatre, but also lead to the bridges connecting it with Premier House. The entrance area is used by Opera North as well as by all visiting production staff performing in the Grand Theatre. The reception team are Opera North employees; the front-of-house staff are employed directly by Leeds Grand Theatre. The Opera North rehearsal spaces, the Harewood and the Linacre studios, are opposite the Grand Theatre, at the back of Premier House, also known as The Opera North Centre. There is a smaller rehearsal room below the stage of the Grand Theatre, to which the company has access. The studios have matching dimensions, which also match the measurements of the Grand Theatre stage. In comparison with the company’s former circumstances, the first 28 years of its existence, they are state-of-the-art spaces, both in terms of their technical equipment and for the fact that they have large windows and are on the same premises as the company headquarters. The Howard Assembly Room was refurbished in 2008 and is owned by Opera North. It is used both for rehearsal and performances and is, among many other things, the principal rehearsing space for the Orchestra of Opera North. It is used for concerts (classical, folk and world music) and for smaller-scale performance, as well as workshop sessions and projects by the Education department. The HAR, as it is referred to, also hosts an art installation once a year and is mostly programmed by the Opera North Projects department. It is used for celebrations by the company (first night drinks), and for hosting events with subscribers, the Friends of Opera North, donors and others. Finally, it is hired out for celebrations and corporate events and has a wedding licence. The space, together with the neighbouring Emerald Grand Hall, is architecturally part of Leeds Grand Theatre, but belongs to Opera North and was renovated to a very high standard with the help of benefactors, principally Dr Keith Howard and the University of Leeds (DARE). The HAR is the company’s most flexible space and is used for internal or externally facing activities, according to need (see also Perspective 1). Occasional spaces for observation included the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds Town Hall auditorium (for the Ring instalments, see illustrations in Perspective 3) and all of Opera North’s regular touring venues: The Lowry in Salford, Theatre Royal in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, The Sage in Gateshead, Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh.

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Illustration 8. Backstage at the Grand Theatre — the space from which an opera performance is operated and populated. Photo: Malcolm Johnson, with kind permission from Leeds Grand Theatre.

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Illustrations 9 and 10.

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The Howard Assembly Room. Photos: Malcolm Johnson.

Apart from having a desk near the offices of the General, Finance and Technical Directors on the fourth floor of Premier House, I was privy to goings-on on the other floors of Premier House: the costume department on the first floor, which one does not enter in transit and nearly always with a purpose, either of working there or of attending a fitting. The second floor is a very busy space, with several departments based there: Education, Marketing, Fundraising/Development, Press and Projects. There is also a meeting room. The third floor is the music and planning floor, with the company management office linked with casting and music departments, including the music library. The fourth floor is not as densely populated as the second, but a lot of key decisions are made here and a constant stream of Opera North colleagues from other floors arrive for meetings and conversations with senior management and finance staff. The floor incorporates general management and human resources, as well as the technical, IT and finance departments and the larger of the two meeting rooms. There is a front staircase and a back staircase, the latter leading to the two large rehearsal studios which were built onto the back of the Premier House complex during the Transformation phase and opened in 2006. There are two bridges which connect Premier House with the Grand Theatre. One is between the Harewood Studio and the stage of the Grand and is used both for storage of scenery and for moving scenery items across from the rehearsal space to the stage. The other one, a footbridge, connects Premier House with the Grand Theatre at the front of the

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building on the second floor (see Illustrations 4 and 6). This is a recent addition, which opened at the same time as the refurbished Howard Assembly Room in 209/10, a space owned by the company. It has a slightly industrial look and is made from glass and steel. The bridge is also an art installation, equipped with body sensory equipment, so anyone crossing it will experience a change from red lighting to blue as they walk along.2 The connecting bridge has symbolic value besides its practical function — it physically links Opera North to the theatre that has been its — albeit part time — home since its foundation in 1978. It also reminds us of the transition made between the theatre and its ‘engine rooms’: Premier House is not an outward facing space and is concerned with preparation and process; the Grand Theatre is the space where the product is shown to the public. There is another link between the two spaces, which is aural. When a production transfers from rehearsal room to stage, the majority of the company will be listening to rehearsals over the tannoy, which broadcasts into the Premier House office spaces. Opera North’s two main buildings have different functions, are inhabited by the company under different circumstances (one of them being part-time, of course) and have different working patterns and rhythms, but they are more connected than it is at first assumed. The company’s storage facilities used to be at Gildersome and moved to Kirkstall in 2011. They are only accessed by technical staff. This is where productions that are still ‘live’ (i.e. they are either scheduled to be revived, there is the possibility of them being revived or they might be rented to other companies) are stored and where props and costumes are kept.

PERFORMING THE COMPANY: INTERNAL AND EXTERNALLY FACING the demarcation between insider and outsider is very strong in the theatre. (McAuley, 2012, pp. 6 7)

2

Trace is a lighting installation commissioned by Opera North to celebrate the refurbishment and grand opening of the company’s theatre in Leeds. Inspired by drama and theatrics, the installation enlivens the bridge access between the administration offices and the theatre over Harrison Street. Lighting installed between the structural bays of the bridge is triggered by infra-red sensors as people walk between the buildings culminating in a theatrical explosion of light on the underside of the bridge as the person enters the theatre. In addition, 800 acrylic rods fixed to the underside of the bridge cast an ephemeral pattern of shadows onto the surface. Nicky Kirk, architects, p. 15: http://www.nickykirk.co.uk/Nicholas KirkArchitecture.pdf

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Between the summer of 2010 and the winter of 2012 there were many opportunities to observe different kinds of behaviour by the company. There is an important distinction between the company at nonpublic events (e.g. a model showing, a celebration, a meeting) and at public ones (e.g. a first night, a season launch, friends’ and fundraising events). Different modes of social performance can be observed at ‘internal’ and ‘external’ events. The following example introduces an external event, a launch attended by an audience. This is juxtaposed with a production launch, an internal event, discussed later on in this section. In the summer of 2012, Opera North applied to an Arts Council scheme based on Venezuela’s El Sistema, ‘In Harmony’, with Leeds (Belle Isle) Windmill Primary School.3 The application was successful and the project was launched on 7 December 2012 in the Howard Assembly Room.

Illustration 11. Opera North Education launch the ‘In Harmony’ Project with children and teachers from Windmill Primary School, Howard Assembly Room, 7 December 2012. Tuba: Brian Kingsley. Photo: Simon Dewhirst.

Two 45-minute launches take place; one for the younger half of the school (years 1 3) and one for years 4 6. The orchestra is in the space (and is taking up most of it) in their casual clothes, conducted by Music Director Richard Farnes. The children are mainly positioned around the players on the outside, but small groups of them are led into the orchestra and are allowed to

3

Chaired by cellist Julian Lloyd-Webber, In Harmony aims to inspire and transform the lives of children in deprived communities using the power and disciplines of community-based orchestral music-making. In Harmony is inspired by the internationally renowned El Sistema in Venezuela, which produced the world famous Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra […] Through an immersive programme of high quality, structured instrumental and singing tuition, children and their teachers learn and play together as an orchestra, performing regularly at leading concert halls, at high-profile event and in their local communities.

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sit among players in a rota, so every child gets the opportunity to hear what the players sound like ‘from the inside’. The presenter, Matthew Sharp, is also a singer and cellist and a very experienced workshop leader. He is the key to making the launch participatory from the start: one exercise invites children and adult audience on the gallery to clap at the same time as him. Several children, when invited, are brave enough to lead the exercise and the last two do so from the conductor’s rostrum and the clap is treated as a cue for the orchestra to start playing. It is a powerful and surprising moment for each of the children to realise they are acting as a conductor. Other activities involve playing ‘air string instruments’, i.e. imitating the movements of a string player from each section and contributing actions and sounds to a story about ‘Dimitri the Fireman’ — a narrative about Dimitri Shostakovich working as a fireman and driving an old and chugging fire engine, which finally gives up its ghost, illustrated by the first movement of Shostakovich’s first Cello Concerto (1959). Matthew Sharp plays the solo cello and narrates at the same time. There is a constant changing canvas on the floor below the gallery from which we observe, as Education staff lead rows of children to sit in the orchestra and encourage them to join in with movement and responses, along with their teachers. It is wonderfully uplifting to see the children’s reactions to the sometimes quite overpowering sound of the orchestra, the timpani making them jump, the brass section evoking curiosity and the strings prompting the most questions along the lines of ‘how do you know which string to play when?’, ‘how do you find an instrument?’ and ‘how hard is it to play the viola/ double bass?’. There is a lot of rhythmic body movement, copying of Richard Farnes’s conducting and constant eager putting up of hands when questions are asked or responses are sought. The adults on the gallery are patrons, supporters, members of the In Harmony project, members of the Arts Council, Opera North development staff and staff from Windmill Primary School, including the head teacher. This could easily turn into a project centred on the ‘worthiness’ of music education, but it is clear that the children and an exciting start to their music education experience are at the heart of the event. The impact on the gallery audience is nonetheless powerful, as it is rare to see live music having such an immediate effect on so many children. Their confidence, energy and enthusiasm contribute to this feeling. The launch can best be described as a mixture between a family concert and a participatory music workshop. The media are present and interview a range of children, the school’s head teacher, Opera North’s Head of Education and the General Director. While the performances are all about the children and their experience, the event has different spheres, prompted by different company aims. A reception takes place in the dress circle bar of the Grand Theatre beforehand, mainly for friends, sponsors and patrons of Opera North, many of whom have contributed to this or to similar projects. Guests are then led to the gallery space of the Howard Assembly Room and are the audience for the launch. They are asked to join in with activities for the children — and most guests comply. Opera North is a company that presents itself in turn (and according to the occasion) as both a producer of main house opera, a corporate

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partner and a provider of community-based education throughout the North of the United Kingdom. It wants its financial and other supporters to join them in taking pride in the impact of the Education Department and the orchestra, and to see what their money has achieved — or might achieve if they donate for a future scheme or event. The programme leaflet for the event has a very evocative image on the front: a little girl in sharp focus, holding a violin with her left hand and raising her right hand and looking upwards with concentration. The image shows other children with instruments around her in soft focus, denoting both ‘music’ and ‘school’ and perfectly communicating the occasion to the company’s benefactors. The presence of an audience means that company members are being observed doing their work by the children, their teachers (who are invited to join in with many activities) and the audience. There is a clear sense of priority on performing in ‘workshop’ mode for the children, but of course there is a heightened mode that may be attributable to the unusual presence of an audience in a format that is participatory. A few years ago, I wrote about Opera North’s highly successful production of Gloriana (Benjamin Britten), first staged in 1993, revived three times and adapted for television by its director, Phyllida Lloyd, in 2000. When I first viewed it on DVD in 2008, I did not have much inside knowledge of Opera North and was struck by the way the company was shown to perform itself in the sequences backstage. They were not necessarily doing anything that was different to their working routine, but there was a heightened quality to their actions, since they knew they were being observed by the camera. While being in a public space will always mean that behaviour is managed, a singer walking to their dressing room in an everyday manner will do so differently to a singer who has been asked to walk to their dressing room while being filmed. There is a demand for ‘non-acting’ implied in such a situation (‘just behave as you normally would’), but we cannot replicate a state where we would not be noticed much in a situation where all eyes are on us. Phyllida Lloyd recalled talking to members of stage management about their brief during the shoot:4 The narrative backstage at the start of the film centres on the protagonist, Dame Josephine Barstow, having not yet arrived in the theatre before the performance. Lloyd asked for a sense of ‘panic’ backstage and a member of stage management replied ‘we don’t do panic at Opera North’. And while staff did their best to comply with the request, their performance of ‘disquiet’ looks slightly stilted, as the mode of ‘do what you always do backstage’ and the specific request of ‘panic’ were at odds with each other. The ‘In Harmony’ launch and the Gloriana film show different modes of

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Opera North at 21, programme booklet for anniversary concert, April 2000.

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company members being observed while performing work that is normally away from an audience. Production work is generally internal to the company and the collective and individual behaviour of its members reflects this. Social performances evolve through the stages of rehearsal and of performance and are reactive to the space in which they take place. It is therefore useful to give a diagrammatic overview of the cycles of productions in various spaces during a typical Opera North season (Figure 2).

Rehearsal to production during a typical Opera North year

Rehearsal Spaces

Howard Assembly Room

Grand Theatre

Tour (performances)

Production 1

Production 1

Production 1

Production 1

Production 2

Production 2

Production 3

Production 2

Production 3

Production 3

Music rehearsals

Orchestra rehearsals

For each production:

(1 week per production)

Sitzprobe

Stage piano rehearsals

Rehearsal studio sessions

Piano dress run

(4 weeks per production)

Stage orchestra rehearsals

Rehearsal room run

Orchestra dress run First night Leeds performances

Figure 2.

The structure of a typical season of productions at Opera North.

Production 2 Production 3

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The rule of thumb is that a production will start with one week of music rehearsals for the cast, led by the conductor, followed by four weeks in the rehearsal studio, culminating in the rehearsal room run, widely attended by all Opera North departments. After the Sitzprobe with orchestra, the production will move to the stage for its final phase. Over a two-week period, it will progress from stage piano rehearsals to the piano dress rehearsal, followed by three to six stage orchestra rehearsals, with the final orchestra dress rehearsal two days before the first night of the production. Opera North has a well-established process of production, the stability of which is evident in the well-rehearsed quality of its productions. The company have built up these processes over the years and value them as essential to the reputation of producing high-quality opera. The rehearsal room is a space where devices of performance are laid open, but not in a conscious or demonstrative way. We can observe the simultaneity of occurring actions: what is placed on stage (the present), and, in the offstage areas, what is being taken away after being used (the past) and what is being prepared for coming onto the stage (the future). Or, specific to singers, the performers on stage at that moment (the present), the performers having left the stage (the past) and the performers preparing to enter the stage space (the future). Other than in performance, where the threshold between acting (singing) a role and social acting is only observable to people who are allowed to be backstage, it is transparent in the rehearsal room, making this a dual space where the transition between the two modes is often visible in addition to the two modes themselves. In the following, the chronological production process provides the broad structure of the investigation, although it is fashioned from many different productions, observed over a number of years.

REHEARSALS: FRAGMENTED AND PROGRESSIVE THEATRICAL ENCOUNTERS There is [...] a dialectical relationship between social life and theatricality. The sociological imagination therefore needs to pay attention to the everyday life of the theatre just as much as to the theatricality of everyday life. (Atkinson, 2006, p. 53)

This section discusses the phases of operatic rehearsal in the context of the spaces in which they take place. Two kinds of acting are constant features in this section: social acting (working to a social script), as it takes place in any of the company’s spaces and professional acting (working to a score and direction), as it takes place in rehearsals and performance spaces. Social performances are motivated by conventions and learned behaviour. Elizabeth Burns calls them ‘a special grammar of

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composed behaviour’ which is set on precedents and enabled by the tacit agreement and others’ ability to read the behaviour’ (Burns, 1972, p. 33). The rehearsal room is an exciting space to see both social and professional forms of acting in close proximity and in constant interchange. In the following, these theatricalities will be explored. The actions and preoccupations of rehearsals are often generic, yet each rehearsal is different and has a different focus, which is either explicitly announced (‘blocking’ ‘running a sequence’) or which emerges during the rehearsal, such as costume and actions, light, or the audibility and diction of the singers, so the words will be understood over the orchestra. Comparing rehearsals within the same production setting, it is noticeable how different they can be when the same material is worked on. This is to do with required (implied) modes, expectations, energy levels and the point in the production timeline, factors which all create their own dynamics. It would be too easy to say that there is a straightforward trajectory in which problems posed by the emerging production are solved and the details of individual and collaborative performance are developed. Each transition to a new stage (music to blocking rehearsal; studio to stage; stage rehearsal to performance) has its own problems that need to be solved. Rehearsals could be described as a process of constantly added layers — a rehearsal room often starts with a set marked up by gaffer tape with props and furniture not yet original, rehearsal shoes and clothes. Gradually, it is populated by set and costume items (‘do you want to try it with the original shoes, the nose, the hat, the wellies, the wings, the tail?’ as overheard during the course of a few days in Pinocchio rehearsals). There comes a stage when the production is straining for space in the rehearsal room. This is partly because there is not much wing space when a full size set is up, partly because more and more people are participating and watching from the front (e.g. the covers and second casts), partly because everyone’s impatience to progress to the stage becomes palpable. Opera North have a system of gradually adding items throughout the rehearsal process. The main elements of the set, costume items and props are used in the rehearsal room, and wigs, make-up and full costume are added as soon as piano rehearsals start on the stage of the Grand Theatre.

Introductions 1: First Full Cast Music Rehearsal — Das Rheingold, 16 May 2011 The cast bring excellent musical preparation and good levels of German to their first rehearsal as an ensemble, along with many subtle demonstrations of collegial interaction and support. If, like in any working environment, hierarchies develop, the signifiers are not observable and could probably only be determined by an insider. Notions of career status and the size of

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roles must play a part, but are understated to the point of invisibility. It is no mean feat for singers to perform music of this calibre in a room full of people who employ them or might be instrumental to future employment, some colleagues whom they know and others they have only recently met. Everyone in the room will have an opinion and it is easy to feel judged at this early stage. Artists make themselves available for judgement on the first night of a production, but this will not happen until there has been a thorough rehearsal period, whereas one is more exposed and potentially vulnerable right at the Illustration 12. Das Rheingold. Michael Druiett (Wotan), Giselle Allen (Freia), Yvonne Howard (Fricka). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. beginning of the process. Introductions need to be well judged, signifying that one is in the same position as everyone and nervous about it (empathy, bonding), but strong and confident enough to overcome these nerves and to be calm and professional. Mutual acquaintances and past projects help the introductory chats, plenty of jokes provide social lubricant as always. When someone sings in rehearsal for the first time, everyone is particularly attentive and then colleagues can often be seen to give subtle signs of approval once a scene or a passage has finished. There are also hints of acting ‘in character’ — e.g. the giants sing about the character of Freia and one of the Rhine maidens jokingly winks at the singer of Freia; Froh’s intervention when the giants threaten to abduct Freia is met with an encouraging and appreciative smile from the singer of Freia. She is boosting a colleague’s confidence and, as a regular with

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Opera North, she is making him, who is making his debut with the company, feel welcome. She is possibly also imagining how this passage might look once it is staged. By the time rehearsal room sessions with the director start, the singers will have worked through the score of the opera with the conductor and a repetiteur in great detail. In a way, they will have gone some way towards forming an ensemble when the production team enters the process and the model showing and introductory talk takes place.

Introductions 2: The Model Showing After about a week of music calls, the company comes together for the model showing of a new production, which marks the formal start of physical rehearsal work. This event brings a lot of company members from the different spaces together. Permanent employees and guest artists, creative teams and administrators are introduced to the next production. While many of them will not engage with the rehearsal process directly after the model showing, a production in the making is nonetheless at the centre of their work, whether they are part of the marketing team or work for the props or costumes departments. There is a sense of expectation, of a new beginning, much the same to meetings that take place in schools or universities after a summer break (e.g. the students returning to the University, attending launch meetings). Opera North, depending on the number of annual productions, will have between six and eight of these new beginnings per year. As there are up to three production processes going on at the same time, there is a certain element of simultaneity (and later on comparison between the microcosms in the different rehearsal rooms by company members in conversation). When rehearsals are starting for a season, these ‘new beginnings’, i.e. the productions, will launch at two-week intervals. There will not be much overlap in the casts, but certain staff members will always be present, the chorus, stage management, senior management, music staff etc. Sometimes directors, who generally lead these events, will ask for everyone in the room to introduce themselves. This is a welcome opportunity for some joking and banter, some tongue-in-cheek ways of showing wit and enthusiasm, thus contributing to a good start. The importance of ‘welcoming’ is evident throughout the company, and although it happens so frequently, it never feels like a routine. When people introduce themselves in the rehearsal room, newcomers, for example singers who have not sung with the company before, are less likely to joke, but will get appreciative, welcoming noises, smiles and nods from the company. Returning guests, directors or singers who have previously worked here are quite likely

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to use humour and will get laughter or applause. Permanent company members will often get affirmative laughter in response to a little joke. An example: at the Faust model showing (31 August 2012), after most of the basses of the chorus have introduced themselves, some just with names, some with their voice group, some with little quips like ‘ageing bass’, the director extends a friendly gesture to the company Manager who has worked for Opera North since 1982 — ‘Everyone knows Jane!’. She replies dryly: ‘Yes. Jane. Bass’. Sometimes humour is used quite strategically. Most directors are good speakers and know how to capture an audience. Some will have a very distinctive style: Christopher Alden in the Norma model showing (12 December 2011) provided an entertaining juxtaposition on the isolated pagan society he was introducing for the production and his New Yorker’s East Village wit: ‘Pollione is the father of Norma’s children, although they don’t hang out very much. He’s one of those tenors who don’t come up with their weekly child support after they’ve moved on to the younger ballerina in the freakin’ opera company’. Tim Albery was able to embody all the characters he had thought about for so long as he gave a very physical and detailed breakdown of his plans for Giulio Cesare (21 November 2011), accompanied by PowerPoint slides of the set. Often, the showmanship will be dialogic and the director and the designer or the choreographer will deliver the introduction together. Once everyone has left the rehearsal studio after the model showing, it must feel strange to the creative team and the cast: they have just been through a presentation that emphasised the finished product. Now they are tasked to go back to the ‘nothing’ that stands at the beginning of every rehearsal process and start creating the production to which they aspire. They are supported by excellent levels of preparation by all involved, so it is only a ‘nothing’ in practical terms, or a case of converting what is in everyone’s head into a physical and material realisation of the score. In the following, the main source of observations is Opera North’s autumn 2012 production of Don Giovanni, but observations from The Turn of the Screw (autumn 2010), The Merry Widow (autumn 2010), The Portrait (winter 2010/2011), From the House of the Dead (spring 2011), Das Rheingold (spring 2011), Norma (winter 2011/2012) Die Walküre (summer 2012) and The Makropulos Case (summer 2012) complete the picture.

The Rehearsal Room: From Blocking to Running Don Giovanni rehearsals started mid-August 2012 in Leeds. I was able to observe the process at every stage and thus became very familiar with the cast, production and technical teams. I knew the director from his previous work at Opera North in 2010,

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The Turn of the Screw. Both productions provided me with a comprehensive rehearsal experience and many interesting opportunities to contribute to questions arising in rehearsals through research and discussion. This was the closest to production dramaturgy that I had experienced in the United Kingdom, and the parallel work on social and theatre dramaturgy lead to many breakthroughs in relation to the ‘mixed methodology’ of this perspective. While the rehearsal room provides a stable environment for the emerging production, it is a space that changes to mirror and accommodate the different stages of rehearsal. Paul Atkinson talks of a space ‘littered with motives that have been invoked, tried, modified, discarded, or adopted’ (Atkinson, 2006, p. 71). This often happens in a workshop atmosphere, where many opinions can be taken into account. David Pountney remarks in a blog on his production of Lulu (WNO 2013) that singers and directors can react differently to the ‘uncharted territory’ of a production in early rehearsals. Singers have the template of the musical score, which demands the greatest possible accuracy, whereas their collaborative work with the director is a process of trial and error, speculation and interpretation: […] our Dr. Schön remarked ruefully the other day ‘How great it feels when you finally do get it right!’ which prompted me to answer that, interestingly enough, the director could never ever get it right because there was no such thing as right in the field of action or characterisation, or whatever a director might invent to realise and transfer a scene from the page to the stage. […] That is because these first rehearsals, when each page is new and for the first time, are terribly exciting and demanding, and in these chaotic and confused moments decisions will be made and turnings taken that will still have consequences weeks later. So while they are all clinging onto the need for accuracy like shipwrecked sailors on a raft, I am trying as hard as possible to cast myself loose on an open sea and let my instincts tell me the next step forward! (Pountney, 2013)5

The to-ing and fro-ing between modes of rehearsal is managed by the director with the help of the stage managers and the assistant director. As also demonstrated in the section on Norma below, we find the director and the singers at the heart of the action and can find other team members in the layers of a ‘concentric circle’ around this core. As longer sequences develop and as continuity emerges in the opera’s action, this configuration changes, as does the space of the rehearsal room.

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Illustration 14. Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 2. Elizabeth Atherton (Donna Elvira), Alistair Miles (Leporello). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. Illustration 13. Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 1. William Dazeley (Don Giovanni). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

A Note about the Use of Period and Puppetry in This Production Don Giovanni is seen as a time traveller who is able to appear in a Victorian setting, the 1950s and the 1980s in this production, mainly through the use of a ‘time portal’, a reference to the Dr Who television series, incorporated into the set through a door, complete with back lighting and dry ice. Giovanni’s servant, Leporello, is also able to make these transitions, as is Donna Elvira. Donna Anna, Don Ottavio and the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father, are placed in the Victorian period, Zerlina, Masetto and their wedding guests are situated in the 1950s and Elvira, although flexible, first appears in a 1980s wedding costume. After this, her costume is adapted to the period required, like Giovanni’s. Periods are expressed mainly through costume, but also through acting conventions and choreography. These are applied playfully

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rather than with historical rigour and so the dance to open Zerlina and Masetto’s wedding celebrations is based on the 2012 YouTube sensation ‘Gangnam Style’.6 Another noticeable feature of the production is its use of puppetry. The production references commedia dell’arte conventions at times and also shows Don Giovanni as a manipulator (the word for the action performed by a puppeteer in some languages) — a puppet master. The puppet transformation occur in scenes where the plausibility of the narrative is stretched, e.g. Leporello transforming into his master and this not being realised by Donna Elvira, or Masetto being beaten up by Giovanni (also in disguise). These scenes are an opportunity to engage in a Punch & Judy aesthetic. The production frequently played with performer — puppet interactions, and with scale and size, too, when singers appear with small puppet bodies around their neck (see Illustration 14) and exchanges are enacted in a deliberately over-the-top style. The device (and its ‘stage’, the picture frame opening in the iris) is simply another aspect of the kaleidoscope of period and performance style that emerges from the production.

First Rehearsal, 16 August 2012, Donna Anna, Don Giovanni, Leporello, I, 1 The first rehearsal starts after the model showing for the cast, team and chorus, and a tea break. For the duration of rehearsal room sessions, the production is located in the Linacre Studio on the ground floor of the Opera North centre. As it (as well as the Harewood Studio above it) has the dimensions of the Grand Theatre stage, the set is normally built in the rehearsal room before the production starts off. This does not include every aspect of it, but quite a lot of the elements, particularly the larger structures such as walls. Unusually, because the company is stretched over several sites (Carousel is at the Barbican, The Makropolous Case is in the process of returning from the Edinburgh International Festival), the studio is currently without a set. One of the features of this production is a thin tab that splits in the middle and comes in from stage left and stage right. When joined, there is a picture frame in the middle of this ‘iris’, as it is referred to (see also Illustration 14). Stage management prove to be inventive and fashion an ‘iris’ frame from a wardrobe stand with wheels, some cardboard and gaffer tape (‘Blue Peter’, one stage manager remarks). Apart from functioning as a puppet theatre the iris is used in the very first entrance of the opera: ‘Gangnam Style’ refers to a track released by South Korean rapper PSY in the summer of 2012, which went viral through YouTube and social media and was the first YouTube clip to reach 1 billion views. Many spoof versions of the video were produced subsequently.

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Leporello grumpily waits for his master, who is pursuing a new conquest, Donna Anna. With the iris closed, Leporello’s hands appear in the picture frame before his head pops up and he looks straight at the audience, an unexpected and commedia-like entrance, which sets the tone for the production. When the iris opens, we see Don Giovanni’s attempted seduction of Donna Anna escalate into a confrontation. Don Giovanni wears a mask for this, but the singer needs his glasses to see, so he puts them over the mask, creating an ensemble of a casual shirt, shorts and black/neon yellow trainers topped off with mask and glasses. The scene is full of ambiguity and critics and practitioners have been arguing since the 19th century whether Don Giovanni has managed to seduce Donna Anna, then something goes wrong and she calls for help or whether she fights him off from the beginning, as she later tells Don Ottavio in her first aria. This production asserts that Anna’s feelings are at first ambiguous, torn between Victorian convention and sexual awakening and then, after her father is murdered in a confrontation with the intruder Giovanni, grief and guilt dominate her for the rest of the opera. So her first appearance maps these ambiguities, at first fiercely fighting the grip of Giovanni, attacking him, being thrown against a wall, being silenced by him clasping his hand over her mouth and shouting for help with less conviction than previously, but then picking up the volume again. This ties in with the musical directions, as her ‘gente, servi!’ (‘people, servants!’) is noted in piano in the score, much quieter than her outbursts before. There is a discussion with the choreographer about the use of strength in this scene, the need for a ‘marshmallow’ version, as she calls it, working almost without strength but not losing the energy. Due to Donna Anna singing out and Giovanni marking, there is currently a difference in the singers’ energy investment. They adjust to each other as the blocking of the scene turns into more fluent sequences with more gestural and facial differentiation emerging. A constant see-saw of rejection and attraction is developing: before Anna’s renewed forte ‘come furia disperata’ there is almost a kiss, but then she pushes Giovanni away with some force. The staging forms a strong dialogue with dynamics in the score at this point.

Afternoon Session, 16 August 2012, Don Giovanni, Commendatore, Leporello, I, 1 Work starts with a discussion about the confrontation between Giovanni and the Commendatore. The director posits that Giovanni’s thrill is seduction, the chase, but that he is not interested in killing people. After the attempt at seducing Donna Anna has gone wrong, he has to respond to her father’s aggression, which the director imagines to be quite heavy-handed, Victorian style. He has got out of bed and grabbed the first weapon he could find, probably a knife from the kitchen. The singer of the Commendatore responds to these ideas with an entrance that is more bluster than threat. Giovanni disarms him,

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turns the weapon back on him and stabs him and then both men show surprised faces at what has just happened. The Commendatore sinks down, his eyes fixed to Giovanni’s masked face. The confrontation is then made into a more elaborate ‘dance of death’, the wounded man staggering, the attacker keeping him at bay, half supporting him, moving across the stage watched by the anxious Leporello, who is not giving up his hiding place. After the older man has sunk to the floor, Giovanni, almost shocked, takes off his mask and the two men lock eyes before the Commendatore dies. The sequence is shown as almost an accident and suggests that Giovanni has not killed before under these circumstances. One assumes he would have done in duels or in a military setting, but not in a situation of such blatant inequality as is shown here with a frightened older man with a kitchen knife. Is this the ‘fatal flaw’ that contributes towards turning his luck?

Afternoon Call, 17 August 2012, Recitative and Duet Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, I, 2 The scene takes place after Don Giovanni has killed the Commendatore and he and Leporello have hastily left the scene. Donna Anna returns with Don Ottavio to whom she ran when the confrontation was unfolding. After discovering her father’s body and fainting, Anna comes to and immediately focuses on revenge for the murder. She then finds the weapon that has been used to kill her father, a knife from the kitchen that he himself had brought in. This she passes to Don Ottavio during their duet in her bid for him to avenge her father. The way this is staged suggests several possible notions: Don Giovanni’s violence is turned back against him, as Anna suggests using the weapon he used for the revenge killing — an eye for an eye? The director is keen that blood should be seen on the blade — this is Anna’s father’s blood, but the way in which the singer holds the knife in rehearsal takes on another, more symbolic and almost phallic meaning. There could have been blood, had the scene unfolded differently and if Anna has been deflowered by Don Giovanni. The murder has changed

Illustration 15. Don Giovanni. Rehearsal still, William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), Alistair Miles (Leporello). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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everything, and there is now the need to avenge her father’s death. Eros has turned to Thanatos. Ottavio later pulls out a pistol when confronting Giovanni, not the knife — this is, however, after Anna has disclosed some of the events in her chamber to him, so it makes sense for him not to want to use the weapon that has been ‘tainted’ by the man who almost ‘robbed the honour’ (‘orsai chi l’honore rapirar mi volse’) of his intended. The director stresses the importance of ‘Victorian’ behaviour in order to suit Anna and Ottavio’s relationship, but also to clearly set them apart from characters from other periods in this production. Ottavio’s moves are agile and spontaneous at the moment, as are his reactions; it is discussed whether his steps are too big and lack the ‘gravitas’ of a Victorian gentleman.

After the Tea Break: Giovanni and Leporello, I, 3 The iris is closed and Giovanni and Leporello stand at opposite sides of the stage, ‘offstage’ (although of course they can be seen in the rehearsal studio). Both have sticks (Giovanni’s has a skull on it) and are advised to enter from opposite sides in the same stride with the same number of paces, mirroring each other. There is a lightness of touch in the two singers’ interactions, and lots of little things suggest themselves immediately in improvisation. There is banter, both between Giovanni and Leporello in this recitative, and also between the singer colleagues. The director describes Leporello as critical of his master and sometimes put upon, but profiting from his charisma (‘growing towards the light’) and also as enjoying relative freedom, as he can speak out quite frequently, even if his interventions generally have no consequence or even provoke anger. The sequence is established as ‘march towards each other, facing each other — stop — chord (the conductor is playing the pianoforte), panto-ish glances to see whether they are alone (‘siam soli?’)’. Then Giovanni, with benevolent impatience, mimics Leporello’s actions before losing his temper and threatening to strangle him with his stick from behind. The reason is that Leporello has called his master’s lifestyle disgraceful (‘la vita che menate e d’un bricchone!’). After offering the sequence without much instruction and inventing many interesting details, the two singers discuss the exchange with the director. The entrance serves to show the long-established master — servant relationship and is characterised by a certain theatricality and ironic lightness until Giovanni changes the tone through his aggressive reaction to Leporello’s disapproval. The three men agree that the two characters have been through this many times before (the singer of Giovanni voices his character’s thoughts: ‘is this the old “Bricchone” number again?!’).

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Illustration 16.

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The Don Giovanni set in the rehearsal room, Alessandro Talevi (director), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

Morning Call, 21 August 2012, Chorus, Giovanni, Leporello, Zerlina, Masetto, I, 5 The set has now been built. The walls are a dark wood stain with faded paintings of dancing women from different ages (see also Illustration 16 above). It is a confined space, its perspective narrowing (it is only about 4 m wide at the back,

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a good 2 m on either side of the set will be framed with black masking). The choreographer runs a warm-up for all performers, fashioned especially for working on a rake, as this can cause back pain. The recitative after the first chorus is then blocked. Giovanni has appeared with Leporello and has made a beeline for the bride, Zerlina, making his mind up to seduce her. To achieve this, he invites the whole wedding party to come to his castle for food and entertainment. Leporello is to take them there, including the groom, Masetto, whom he is to distract while Giovanni seduces Zerlina. First of all, there is silence at Giovanni and Leporello’s appearance — they are strangers, but Giovanni is clearly of a higher class and this could be intimidating. After all the frantic activity beforehand (dancing ‘Gangnam Style’ to the opening chorus in the scene), this sudden silence is quite powerful and constitutes a change of energy and ‘temperature’ — at this moment it reminds me of the reaction of ‘locals’ when a stranger walks into a pub. The director then wants excitement at Giovanni’s offer, which takes hold with the women of the chorus first — they start moving excitedly through the door downstage right, where Giovanni’s house is said to be. Every time they repeat the sequence in rehearsal, chorus members add little features, excited little shrieks, exchanges and reactions. Once the women have left, the men find they can only go out through the next door up and have been separated from the women. Not yet concerned, but in a hurry nonetheless, they immediately start improvising an impatient hustle to get through the door at the same time and creating a bottleneck. The director suggests that ‘everyone can take a little character on as they go out: ‘ooh, I’m not sure — oh, I’ll just follow’ (he pauses as he takes in the chorus enthusiastically improvising) ‘or is that a dangerous thing to say?!’ Making offers is something most performers do all the time in rehearsal — whether these are dance moves, particular reaction or suggestions disguised as jokes, there is a constant stream of offers. They will often be accepted by the director and other performers who take the idea further, maybe tweaking it slightly and integrating it to connect it with other vignettes that are happening on stage. As all are acting on the same instructions, their individual actions end up being connected overall, i.e. one can see every member of the chorus building up individually to a collective reaction in a slightly different way. There are sequences where it is important that everyone performs the same movement (e.g. during the dance at the beginning of the Zerlina Masetto scene) and these are choreographed. There is still room for individual colouring (poses, gestures etc). For the director, it is important to balance foregrounding and backgrounding in a busy scene like this — the chorus can ‘let rip’ when the focus is not entirely on them, but when there is parallel action, e.g. Masetto’s aria ‘Ho capito’ that follows the recitative they are working on, a different level of action and acting is required.

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Afternoon Call, 22 August 2012, Anna, Ottavio, Elvira, Giovanni, Quartet I, 9 New costume elements are appearing every day. Rehearsal skirts have been worn from the start, now Anna has a corset, too, and Ottavio has a top hat for the quartet. Giovanni gets some ‘winkle picker’ shoes during today’s rehearsal to add to his bowler hat and cane and there is a wide range of hats being negotiated at every rehearsal. Elvira’s ‘Victorian’ rehearsal skirt is fitted with an improvised train by the stage manager. The singer of Giovanni shows a strong contrast between genteel behaviour towards Anna and Ottavio and quiet menace towards Elvira in his aside ‘zitto zitto’, grabbing her by the arm and forcing her away from the other two characters — ‘That’s not very Victorian’ remarks the singer of Elvira to the director. She has a few questions about the rules for the time periods that exist on the stage. The quartet must take place in the Victorian era, as that is where we encounter Donna Anna and Don Ottavio. This means Giovanni and Elvira have to adapt through costume and demeanour. They have a little private aside where he threatens her, as she continues to accuse him of being a serial seducer. The discussion hinges on whether they have to keep up the Victorian appearance, both being time travellers. The director points out that Anna and Ottavio are not watching them at this point, so they don’t have to keep up appearances. ‘So am I Victorian or am I pretending to be Victorian?’ asks Elvira. The information given to her about the scene would indicate that both she and Giovanni are aware of multiple periods and are just acting. Despite the fact that they probably would not keep up the acting when in an aside, an agreement is reached to keep Elvira Victorian in the scene to

Illustration 17. Don Giovanni. Rehearsal still, Finale Act 1. Christopher Turner (Don Ottavio), Claire Wild (Zerlina), Elizabeth Atherton (Donna Elvira). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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avoid confusion. It is a case of prioritising clarity for the audience over internal logic and as it is a very brief moment, there would not be enough time to establish the multiple layers of meaning that go with the time travelling concept. Watching Don Ottavio, I imagine someone of his status to have a very polished public persona which would include a certain gravitas and deliberation of movement. When I mention this to the director and the assistant director, we all start talking about movement as a signifier of period. Quickly, this becomes ‘period’ in the sense of ‘old fashioned’, rather than a specific period. Social class then had more of a bearing on demeanour than it would have now. Also, behaviour was more gendered than contemporary behaviour is, determined by inequality in status between men and women, but more practically also by physically restrictive dress. Costume and props are the most concrete signifiers by which period ‘clues’ can be given.

Afternoon Call, 23 August 2012, Don Ottavio, Aria: Dalla sua pace, I, 10a The rehearsal starts with a discussion about stillness — the singer performing Ottavio says he feels more comfortable when moving around. But both he and the director agree that stillness is something that has been lacking in the character of Ottavio so far. So to see him standing almost motionless during parts of the aria feels right. In this production, the honourable Victorian exterior hides a questionable character, however: Ottavio had taken some money off the Commendatore’s body earlier. The director raises the subject of money in connection with this aria and ways of making connections between what Ottavio has done earlier and what he sings now (‘my peace depends on her [Anna’s] peace’): should he be pondering that Anna agreeing to marry him would contribute to his peace of mind by providing his financial lifeline?) To illustrate this, Ottavio should be taking stock of his existing funds. This is suggested as a thought and an action in the B part of the aria, before he returns to more tender ponderings in the recurrence of part A. This exploration leads to practical considerations and the director asks whether Ottavio has something with a pocket, a waistcoat or a coat, even a hat? The set and costume designer doesn’t think this is right and suggests he would have taken his hat off by the time the aria starts, holding it. She also offers the thought that Ottavio probably would not have a top hat — if he does not have much money, a thing like that is hard to maintain and would probably be the first to go. The singer tries out Part B of the aria while playing with money — he does it in a way which makes him look guilty, but the director’s suggestion of counting seems to go a little bit too far. This makes the aria come across as part A) noble feelings, part B) material considerations and worry which leads back to part A) guilt and return to noble feelings (the guilt mainly expresses itself in the transition between parts B and the return to part

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A). It is decided that Ottavio will wear his coat, holding his top hat in the first part of the aria and will then walk towards the wall downstage right and lean against it while expressing his darker feelings.

Don Giovanni: Aria, Fin ch’han dal vino, I, 11 The director talks about his ideas for this very famous, fast-paced aria to the singers of Giovanni and Leporello; the latter will be the silent recipient of a whole host of instructions for the big festivity that Giovanni is planning at his home. The aria suggests that Leporello should encourage drunkenness and disorderly dancing (‘Senz’ alcun ordine la danza sia,/ch’il minuetto, chi

Illustration 18. Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 1. William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), Alastair Miles (Leporello). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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la follia/chi l’alemanna farai ballar’), so that Giovanni may add another ten conquests to his list by morning. It is the theme of the three dances (which will be shown on stage in Finale 1, each dance with its own musicians attached) on which the director wants to base the staging of the aria. He suggests showing dance moves from different eras, rather than ‘the menuet, the follia, the alemanna’ which are mentioned in the aria, in order to connect them with Giovanni’s identity as a time traveller. There’s a practical problem — the pace of the aria and the number of words put a restriction onto what the singer can physically do. Here, Leporello can take an active part (he is also equipped with a cane, like his master) and can carry out the moves, as he takes Giovanni’s orders. A music hall style double act develops at the end of the aria: Giovanni and Leporello stand back to back, link legs and their canes take on an upward angle in the playout (this reminds the designer of Brighella from the commedia dell’arte; apparently there is always a moment where his cane turns a bit phallic). This provides a strong, sexually charged statement at the end of the aria, which has ended up as a ‘mash up’ of periods: Charlestonstyle, jiving from Leporello and an Elvis-style swagger from Giovanni, just before he strikes the pose classically associated with his character, mainly through the ‘Champagne Song’ portrait by Max Slevogt (1901/1902, a portrait of the baritone Francesco d’Andrade Illustration 19. Don Giovanni. Performance still, Act 1. Claire Wild (Zerlina), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. singing ‘Fin ch’an dal vino’).

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Afternoon Call, 28 August 2012, Zerlina, Masetto, Chorus Ladies — ‘Batti, batti’ (Aria Zerlina), I, 12 The director worked on this scene with the singers of Zerlina and Masetto a few days ago. Zerlina initiates a very physical seduction to make up with the sulking Masetto. It starts with suggestive teasing, which turns into foreplay and then (clothed) sex with Zerlina on top, controlling the rhythm in time with the lines she is singing ‘pace, pace o vita mia’. She climaxes on ‘si si si, si si si’, banging her fist on the floor. This is daring, but is anchored in musical cues — and the characters are situated in the 1950s, where restraints would not be as big a barrier as they would for example be in the Victorian period. Masetto’s remark in the recitative following the aria ‘questa strega sedurmi’ (this witch seduced me) also fits this idea. Two main approaches can be observed in the early stages of rehearsal — one is the sequential ‘one thing at a time’ approach, added together gradually, with short moments of staging turning into longer sequences running through. This is often followed by another technique, the micro rehearsal, where several things are practised in the same space after they have been set up. Initially, they will be rehearsed simultaneously, but separately, and will then gradually be added together again. In a micro-rehearsal moment, Zerlina and Masetto run through her aria, Zerlina speaking the words rhythmically, without music, and going through the movements. Meanwhile, the director is dividing the chorus ladies into ‘very drunk’ and ‘not quite as drunk’. They have been at Giovanni’s party for quite a while, and the plentiful supply of drink is showing. Two of the chorus ladies sit with their backs against the back wall, sharing a bottle and offering the director all sorts of ideas as to what their characters might do — one spills champagne down her front and then pretends to suck it off the fabric (a suggestion from the stage manager), she then acts the urge to be sick, while the other offers her handbag for the first one to be sick into. Their attention is then captured by the scene occurring between Zerlina and Masetto further downstage and they stare at them with their mouths open. They are very funny in their dead pan clowning and it is hard to take one’s eyes off the way they react to everything on stage. Another chorus lady, also acting very drunk, is on the floor and rolls right to the edge of the rostrum at the beginning of the recitative, when the iris opens. The director wants Patsy (Joanna Lumley’s character in Absolutely Fabulous) to be the role model for this (the chorus singer should try suddenly waking up, drunkenly asking ‘what?!’ and going back to sleep again). The first time she tries to roll downstage, she rolls over the edge of the rostrum and lands on her front, to general hilarity, including her own (after everyone realises she has not hurt herself). She then proceeds to go through a range of options for leaving the stage — focusing in turn on flirting with a servant, strenuously trying to maintain

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her dignity while struggling to stay upright and refusing to leave without her bottle. Meanwhile, two other ladies wander to and fro looking for the action (‘a bit Saturday night in Leeds’, the director explains). Meanwhile, two of Giovanni’s masked servants, gentlemen of the chorus, have been encouraged to develop a ‘slightly creepy’ feel about their demeanour. They try out some polite, but sinister smiles and stoop their postures in unsettling reverence. This kind of rehearsal is very entertaining, both when several actions are developed simultaneously and when the resulting combination is run. Things that are newly added become magnified because others on stage are seeing them for the first time and react to them. This in turn gives encouragement to those who are trying things out and deciding which options to incorporate in the action. Once all the different elements of a scene have been put together and established as simultaneous action, they blend into the flow of the action and other performers get used to them as part of the scene. This explains why the first try or suggestion of a new idea is always the best, funniest and freshest, and why considerable input is needed to recreate it and keep it looking spontaneous.

Illustrations 20 and 21. Don Giovanni. Rehearsal and performance, Act 2. Michael Druiett (Commendatore), Alastair Miles (Leporello), William Dazeley (Don Giovanni). Photos: Malcolm Johnson.

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Don Giovanni enters through the top window at the back. The tempo of his sequence means it is a challenge to get the words out — it runs at almost the speed of a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song. The singer shows fierce concentration and focuses on conductor the first time he sings it and this success results in a relieved face. The second time the sequence is repeated, actions are added and therefore the patter text results in the singing of gobbledygook. The singer skilfully turns this into a joke along the way and makes everyone laugh. The third time tempo, text and acting all come together without a glitch together and he exits with a triumphant ‘made it’ gesture.

Morning Call, 29 August 2012, Whole Cast (Except Commendatore), Finale Act 1 A series of micro rehearsals is used to put this musically and dramatically complex finale together. One of its key sequences is structured around three different dances happening simultaneously. In this production, this can be aligned with the fact that all characters from the different periods are on stage together; creating a period and a dance ‘mash up’, leading on from Giovanni’s aria ‘Fin ch’an dal vino’, which also featured dances from many different periods. The first dance to be introduced is the minuet. Anna, Ottavio and Elvira dance this centre stage, albeit reluctantly, in order to keep up their masked guest covers. A steamy tango is developing downstage right, danced by Zerlina and Giovanni, which will end in her being dragged off to be seduced (Giovanni’s first attempt was cut short by Donna Elvira’s intervention earlier on). Finally, downstage left, there is a ‘distraction’ dance by Leporello, who has the order to dance with Masetto in order to separate him from Zerlina and to make Giovanni’s seduction plans easier. The singer of Leporello makes lots of offers for this, all of which are allowed for the moment, so his dancing results in a mixture of several periods (‘with a bit of Daddancing thrown in’, as the singer jokes). Masetto should be focusing only on Zerlina on the other side of the stage, but finds it hard, as Leporello’s dancing is making him laugh so much. After a few runs of the sequence, he finally manages to push past him and run after Zerlina, who has just disappeared with Giovanni. The singer of Masetto does this with full energy, running against the door that has closed in his face and performing a spectacular fall. Everyone pauses briefly, as it is the first time they have seen this and are not at all sure whether the fall was intended. It was, but some of its vigour is toned down as the scene is repeated.

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Morning Call, 30 August 2012, Ensemble (Except Commendatore), Finale, I, 13 There is an animated discussion: the last part of the finale results in the accusation of Don Giovanni as Donna Anna’s assailant and the Commendatore’s murderer, but there is no real action the accusers can take after this has happened because of Giovanni’s status. So far, he has led a double life as the rich and charitable Don, respected by his peers, friends with the Commendatore — and as the furtive seducer, often wearing a mask to conceal his identity. While he is classless in his pursuits, his status means he can afford the life he lives and can expect relatively few repercussions. If there is too much of a scandal (such as the killing of an old man on very unequal terms!), this convenience might be under threat. There seems to be a brief moment just before the last part of the finale, in the pause before the allegro (i.e. ‘trema trema, scellerato’) where this dawns on the characters that there is relatively little they can do in the face of Don Giovanni’s elevated status and lacking actual proof. Don Ottavio, however, is coaxed to threaten Giovanni with a gun, which goes off by accident, making everyone jump and shriek. Ottavio acts being ill at ease, pointing the gun at Giovanni and Leporello and consequently does not represent much of a threat. Elvira asks the director if she can have a knife in the final ensemble of the finale. This could enhance the risk for Giovanni and Leporello and would communicate that she is not frightened of Giovanni. As the singer points out, he used violence against her earlier in the quartet and she stood up to him. With all elements joined together, Giovanni and Leporello are trapped between Anna and Ottavio (with a pistol) on the left, Elvira (with a knife) on the right and Zerlina and Masetto (furious about what must have been attempted rape backstage) behind them. In the playout to the finale, Giovanni manages to overwhelm Ottavio and wrestle the pistol off him while Leporello bites Elvira’s hand which is pointing the knife. In the ensuing confusion, Giovanni escapes to the front and, with the iris almost closed, pushes Leporello back into the angry cluster of protagonists while he disappears. This is already a dynamic and seemingly chaotic scene with just the soloists. The chorus are now added to the mix. They have been offstage, but now return with their own bills to settle after the alcohol-fuelled turbulence of the party. They are told that couples should chase each other and pay no attention at all to the soloists, running around them, narrowly missing them and pushing them out of the way. Again, this is carefully choreographed and added in layer by layer. The warring peasants are certainly not hands off with the soloists. When the scene is polished, loud steps are quietened, shrieking is muffled so it does not disturb the music, but when it is run the finale is thrillingly explosive, chaotic and frantic (see also Illustration 22 below).

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Morning Call, 4 September 2012, Giovanni, Masetto — Recitative, II, 17 The singer of Don Giovanni acknowledges a new observer in rehearsal while having his puppet tied round his neck and jokes that this is ‘a typical day in the rehearsal room — this is what we train for’. It is interesting to put myself into the shoes of the person who is seeing the scene for the first time. Walking in cold, maybe with preconceptions of ‘Mozart’s greatest opera’, one enters a set up where singers are trying to keep a straight face with small puppet bodies tied around their necks (see Illustration 14). Giovanni and Masetto make lots of commedia-like suggestions (‘does Giovanni do dastardly laughter, or should it be a helium-induced sound, seen as he’s wearing the puppet?’) and offer exaggerated shouting . ‘We love it when a puppet is beaten up’, remarks the director. When these scenes are first tried out, singers instinctively assume a Punch & Judy style — with the arm gestures, but their ‘real sized’ bodies suddenly mimic the puppet body (when Giovanni’s puppet hits Masetto’s, his ‘real’ body moves as though he was being manipulated by a hand). This does not result in the puppet being manipulated in the right way and so Masetto has to differentiate his movements accordingly, channelling his real body’s reactions into the puppet. As his head is the puppet’s head, he still has to show the reaction to being hit in his face. As the tea break is called, Giovanni sits quietly looking at his score, probably temporarily having forgotten about the puppet body around his neck.

Morning Call, 5 September 2012, All Soloists (Except Commendatore), Sextet, II, 18 The Sextet in Act 2 is a number that can be ‘a director’s graveyard’, as the director cheerfully remarks. All the different parties with their different backgrounds and different reasons to plot revenge enter at different times. We agree that it is quite difficult to find a plausible situation for the protagonists’ entrances — do they just happen to be passing? The man who is the target of their revenge campaign, Giovanni, does not have a part in the sextet, but he is the reason they all appear in the space. The director is trying out the idea that Giovanni is present and has conjured everyone into the space where he controls doors and entrances. Giovanni is on the gallery, looking down onto the scene he is creating, reminiscent of a puppet master controlling marionettes or ‘lab rats’, as the director calls it. Once it is understood why the characters enter and move in the space (i.e. it is out of their control), the sextet is easier to grasp — not least because the protagonist everyone is singing about is actually visible. Elvira believes she is with Giovanni, but it is Leporello who is disguised in his master’s clothes. He reveals this when violence is threatened by the others, who then express their frustration that Giovanni has managed to avoid his

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comeuppance yet once again. Giovanni, after setting up this confrontation by facilitating the confrontation, disappears with a triumphant laugh. When realising she has been deceived yet once again, Elvira gives the cue for the final allegro section (‘mille torbidi pensieri’) by slapping Leporello in the face and the sextet ends with everyone trying to get out through the shut doors in a mood of panic and disorientation. In rehearsal, the sextet is developing a good balance between moments that are relatively still, where the characters are taking in information, and some very physical sequences (Elvira is forced away from what she believes is her ‘beloved husband’ by Anna and Zerlina, then everyone pounces on Leporello once he reveals his disguise). Finally, after his unmasking, Leporello gets rid of his Giovanni-costume and shows his hate for it, as his master is not there to be berated. The second act shows Leporello altogether in a darker mood — he finished the first act by being beaten up after being thrown to the angry crowd by his master, he has been forced to act as his master and has almost been beaten up again because of it. His trials are not over — the terror of the graveyard scene and Giovanni’s punishment are yet to come — but the light-hearted comedy of the first half has been replaced by Leporello as a sad clown, who could easily find a place in one of the later plays by Samuel Beckett. Some of the situations might have comedy value for the audience, but the singer demonstrates that for Leporello they are not funny at all. Earlier in the trio between Leporello, Giovanni and Elvira, the singer showed his character’s resentment and his dismay at his amoral master, as he was forced to act as Giovanni by having a pistol pointed at him. Even when he sings ‘io rido’ (I am laughing), it is in a very bitter way, just having been kicked onto the floor. Throughout Act 2, Leporello becomes stiller, no longer protesting, but putting up with hardship and cruel pranks with gritted teeth. Leporello’s angry reaction to Giovanni’s clothes after his unmasking in the sextet makes me reflect on the use of costumes and props in replacement of absent characters — a kind of substitution. Elvira also makes use of this device, as she stays behind after the sextet to lament her renewed betrayal by Giovanni (aria ‘Mi tradi, quell’ alma ingrata’), singing to Leporello’s discarded Giovanni-costume with alternating anger and tenderness.

Afternoon Call, 6 September 2012, Don Giovanni, Leporello, II, 24 The singer of Don Giovanni takes a few minutes to get acquainted with his props for what turns out to be his character’s final meal — there are oyster shells (empty of course), dishes and a breast-shaped pudding for dessert, but other needs arise, such as lemons (‘I can mime a lemon for now’) and a pepper grinder (‘should it be penis shaped?’). What looks like light-hearted messing around has an important function; finding out the texture and handling of objects in order to find ways in which they can be included into a scene, as well as finding solutions in order to substitute props that are not there yet. I have often

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Don Giovanni. Performance still, Finale Act 1, Alastair Miles (Leporello), William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm

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watched singers investigating new objects in order to anticipate anything that might happen when they are using them in a scene, and then later checking their props and arranging them in their preferred position. Whether these are plates and food, as they are here, or clothes that will need to be put on in a particular order, singers do the preparation and are always helped by the professional precision of stage management and the props team. We leave the Giovanni rehearsal room just as the production moves towards its next stage — a whole scene, several scenes, an act, both acts and finally, the quite formal rehearsal room run.

The Rehearsal Room Run Before the start of the run, the rehearsal studio resembles an anthill: notes are given to singers, the stage is reset by stage management and props staff, the deputy stage manager’s score is updated, lists of chorus members are ticked and the chorus manager calls in in case of any questions. Company members attending the run chat, look for chairs, joke and add to the buzz of anticipation. On first entering, it simply looks like a mass of people, but it quickly filters out who is a production member and who is a visitor. Visitors display more cautious body language, seek out a seat tentatively, make sure they are not in the way and are extra alert and polite to the inhabitants of the room they are entering which ‘belongs’ to the production. They behave like guests. The routine and experience of the performers means that it is a ‘normal’ occurrence for them to have an audience, but this is the first time outsiders are present and it changes the energy and the atmosphere in the space significantly. Performers’ attitudes displayed through behaviour might include the following: ‘let’s show them the results of all that work’ — ‘makes no difference to me, I’m just doing my job’ — or the comical display of mock nerves to show there are no nerves at all. Once the run is under way, ‘outsider’ company members are as silent as an audience and the only action that is not on stage is that of the production team taking notes and occasionally whispering, as well as stage managers and props staff moving around the space silently, ensuring everything runs like clockwork. There is no ‘backstage’ in the rehearsal room and performers not on stage will thus be visible. Their behaviour signifies they are mindful of this and they keep private behaviour to a minimum. Some intent listening takes place ‘offstage’ and even some mimed applause after an aria has been particularly well sung. Breaking the rules of the passive audience in a production with which one is not connected can be nerve-wrecking — sitting at the far side of the room (far away from the door) for the rehearsal room run of From the House of the Dead, I have to leave between acts and forget my jacket, containing car keys and documents. As I am picking someone up, waiting to the end of

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the next act is not possible and re-entering the rehearsal room while the run continues seems impossible. There is a brief musical break, but the stage action continues, so I consider that marginally more acceptable. I run in to get the jacket and run out again quickly and as silently as possibly. This results in a few puzzled looks from the rest of the audience and no acknowledgement from the performers who are used to continuing through disruption, but I feel mortified and send an e-mail of apology to some people who had been present the following day. This shows that the formal rules that come with performance and rehearsal spaces are strongly engrained and breaking them is felt very keenly. The behaviour observed in others is a body language that takes the ‘I am not really here’ as far as possible — a stoop, walking with bent knees to make oneself look smaller, looking at the ground in order not to make eye contact, displaying an apologetic smile or a ‘mea culpa’ signifier, all of these physical examples of ‘I beg your pardon’. The transition from animated and noisy to completely silent in the rehearsal room is achieved very quickly at this stage — it is clear who is giving the signal and despite people being in conversation, they will be alert to being called by stage management and react very quickly. The process from noisy and informal to formal and quiet is maybe a little bit slower early on in the rehearsal process than at this later stage. If something amusing takes place, there will be laughter in the context of the production, but also because the singer of the role, whom the audience know privately, is doing something funny. There is a similarly mixed reaction to something extreme happening on stage, often expressed through a spectrum of smiles: embarrassed, amused, conspiratorial. One knows that the violent scenes in Norma or Joshua, for example, are thoroughly rehearsed, but they still spark the imagination along the lines of ‘how does that work technically?’ and ‘I hope they’re not really hurt’.

Past, Present and Future in the Rehearsal Room The more sequences of a production are run through, the more the rehearsal room changes as a space, revealing the dual qualities of its stage area and the space that surrounds it to. To illustrate this, it is helpful to list what is happening onstage and backstage during a run in a way that stresses simultaneity. This format is used again later, documenting a full performance of Don Giovanni from a backstage perspective. It shows that a scene going on in the stage space is, in a way, old news in the wings, where the next entrance and the next scene change are now the focus of preparation. Watching from the front of the rehearsal room, one sees the narrative at the centre of the space, the ‘now’ of the production, and, in a way, can observe the future in the wings. The past is also in evidence, at moments where performers come offstage, have costume changes or adjustments and discard their props before leaving the wings to prepare for their next entrance.

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Onstage/Backstage: The Portrait, Rehearsal Room Run, 14 January 2011 Onstage (rehearsal room) Fast-paced scene in restaurant — Chartkov on ladder with napkin around his neck, waiters serving food with a frantic accompaniment of ‘yes Sir, yes Sir!’

Offstage (wings), but visible The Journalists mounts the rostrum backstage that allows him to look through the elevated window onto the stage

The Journalist peers onto the scene out of a window, wondering who Chartkov is

Scene between Journalist and Chartkov Journalist exits

Entrance Noblewoman and Liza upstage left

The Journalist comes down the steps backstage and prepares to fly in from stage left on a zip wire with the help of backstage staff. Once he has ‘landed’ on the ladder with Chartkov, we see the device he has held on to brought out stage right and secured by stage management Preparation for the Noblewoman to enter on stilts, and her daughter Liza in a very small mobility device. The Noblewoman receives assistance to get onto her stilts, staff fix and securing them, help with knee pads, etc. Once she is strapped into the stilts, the singer practises moving around, as it is early days of having the devices in the rehearsal room. Stage management and props colleagues remain close right up to the two singers’ technically complex entrance in case of a fall Quick change in the wings stage right for the Journalist into the costume of art dealer

A change in behaviour backstage is observable directly before an entrance. Last bits of practising or repetition might occur on the way to the position and might then be replaced by an air of concentration and anticipation where performers will not generally be very communicative and tune into the scene they are about to enter. This is a transitional mode, as the singer will not yet ‘be’ the character they are playing, but will no longer behave ‘privately’, either. While introvert, there is a subtle performativity at play, too, as the pre-entrance behaviour signals to others that private exchanges are not welcome without this having to be stated in words. The levels of preparatory investment will depend on the phase in the rehearsal process and the expectation within the particular rehearsal, of course. If there are several singers entering at the same time, there will often be signs of energising each other — ‘we can do this’ gestures, winks or nods of affirmation or shared jokes. Watching them sing offstage can

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The Portrait. Paul Nilon (Chartkov), Peter Savidge (Journalist). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

also be very interesting, as parts of the character they are singing take over their physicality, even though they are not consciously acting. Some singers switch off very quickly when they come offstage; the transformation to their backstage persona a matter of seconds. Others will go through a more layered process — the Noblewoman in The Portrait (above) is an example for this: after her exit, the singer walks in her stage style for a little distance, smiling in appreciation of colleagues’ comments and

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Illustration 24.

The Portrait. Richard Burkhard (Nikita), Carole Wilson (Noblewoman), Paul Nilon (Chartkov). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

rehearsal room audience’s amusement, performing a mock regal ‘thank you’ gesture (a curtsy at a different rehearsal I observed) and then, slipping into her more private persona, nodding and smiling at someone watching the rehearsal. The general mood backstage will depend on the urgency of preparation — no banter or corpsing occur during a quick change, obviously. Singers waiting for their next entrance will often pick up cues from the music accompanying the stage

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action, walking in time to a particular rhythm, for example or warming up their voice quietly in tune to the music. The need to be quiet backstage will also be in proportion to the volume of the music. Sometimes even the activity of ‘being quiet’ takes on a heightened performance quality, as singers walk on their tiptoes backstage in exaggeration, ‘being seen to be quiet’.

Cover Run Norma, 14 February 2012 — Rehearsal Studio For the first cast rehearsals, the high wooden walls of the set were in the studio, making it stage-like — the usual simultaneity of seeing performers on stage and those preparing for their entrance (adjusting costume, gathering props, behaviour that precedes an entrance) was not in evidence. As the production has now opened and the set is on stage, the cover run takes place on a marked up stage, so ‘onstage’ and ‘backstage’ can be observed simultaneously. I watch the singer of Norma before the entrance to her aria ‘Casta Diva’, as she picks up her bunch of branches, pulls her coat around her and assumes a look of intense concentration, not looking at anyone, already taking on a bit of the prophetess backstage, from where she starts singing. It is a different rendition to that of the first cast singer, although it displays the same physical gestures. However, they are inhabited by a different person with a different physique, a different body language and of course a different voice. There is a special quality to the attention that is being paid by others in the room. This attention heightens as people listen to the signature aria of the opera, ‘Casta Diva’. This is the only opportunity to hear the cover cast together, something that will never happen during the run of performances, where just one cover might replace a particular singer. After her aria, there is not enough space for the singer of Norma to go off downstage right, so she turns her back in order to shut off from the stage and behaves in ‘offstage’ mode, changing her body energy and relaxing her posture. Meanwhile, the young priestess performs her silent exchange with Flavio onstage and leaves with her wrapped up branches. The assistant stage manager takes them off her as she crosses the gaffer tape threshold. She sits down, sticking her tongue out briefly at one of the boys who play Norma’s children in order to amuse him. He grimaces back at her, but the young priestess does not seem to want to play anymore, as she is now watching Adalgisa sing her first aria. The difference between onstage and offstage behaviour can be particularly well observed in children. The younger one of the boys humorously scrunches his face together and shuts his eyes in a ‘yuck’ expression when Pollione flings his arms around Adalgisa during their scene. The children are directly in the sightlines of the two performers at this moment, but seem completely invisible to them through their immersion in the scene, which creates a mental threshold. The physical threshold merely consists of some gaffer tape on the floor.

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Norma. Annemarie Kremer (Norma), James Cresswell (Oroveso), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Concentric Circles in Rehearsal As we will see later in the section, the relationship between singers and directors will undergo some changes when a production transfers to the stage for its final stretch of rehearsals. As Atkinson elaborates, the rehearsal process follows the path from the secular/mundane to the sacred. As the rehearsals proceed through the production cycle, however, we can observe other trajectories. For instance, the physical and social space between singers, producer and others becomes progressively more distant in physical and sometimes in emotional terms (see also Atkinson, 2006, pp. 27 28). One could say that the singers revert to the closeness they began to develop in music rehearsals before the director joined them. We can visualise this by thinking in terms of concentric circles, which are reconfigured during various stages of the production’s emergence. In the exploratory stages of early blocking rehearsals, it is suggested that the singers and the director are generally at the centre of the inner circle, and that those in the ring around them react to impulses from this ‘nucleus’.

In the Norma Rehearsal Studio, November 2012 The director picks up some branches and suggests how the singer of Norma might put them on the floor. The costume designer then demonstrates how branches are cut (away from the body). As soon as she cuts a few leaves, a stage manager goes to get a broom, ready for when the scene is reset. Introduction to the aria ‘Casta Diva’. There is a long time for the singer to move from touching the branches to climbing the tree with its priestess’s seat. As the singer starts the ascent, there is an impulsive movement from two stage management staff and an assistant director towards her, in case she slips and needs to be caught. As soon as there is a brief break, stage management try out the tree ascent themselves to assess risks and possible adjustments to the chair and its fixings. These two brief examples show the connectivity of something that happens or is tried out — as soon as any props are handled, the prop person goes into standby mode, for instance. During the early rehearsal stages, the assistant director, the costume designer, stage managers and props staff have their position in an outer circle, but frequently enter the inner one. During interruptions and when there is a risk, the circle’s boundaries are not observed. In a third concentric layer, there will be colleagues who have a more static position, such as the conductor and the repetiteur. While they will be sitting side by side,

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there is still a distinction between these and the ones not directly involved, or not involved at that moment. The further the rehearsals process progresses, the more it leaves the singers alone in the core circle, at the centre of attention, with only occasional interventions from production staff. The immediate and close physical connection (the director and assistant director talking to the singers at close quarters in the early rehearsal stages) changes gradually, as the stage space is treated more and more like an actual stage. This means the director will intervene from a position further away, behind a desk, while a scene is in progress and detailed face-to-face discussions will happen when interruptions occur. One can observe a realignment of these circles in the production’s transfer to the stage. This is not only due to the change of space, but is also connected to the specific types of rehearsals of any production. To proceed chronologically, when stage and piano rehearsals start, the physical space between the stage area and the auditorium is greater than in the rehearsal room and access not as straightforward as it was. The performers on stage are joined frequently by members of the stage management team during interruptions, whereas the director and assistant director will often communicate with the stage via a microphone, to save losing time in transit. They join performers on stage typically at the start of a rehearsal or when a complex problem needs to be solved. So the singers, still the focus of attention, have a concentric circle staffed by stage management and crew and also have a close connection with conductor in the orchestra pit (less so with the pianist, whom they now cannot see). The director is surrounded by designers and other key staff in the auditorium. These realigned circles of interaction do not necessarily mean a deterioration in relationships, of course. I have often observed that compensation for the loss of immediate closeness between singers and director is sought through conversations in corridors or dressing rooms, notes sessions and other interactions away from the rather intense focus of rehearsals.

Stage Piano Rehearsal, 21 September 2010, The Turn of the Screw, Leeds Grand Theatre Opera North’s production process sees costumes and often make-up as part of the rehearsals right from the first stage call. So not only is the space unfamiliar and numerous adaptations have to be made by the cast and production team, but costumes, wigs and make-up also have to be contended with simultaneously. The piano is no longer a few metres across from the performers, but in the orchestra pit, with amplification, so it can be heard on stage. The director can no longer communicate with his cast by bounding onto the scene from behind a table, but has the choice of either speaking to the stage through a microphone or to make the much longer way from auditorium to stage to be among them in person. A

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very noticeable separation has occurred — McAuley also points out in her rehearsal ethnography about a theatre production that there is ‘no way back to the passionate involvement of the rehearsal room’ (McAuley, 2012, p. 222). Sometimes factions can indeed grow fractious. This will often have technical reasons and indirect communication, through the stage microphone, is a useful example. It is easier to get exasperated by a disembodied voice than by someone in direct dialogue in the rehearsal room, and it is easy to become impatient in the few minutes it takes the bearer of the disembodied voice to come to the stage. Affirmations and reactions, hugely important to a singer while shaping a part, are not possible to the same extent, so a singer on stage might have the feeling of being looked at rather voyeuristically and of being spoken at rather than spoken to. The singer who is addressed cannot see the bearer of the voice, whereas the director in the auditorium can see the well-lit singer on stage, receiving a fuller picture including gesture, facial expression and body language. It is a communicative situation comparable to a one-sided skype call. Where problem solving has focused on characters’ actions and relationships within the narrative and specific concept of the production, it now has much more of a functionalistic and technical mode — questions such as ‘why would you react in this way?’ are eclipsed by questions such as ‘please could you move a foot further downstage to be in the light?’. The prologue to The Turn of the Screw takes place in front of black tabs in this production. Its singer, who also performs the part of Peter Quint, comes on with the house lights half down. There is a sense of expectation that accompanies the first words sung in their original stage setting in this production (‘It is a curious story’). The conductor gives the upbeat and the pianist plays the few short chords preceding the singer’s cue. Just as the singer breathes in to start singing, the director interrupts over the microphone with ‘can we try that again?’ and everyone bursts into laughter — part tension relief after the build-up, part amusement that the formality of the rehearsal (greater than the formality in the rehearsal room) has been broken after just a few seconds. There might also be a slight element of Schadenfreude. While the interruption lasts, the circle on stage (cast, stage management and crew) and the circle in the auditorium (director, assistant director, designer, lighting designer et al) are selfcontained, then a connection is re-established through the stage microphone, becoming stronger as the sole focus is once again the action on stage.

Sitzprobe, 7 and 8 June 2012, Die Walküre A Sitzprobe (a German word adopted into UK practice, meaning a seated rehearsal with orchestra, the first interaction between singers and orchestra) occurs after the rehearsal room run, which is accompanied by piano, and before the production moves

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onto the stage. This may differ in other companies, but at Opera North it forms a bridging rehearsal between the two main phases of the rehearsal process. Since 2009, these rehearsals have taken place in the Howard Assembly Room, the floor of which is transformed into an orchestra pit, the orchestra sitting in the same layout as they will be in the Grand Theatre. The conductor will have rehearsed alone with the orchestra for a few days preceding the ‘Sitz’. Similar to the singers’ rehearsal room sessions, orchestra rehearsals are about interpretation and problem solving. Agreements about tempi, transitions and dynamics are reached and the work is refined. The singers arrive, and participate in the rehearsal from the gallery, looking directly at the conductor opposite them on a lower level. Again, this mimics the spatial conditions of the theatre. Acoustic conditions are very different, however, as in the wood-clad interior of the Howard Assembly Room, the orchestra sounds much louder than it will in the Grand Theatre. The singers are warned about this difference in balance, so they are not tempted to up their volume in order to be heard over the orchestra. As this is the first time the singers and the orchestra are rehearsing together, the conductor introduces the singers by name and by character, to murmured acclaim. Sometimes the strings will touch their instruments with their bows in a visual applause display one can also observe in the orchestra pit or on the concert podium at times. Singers will acknowledge the orchestra in turn through mimed applause, nods, broad smiles and a mimed ‘thank you’. After a long period of synchronising their acting and singing performances in the rehearsal room, singers can now concentrate on their musical work in interaction with each other, with the conductor and with the orchestra. At times, elements of their physical performance can be seen in the Sitzprobe, but in a reduced form, as if they were reminding themselves of the simultaneity of the physical and vocal actions. The concentrated and muscular action of singing will often result in a heightened physicality. In a Sitzprobe for Act 1 of Die Walküre, for example (7 June 2012), the singer of Hunding starts while sitting down, but the energy and pent up aggression of his singing (and his character) make him stand up, gripping the railings of the gallery with great force, as if an outlet were needed for this energy and anger. A similar thing can be observed for Brünnhilde’s first entrance, her characteristic battle cry of ‘Hojotohoh!’ Previous to the cue, there is a sense of heightened attention in the room, as is often the case for the first time a singer is heard in rehearsal (see first music calls earlier in the section). The singer adopts a similarly muscular pose to Hunding and Siegmund earlier. Her voice fills the space and rides over the orchestral strings. In the third part of Die Walküre Sitzprobe (8 June 2012, Howard Assembly Room), anticipation builds up over quite a long time, as the Valkyries are called for 1.30 pm and detailed work takes place on Act 2 over the period of an hour, which means there is quite a long wait for the eight singers. The conductor breaks off, gives a few notes to the orchestra (only 20 minutes to go until the end of the rehearsal) while the singers line up on the gallery. Finally, the pulsing orchestral introduction starts, first in the strings, then in the woodwind with the galloping sound of the Valkyrie’s horses, then the horn

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sections with the famous ‘ride’ motif. Finally, this orchestrated tension of arrival and fast motion is pierced by Helmwige and Gerhilde’s battle cries. As the singers belt out the octave jumps from the gallery, the tension makes way for thrilled faces and smiles from the others in the room, also to be seen on the conductor’s face in conducting them. The singers’ ability to ride over the dense orchestration, seemingly without effort, impresses and affects everyone. The visceral power of the music merges with the compelling emotional quality and the unleashed volume of the Valkyrie scene. Sitting only about 10 m away, I feel the sound waves from the singers’ voices on my face, while the sound of the orchestra creeps up the body via my legs — the wooden gallery conducts sound easily, and it is thrilling to experience the scene with a kind of physical totality that goes way beyond the aural. Meanwhile, the singer of Brünnhilde has taken a little break from Act 2, before joining her sisters, good humouredly miming her horse’s motion which her entrance music indicates.

Illustration 26.

Die Walküre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Acts of Adaptation: Pacing, Modes and Investment in Rehearsal We can conceive the production process as a series of chronological and simultaneous acts of adaptation: the cast and production personnel have adapted to each of the rehearsal spaces, taking on specific rhythms of working and interacting. Musically, the cast have adapted to working with piano accompaniment and then, from the Sitzprobe onwards, the orchestra and the singers adapt to each other with the mediating and interpreting roles of the director and the conductor at the centre. The director has adapted her or his vision to the reality of the day-to-day rehearsals, and everyone involved with the production will be in the process of creating a specific production ‘text’ (see introduction to this section), involving all layers of meaning. We are now in the final phase of the production process: rehearsals on stage. Each stage of the production process comes with its own introductory soundtrack. Before a stage piano rehearsal, this is an atmospheric collage, which may include the voice of the director giving notes or discussing lighting cues with the lighting designer, a singer warming up backstage, the murmuring of other performers backstage, the conductor practising a short sequence with a singer, stage management communicating why there is a slight delay, singers covering parts chatting in the auditorium and the sound of distant walkie-talkies.

First Stage Piano Rehearsal, 8 October 2010, The Merry Widow The beginning of the new production phase on stage is in some ways reminiscent of the simultaneous display of theatre and social performance in the rehearsal room, but a lot of the social interactions one could observe in the studio are now hidden backstage and in the dressing rooms. As I sit down in the auditorium, however, the rehearsal has not yet started and the stage has not yet been cleared, so the performers stand talking in small groups. As costumes are still new, performers admire each others’ attires and scrutinise them for their practicality. The mode is private, but in anticipation of rehearsal, thus slightly heightened; taking in sounds from the stage and listening out for stage managers’ instructions, which are expected at any minute. The General Director, the Planning and Casting Director and the Technical Director sit down in the auditorium to watch the rehearsal, which they will regularly do throughout the production’s final phase of rehearsals. To continue with the adaptation theme above, the transition to the stage means adapting to new distances, light levels and entrances for the performers. Before any scene or part thereof is run, there is a ‘walk through’ mode, which normally means concentrating on the moves without much dramatic or character investment and is for orientation and safety. Once actual

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rehearsing starts, performers have a mode where stage directions, moves, mimics and gestures are delivered and only if something goes wrong, a private layer will enter the performance — an example: the singer of Hannah Glawari is lifted by two gents of the chorus at the end of her entrance song (see also Illustration 28) and when there is a wobble, her ‘in character’ face is mixed with a slight grimace of worry, even though she carries on momentarily. If an error occurs that does not halt proceedings but which may inconvenience someone else, the performer who caused it will change modes to signal that the problem is solved, or to indicate an apology and then return to their character. Modes also depend on whether a singer is singing out, i.e. singing with full voice, or marking, which means singing an octave lower, or quieter. This will have an effect on the way the stage directions and interactions are realised, too, as it is more of a ‘draft’ mode, further illustrated by a brief return to the Rheingold rehearsal room: Opera North’s Head of Music sings in the parts of the absent singers of Wotan and Freia — again, in a way that signifies ‘I am not singing this as a singer would, but am providing cues to fill in the missing voice, so it needs to be audible and articulate enough to be heard and understood’. Sometimes this is a shared task, e.g. between conductor and pianist, sometimes another singer, not busy at the time, will fill in. If a physical presence is needed for an absent singer, this will be done by a member of stage management. The acting style of the substitute will provide necessary positions and moves, but will not be characterised by what Atkinson calls ‘dramaturgical commitment’, thus mirroring the approach to substitute singing above. At the other end of the scale to this ‘draft style’, singers display a performance mode, which means staying in character, investing moves with all the energy and commitment available and covering up mistakes or concerns to make them look intentional. There are many ‘firsts’ for the cast in early stage rehearsals: at the stage piano rehearsal for The Portrait (21 January 2011), the curtain rises to reveal a nightly painter’s studio. A figure flies across the top of the stage in black with a top hat, its outlines lit by light bulbs, bringing associations of both ‘ghostly’ and of ‘showbiz’. The low lighting levels mean we cannot see how the character, the Lamplighter, is suspended, making the flying seem real. This is the first time the cast have seen this effect — the singer had merely walked across the rehearsal room stage previously, lighting his lanterns. The ensemble’s attention is momentarily centred on the powerful moment. Later on in the rehearsal, the waiting after an interruption to address a technical issue also looks slightly magical, as the Lamplighter assumes a waiting position together with the singers of Chartkov and the silent performer of Psyche. He is, however, suspended about 4 m above them while they chat. For the next repetition of the sequence, it is decided on stage to bring him down as he has spent a long time in his harness already, but the singer wants to be flown up again, for which he mimes a Superman pose, then breaks into ‘Fly me to the Moon’, with a few mid-air

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dance steps. While this witty behaviour in rehearsal facilitates a welcome comic relief, it also signifies to production team and stage management that the singer is happy to work under physical strain and is not performing ‘under sufferance’. Humour has many functions in a rehearsal process: it aids playful modes of ‘trying out’ without the performers feeling exposed, as the experiment can be passed off as a joke. Humour also masks embarrassment and serves to relieve boredom. Among performers, trying to make colleagues ‘corpse’ can almost be a sport and takes on quite an element of risk at times. Humour in the sense of bathos is also a very regular feature in the production process — juxtaposing the sublime and the everyday will disperse tension and put things into perspective. The following snapshots from rehearsals illustrate this.

Stage Piano Rehearsals Today’s rehearsal of The Turn of the Screw (23 September 2010), starts at the beginning of Act 2, and that is where it stays for a significant amount of time. The highly elaborate lighting plot, with mostly side lighting, is taking up a lot of time. While it looks stunning from the front, it is difficult for singers on stage. They cannot necessarily see the channels of light or whether they or parts of them are in or out of them. Just as importantly, they cannot always see each other to make eye contact in joint scenes, and the very familiar environment of the set, worked on for a month in the rehearsal room, is now largely in the dark and quite menacing in

Illustration 27. The Turn of the Screw. Elizabeth Atherton (Governess), Benjamin Hulett (Peter Quint). Photo: Bill Cooper.

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terms of tripping and bumping into furniture. Into the slight tension that is building up over the issue sounds the cheerful voice of a stage manager: ‘Eat carrots for breakfast, lunch and tea and you’ll be alright’. During the first stage piano rehearsal for The Makropulos Case (26 July 2012) the change from Act 1 to 2 is being rehearsed. Emilia Marty, the protagonist, is an opera singer. As the plot does not show her as a performer, a short moment has been created between Acts 1 and 2 to present her at the end of a performance. The curtain of the Grand Theatre is transformed into the theatre curtain for her performance and it rises to a sound cue of rapturous applause and shouts of ‘brava!’ as Emilia takes her bow. The cue is first played without any action on stage in the relatively informal setting of the very first stage piano rehearsal towards the end of the tea break. The repetiteur, humorously pretending the ovation is for him, nods in acknowledgement of the recorded cheers and mouths ‘thank you’ from behind the piano in the orchestra pit. The conductor laughs at this and then mimes throwing flowers at the pianist while there is some applause for him from the production team in the stalls, too. At the end of a piano dress rehearsal, the pianist is thanked with ‘real’ applause, which is an acknowledgement of many weeks of work and also a farewell, as the repetiteur will be based in the auditorium from now on, taking notes for the conductor and checking balance levels between orchestra and singers. Only parts of an opera will be rehearsed at the first few stage piano rehearsals — one act will be worked through in a threehour call, for example. This will culminate in a run referred to as the piano dress run or piano dress rehearsal. In many other companies, this will be the first time that all the constituent parts of the production, costumes, wigs, make-up and original props, will be assembled and it can be strenuous rehearsal for everyone, not least the pianist, who in their part as the orchestra will have to play through the entire opera (ideally) without interruption. Opera North have taken part of the stress out of the call for the performers, as costumes, wigs and make-up are introduced much earlier in the process, at the first stage piano rehearsal. However, this is the first time the performance will run through on stage, so it often turns it into a rehearsal where performers pay extra attention to transitions (scene changes, quick costume changes, props and other technical issues) and also discover how to manage their energy levels during the performance. As the piano dress also gives the production team the first opportunity to see a run on stage with set, costume and lighting, this is normally the latest point where changes are made at Opera North.

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Stage Orchestra Rehearsals Like stage piano rehearsals, stage orchestras also have their particular sound collage. At the first Ruddigore stage orchestra rehearsal (26 September 2011), this consists of the sound of the orchestra tuning up and playing short fragments from the operetta in addition to the sounds of the stage and the auditorium described above. Generally, the tuning process moves from being fragmented and individual to something more homogenous. It can almost be described as an overture before an overture — particularly where Gilbert & Sullivan is concerned, as the overture is made up of excerpts of the ‘big hit’ numbers of the opera, and we hear a collage of these beforehand. As sounds become more joined up, the leader will be aware of stage management signals and stands up for the final tuning, led by the oboe. All instruments join the tuning after the leader, starting from A, the sound then dissipating from the unison and breaking up into scales and intervals from all the instruments, until the leader signals that the performance is about to start and the players fall silent. In a performance, the conductor would now enter and, following another light signal from stage management, start the performance. In a stage orchestra rehearsal, the conductor is often already present, talking to the players, and will sometimes use the heightened concentration just before the start to give a few notes on the previous rehearsal. It has been nearly a week since the orchestra last rehearsed the performance at the Sitzprobe. The stage orchestra rehearsals, particularly the first two, ‘belong’ to the conductor more than to the director, just as the stage piano rehearsals are primarily led by the director and focus on making the performance into a coherent whole. I have seen sometimes quite heavy-handed manifestations of status at other companies during these rehearsals, with the conductor asserting control and the director being expected to not ask for interruptions. At Opera North, I have not observed this kind of behaviour; rehearsals simply come with different emphases. Balance between soloists, chorus and orchestra and singers’ diction are of prime importance, as this is the first time the cast and the orchestra come together in the performance space. The Grand Theatre’s acoustic conditions differ greatly from the Howard Assembly Room, where the Sitzprobe took place, and great care needs to be taken to ensure that sound from the pit and from the stage achieve the right balance and that both can be heard clearly. For this reason, music staff will be moving to lots of different positions in the theatre during the rehearsal and feeding back to the conductor, who will pass on the notes to the repetiteur sitting behind him in the first row of the stalls. The work on acoustic balance and word comprehension is one of the most frequent reasons for interruption in a stage orchestra rehearsal. Once an interruption occurs, the performers on stage can often be seen in a transitory mode of behaviour. When the stop is sudden, a performer, although aware of the interruption, will often carry on in character

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for a few seconds, sometimes because physical investment means it is difficult to stop abruptly, sometimes to make the point that s/he is not delighted to be interrupted, sometimes to make colleagues laugh. Returning to the stage orchestra rehearsal of The Merry Widow, we have reached the point of the men’s chorus’s entrance to woo Hanna Glawari, like moths to a flame. Only a few measures in, the conductor interrupts and the gentlemen running in full flight turns into a little slapstick routine by a few of them. This would not Illustration 28. The Merry Widow. Stephanie Corley (Hannah Glawari), Gentlemen of the Chorus of Opera have happened at yesterday’s North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson. rather more ‘technical’ run of the piano dress rehearsal, where it was all about keeping going and becoming aware of costume/prop/set threats. A certain level of orientation and security exists in this next rehearsal, so joking can be ‘afforded’. There is no rigid template as to how a stage orchestra rehearsal is run, as it is based on the different needs of each production. I have observed, however, that technically challenging productions will make the stage piano rehearsals more prone to interruptions and that running longer sequences might therefore become a priority at the stage orchestra stage. While the production moves closer and closer towards performance standard and interruptions occur less frequently, we can still

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Carousel. Finale, Gillene Herbert (Julie), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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observe the simultaneity of several actions at once occasionally: at the third stage orchestra rehearsal of Carousel (28 April 2012), a long sequence of dialogue and ballet after protagonist Billy’s death is run without interruption. The conductor then needs time to work through the section with the orchestra without action on the stage, and the director and her team need time to tweak a few things on stage. So the iron curtain comes down to separate the auditorium and pit from the stage, creating a sound barrier for the two simultaneous rehearsals. Just as the conductor gives the upbeat, we hear a rich four part harmony of the chorus singing ‘You’ll never walk alone’ behind the iron curtain — the conductor pauses for a few seconds, and the strings start a deliberately distorted accompaniment of the section in humorous reaction. Meanwhile the carousel projections are running on the front of the iron curtain. The sound from onstage is then ignored during the next bit of orchestra rehearsal, although we still hear the sequence, repeated at least six times as instructions such as ‘figure O, after the crescendo; can you change that to a quaver, ladies and gents, please?’ and ‘page 23, where it’s marked pizzicato — could you put a diminuendo on that? [laughter from orchestra] NOT on the pizzicato!’ An apt mixture of lightness and concentration has facilitated this complex simultaneity of three things going on at the same time. One wishes the iron curtain was temporarily transparent.

Dress Rehearsal This is the last rehearsal before a production opens to the public and it shows modes of both performance and rehearsal. This starts with the audience: in most cases, the dress rehearsal will be open to the Friends of Opera North, friends and family of the cast and team, members of the company and other invited groups or individuals. Due to the partnership between the University and Opera North, there will often be groups of staff or students and due to the work done by Opera North Education, there will sometimes be large groups of pupils accompanied by teachers. There is a seating order for the dress rehearsal: Friends of Opera North, company members and their families will be allowed in the stalls. Their view can be restricted by the photographers who are in the third or fourth row of the stalls. The quick-fire soundtrack of their cameras is a part of every dress rehearsal. The dress circle is reserved for the production team and company members, who will often choose to always sit in the same area, box or even seat on these occasions. The other audience members will have tickets for the upper circle. Programmes are sold and bars and ice cream stands are open in Leeds Grand Theatre for Opera North dress rehearsals. It is so much like a performance that one can easily forget the formal classification of ‘rehearsal’. An announcement, often made by the company manager serves as a useful reminder: ‘we tend not to interrupt, but if we have to, we will’. She also explains that some

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singers may not sing out at all times, as they need to pace themselves after two very strenuous production weeks in the theatre. Having an audience is not simply a generous gesture towards friends, families and supporters, however, as the production has reached a stage of near-completion, where the only factor that has not featured in rehearsals so far is the performers’ relationship with the audience and the audience’s reaction to the performance. The atmosphere and energy are noticeably changed by this; the sense of a dialogic relationship fuelling the singers’ performances is palpable. On a practical level, an audience helps to test timing, especially in operas that are not ‘through composed’. This means they are made up of ‘numbers’ which are connected by either dialogue (as in Ruddigore or Merry Widow) or through recitatives (as in Don Giovanni and La Clemenza di Tito). Conductor, orchestra, singers and stage management have to react to applause by slightly (but not too noticeably) delaying the continuation of the score or by being prepared to continue with the next number straight away if there is no applause. The dress rehearsal is also the first time that the cast are able to rehearse curtain calls with an audience in the theatre. Apart from realising their latest set of instructions and rehearsing them with help from stage management, the ‘real’ applause and appreciation of a dress rehearsal audience is an uplifting end to their evening and will help to increase optimism before the first night. After the ‘external’ audience have left the Grand Theatre, one can still observe little clusters of insiders (company members and company affiliates) in the space and backstage, debating what they have just seen and digesting the rehearsal, expressing appreciation about musical and scenic efforts. I have often taken students and guests to dress rehearsals, and watched their reactions while they were seeing and hearing the production for the first time. It made a difference to hear something with fresh ears or to see it through an outsider’s eyes as a very useful last reflection of a well-managed rehearsal process.

First Night Backstage One has to look closely to determine differences between a first night and a ‘normal’ performance at Opera North (see Don Giovanni backstage). Excitement is understated, nerves, if an issue, are on display only very covertly and wishes of good luck are accepted with a cheerful sense of ‘getting on with it’. There is a lot of coming and going outside the dressing rooms, as cast and company members deliver little ‘good luck’ or ‘thank you’ gifts, and there is more energy and expectation when performers approach their entrances. The sequence and order of the performance, although rehearsed by now, is not yet routine for the cast and crew.

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Norma. Finale. Annemarie Kremer (Norma), Luis Chapa (Pollione), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Front of House A first night front of house is very similar to any other performance. Only when looking closely does one detect a heightened sense of expectation. This is transported mainly by people with some connection to the company, be they long-term friends, patrons, sponsors, company members or their families. First nights can also have a distinctive business-like feel, with agents, management from other companies and press attending. This impacts on cast and company members, as it heightens the sense of visibility after such a long protected phase in the rehearsal room. Decisions that can determine the next few years are often negotiated on first nights, so visibility is joined by vulnerability, a feeling that a lot is at stake for just one performance, even though there will be a run and an extended touring period after the first night. So the ‘regular’, ticket-buying audience is joined by representatives of the opera industry, often with complimentary tickets, who bring specialised agendas with them. Given the level of support for Opera North in Leeds, the buzz around a first night can be expected to a certain extent. It is interesting to see a first night in a different theatre space from Leeds Grand Theatre. The Makropulos Case opens at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 11 August 2012, also opening the Edinburgh International Festival. It is one of those evenings where one feels glad to have been present. There is a lively and active quality to the audience; they seem intrigued rather than confused — and the real breakthrough comes when lines previously considered strange or hard to understand by the performers are reacted to or laughed at. There had been a small audience present in the dress rehearsal, but not enough of them to set up a functional two-way communication with the stage in such a large space as the Festival Theatre. Cumulatively, the opera suddenly reveals its proper genre as a surreal piece, a comedy even, but with characters that are not mere comic ciphers, but threedimensional. Suddenly, a rapid conversation piece that one was struggling to keep up with is transformed into something more coherent and elegant. The lively audience reactions make a considerable contribution to the singers’ confidence, releasing tension and freeing energy in order to reach new levels of musical quality and dramatic flow in performance.

Responding to Sudden Change Opera North is not a company where voices are raised. The company’s composure may be part of the English sensitivity, or it may be part of the collective character they have established. Dealing with unexpected events on a regular level means that well-rehearsed processes are performed when there is an emergency. At the first night of Fidelio in early 2011, an electrical fault affects the lights on the music stands in the orchestra pits. This occurs during a dialogue scene. The lights briefly come

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on again, so the conductor starts Rocco’s aria ‘Hat man nicht auch Gold beineben’, only for the lights to go out again. The conductor turns round, apologising to the audience and explaining the reason for the interruption. The curtain comes down. The General Director and the Technical Director have already quietly left the auditorium and have gone backstage. After an announcement by the General Director, the performance resumes with benevolent applause, as the lights are once again working. Unfortunately, they fail again after only a few measures and the singer of Rocco is once again stopped and once more the curtain comes down. The General Director makes another announcement of a 20-minute break, while the problem is investigated more thoroughly. After the audience returns, the rest of the performance continues without further problems; the goodwill of the audience communicates to the singers through applause and concentration. Slipping backstage while the problem was not yet resolved, I do not detect the edge of panic or tension that can sometimes be in evidence in these situations. Members of stage management and others are very focused on solving the glitch, so the only detectable difference is heightened concentration and a lack of social interaction, which would otherwise characterise the backstage environment. The unexpected problem surrounding the first night of Die Walküre on 16 June 2012 takes slightly longer to solve. The singer of Brünnhilde has been suffering from a throat infection and is forced to cancel the first night. A replacement is found, who is rehearsing in Frankfurt and who has previously sung the part of Brünnhilde. As singers are in their own evening wear for the performance, the Casting and Planning Director and her assistant go shopping for an evening dress in Leeds as soon as the replacement Brünnhilde is on the way to the airport; the General Director’s wife brings in some jewellery in case it is needed. The performance start is 4.30 pm, and as the singer has only arrived in Leeds in the early afternoon, there is no rehearsal time. She briefly speaks to conductor Richard Farnes and director/designer Peter Mumford. During the ‘fully staged concert performance’ (see also Perspectives 1 and 3), the Assistant Director talks the singer through her next entrance whenever she is offstage. Apart from two short entrances at the start and finish of Act 2, she sings with a score (the rest of the cast are singing from memory). During the performance, there are an extraordinary number of parallel things for her to do: she processes her music and text from the score, acts and interacts ‘in character’ while negotiating the score in her hand (or on one occasion on the music stand), she follows the conductor on monitors (rather than seeing him in front of her, as is normal during an operatic performance) and listens to the orchestra behind her on the stage, and finally, has to find ‘her’ light on the narrow stage. As she has not been part of the production during the rehearsal process, her acting style is an excellent compromise between her own embodiment of the character and some elements of the direction that she has been able to absorb in so short a time. Members of the company notice the new elements she is bringing to the characterisation of Brünnhilde, but those members of the audience to whom I speak after the performance think she fitted into the staging quite seamlessly, even though

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she had a score on stage with her. The co-ordination and the dialogic nature of her performance, as well as the quality of dramatic and musical delivery thrills the audience. While no nerves had been on display vocally on stage, the singer later pays tribute to the calmness and levels of preparation backstage that has contributed to her huge success on the night.

The After-Show Party Although the gathering of company members, supporters and invited audience members has a very informal social dramaturgy, it is accompanied by distinctive behaviours. As Opera North after-show gatherings are mostly held in the Howard Assembly Room, invited members of the audience will be the first to arrive after the applause has finished in the Grand Theatre. Conversations will be about first reactions, the kind of reception the performance received from the audience and about personal responses. Operas with a sad or emotional ending will sometimes mean audience members are still under the impression of the strong feelings the performance has stirred up and will make the transition to ‘post show celebration’ behaviour through self-mockery about losing control of emotions (‘silly me!’). The assembled guests will be joined by those company members who were not involved in the production after a little while (most of them will have gone backstage first to congratulate performers and production team). The final arrivals to the party are those whom it honours: the cast, members of the orchestra and the chorus, the crew and the creative team of the production. Some performers will still be wearing their stage make-up. Even though there is no formal acknowledgement as they come in one by one, it changes the dynamics of the busy space. People move around, as they want to congratulate cast and creatives individually and this ‘choreography of appreciation’ makes for more movement in the space. The performers also bring their adrenaline levels in with them, a mixture of the heightened energy that good performances facilitates and the ‘buzz’ that comes with having completed a successful first night and having felt the audience’s appreciation at the curtain calls. Production ‘insiders’ are not among themselves, however, and often privacy will be sought after a little while, and they will leave the space they share with benevolent outsiders. Some will continue celebrations in smaller groups in a restaurant, some will display more relaxed and exuberant behaviour when just a small company circle is left in the space towards the end of the event. The demarcation between insider and outsider is expressed very subtly and politely, but the temporary bonds of a production are strong and performers and particularly production team members will know that this signals the end of this sociable intensity, and will want to make the most of it while everyone is still there. Productions develop their own codes, jokes, anecdotes, rituals and dynamics and even though

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performances continue and the feeling of belonging can temporarily be revived for performance days, the conditions are not the same. Ensembles disperse, temporary accommodation is given up, trains and hotels are booked for the rest of the performance run in Leeds and on tour. Performers and teams return to their homes, often not in Leeds, returning only for performances. The opening night is a mixed affair emotionally: a successful process makes for sad and wistful feelings, as one wills it to continue. A difficult process might offer a mixture of relief that problems have now come to a conclusion, but mild frustration at some of the more challenging aspects along the way. Working in opera decades ago, I never felt exuberance at first night celebrations and questioned my inability to produce an ‘appropriate’ celebratory response. Looking back, this was because the sense of an ending backstage dominated over notions of the beginning of a public performance run. So these emotions separate ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ to the production process from each other, which translates into their modes of behaviour after a first night.

CONCLUSION: THE GENERIC AND THE SPECIFIC […] nothing that happens during the rehearsals can be bracketed out as not relevant to the production process that is occurring. (McAuley, 2012, p. 213)

There are aspects in a production’s genesis which most opera companies in the world will have in common. A rehearsal process will always move from an idea to the joint invention of director and singer in the practical realisation of this idea. Many variants or different solutions to the same problem will be tried out before one is settled upon. This starts a phase of repetition and of practising individual sequences, as well as tweaking the emerging dramaturgy of a production. The next stage will connect the scenes thus realised into a flow of action and increase the performers’ familiarity with this action. When the production is in a shape where ‘runs’ are possible, it will move spaces. The change that comes with a different environment refreshes the rehearsed action, which will first be matched to its stage space technically and then move closer and closer towards a performable state. When exactly this state is reached is individual to each production. Some are almost in a first night shape by the time of the piano dress rehearsal, roughly a week before opening, others do not ‘fall into place’ until the first night itself. During this evolution, the strategies of behaviour as performance by cast, production teams and technical staff are expressed in as many varieties as there can be acting styles in a season’s work of operas. It is

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Pinocchio. Finale Act 1, Victoria Simmonds (Pinocchio), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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in these two broad streams of dramaturgy where observations specific to a company and all its individual performers can be found. The fact that this is the second section of my study, preceded by information about the operatic context from which the company grew as well as the company’s specific history will hopefully clarify the complex interaction that exists between a wider professional context, the socially organised settings within Opera North as a company (see also McAuley, 2012, p. 5) and the creatively highly individual but rigidly structured operatic rehearsal process. It is a privilege to have witnessed some of the discoveries in this complex interaction of company macrocosm, rehearsal microcosm and the thrilling evolution of musical and dramatic action.

REFERENCES Atkinson, P. (2006). Everyday Arias: An operatic ethnography. Oxford: AltaMira Press. Burns, E. (1972). Theatricality. A study of convention in theatre and in social life. Harrow: Longman. Cole, S. L. (2001). Playwrights in rehearsal. London: Routledge. Gell, A. (1992). The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology. In J. Coote & A. Shelton (Eds.), Anthropology, art and aesthetics (pp. 40 63). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1983). Ethnography. Principles in practice. London: Tavistock. Martin, P. (2006). Music and the sociological gaze. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McAuley, G. (2012). Not magic but work: An ethnographic account of a rehearsal process. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Risi, C. (2011). Opera in performance. In search of new analytical approaches. The Opera Quarterly, 27(23), 283 295. Turner, C., & Behrndt, S. (2008). Dramaturgy and performance. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

PERSPECTIVE 2 APPENDIX DON GIOVANNI BACKSTAGE

Illustration 1. The backstage area, stage and orchestra pit of Leeds Grand Theatre from the fly floor. With kind permission from Leeds Grand Theatre. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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It is difficult to represent live performance through writing, and describing a performance from a backstage perspective poses even more problems. Approaches have included filmed documentaries — but whether it is on the page or the screen, a chronological account is not the ideal way to represent parallel processes. A documentary, in my view, would therefore have to operate with split screens, but that would still not be akin to the live observer’s experience, as different things are foregrounded at different moments of the performance (e.g. at times the concentration is on the cues heard over the headphones, at other times one gets engrossed by the score, then what is onstage suddenly becomes dominant, or there is distraction through something going on in the wings). I have tried to replicate this simultaneity through three columns, representing what is happening onstage, backstage and on headphones (cans, i.e. an auditory space). Fortunately, it is [possible] for the reader to gain an impression of Opera North’s production of Don Giovanni (Winner of the Manchester Theatre Award for opera in 2013) as it was filmed with five cameras during a live performance at the same performance I observed, on 20 October 2012, and can be downloaded for home viewing (http://www.digitaltheatre.com/production/details/don-giovanni-opera-north). There has been a lot of work in the area of broadcasting opera — most of it is performance-based, giving a ‘best seats in the house’ approach, which means mixing the perspective from a good seat in the stalls or dress circle with strategic zooms and pans of the set and some close ups of the singers. Some opera houses have taken on board the public’s interest in what goes on backstage, for example Stuttgart Opera in July 2012, broadcasting Don Giovanni with many different camera angles. As this was an unusual approach, it had a few teething problems: there were cameras at many strategic positions, but nothing that provided continuity. The ‘compere’ of the performance, high-profile German talk show host Harald Schmidt, was not sufficiently knowledgeable about opera and there was a feeling that the makers of the programme were apologising for inflicting opera on the viewing public and were trying to compensate for its more archaic aspects by cutting from camera to camera at a manic speed. The Royal Opera House’s approach to their live streaming of Act 3 of Die Walküre, 7 January 2013 (managed by an in-house team named Insight and broadcast on BBC4) included 21 cameras edited into continuous footage. The post-hoc stream on www.space.org was available for three days after the streaming, separating prompt corner, orchestra pit and front of house footage and the Guardian website made the mixed edit available. The commentator was Suzy Klein, announcer for BBC Radio 3 and programmes about classical music on BBC television channels. She introduced key people before Act 3 began and then provided the commentary in dialogue with director Keith Warner, who, despite being the production’s director, would normally never get the multi-camera view of everything that was going on backstage, as he would have been watching from the front from the moment the production started its stage rehearsals. The score, although often mingled with the voices of

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stage management, technicians and those of the commentators, was always audible, albeit at different volumes, and provided the necessary continuity. The onstage and backstage spaces were often shown in parallel — being an open set with its central, at times revolving huge wall, the stage can be seen from the wings and the view of the threshold between the performance area and the space from which the performance is run provides some of the most illuminating insights of the broadcast. A broadcast which shows the multiple spaces of performances provides a superior view to the one I had when observing backstage at Opera North, as the perspective from front of house was not available to me alongside the production’s mechanics backstage. The skilful interweaving of simultaneous actions also provides a more comprehensive view than a written description, as it is able to show the performance’s visual, explanatory, auditory and phenomenological dimensions, while written commentary can only describe, evoke and evaluate. The broadcast has the luxury of being in many strategically selected positions at once, something the lone observer cannot achieve. My feeling is that events like these are the future of opera documentation and that, for the time being, my written work can add a few close observations to the mix, enriching the ethnographic angle of this perspective. The overlapping worlds backstage merit drawing together, as we can see through close description how they contribute to the artistic ‘whole’ away from the audience’s gaze.

THREE OVERLAPPING WORLDS: STAGE, BACKSTAGE, HEADPHONES: DON GIOVANNI BACKSTAGE If one has spent time backstage before, the smell triggers a powerful olfactory memory. People often refer to ‘Bühnenluft’ (stage air) in German, and colleagues will say that every theatre smells different — it is hard to deconstruct what is contained in the stage smell, but it contains hints of plastic, solvents, make-up, clean costumes and some dust, too. It is very distinctive and a strong association hits me as I walk into the wings just before Opera North’s fifth performance of Don Giovanni at Leeds Grand Theatre. The Grand front of house does not smell of ‘theatre’, but frequently of food, because it is surrounded by so many restaurants and fast food outlets. I talk to company staff in the corridor surrounding the stage. Stage management welcome me and a spare set of headphones (cans) is found, so I can follow cues and exchanges during the performance. I take my place behind the Deputy Stage Manager down stage left. During the performance, I think of the fact that Leeds Grand Theatre is only seasonally occupied by Opera North — yet the backstage space comes across as very specific

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to the company, with gaffer tape marking the different settings on the stage manager’s desk in prompt corner for all three of the current shows. In a few weeks, the productions will start touring and Leeds Grand Theatre will host a series of guest productions until Opera North moves back in for its next season in January. It must feel strange for staff to inhabit this environment as though it were a permanent home, but to then return to the theatre being ‘out of bounds’ for company staff due to other productions occupying the space. Given the regularity of the touring circuit, the theatres in Salford, Newcastle and Nottingham might feel just as specific to the company. This is probably to do with the well co-ordinated, but still personal tone backstage that comes with years of working together and into which it is easy to integrate guest artists or visitors like myself.

GLOSSARY ASM Cans

Assistant Stage Manager headphones with microphones to enable speaking and listening to a number of the technical crew

DSL/DSR downstage left/downstage right DSM FOH

Deputy Stage Manager front of house

Foldback the sound broadcast to the stage, the wings and backstage area from the orchestra pit, so cast and crew can hear the orchestra better Iris thin rigid felt curtains which go in and out as part of the stage action in this production of Don Giovanni Irons

the iron curtain which separates the stage and front of house spaces for reasons of fire prevention and security

Q SL/SR

cue for something to start, which can refer to lighting, sound, a scene change or an entrance by performers stage left/stage right

SM Tabs

Stage Manager main theatre curtains

USL/USR upstage left/upstage right Workers working lights, that is lights not used in performance but to illuminate scene changes etc. NB: These notes do not provide the majority of cues that take place during a show, but give a representative sample, as well as demonstrating the shifting attention of the observer, who will sometimes notice them and sometimes pay attention to other things in the space. Some of the descriptions will be clearer if the sections on Don Giovanni rehearsals in Perspective 2 have been read. Illustrations throughout the same section provide additional information.

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ACT 1 Stage Pre-show

Backstage Soundtrack of chatting, orchestra tuning, audience talking in the distance, banter and greetings in the wings

Sound of final tuning from orchestra pit, led by oboe

Cans Everyone ‘checks in’ on cans and says hello to the team and to the Deputy Stage Manager (DSM) who runs the show from the desk in prompt corner. Most calls and cues referred to in these observations are hers. Checking in on cans sometimes comes with a joke or in a silly voice. The playfulness conceals a well-established structure of doing vital checks and going through the routine pre-show procedures. It is also characteristic of the specific energy always felt at the start of a performance Call: beginners ‘Iron’s going out!’ Call: non beginners Call: final orchestra call

Conductor enters orchestra pit to applause

Company Manager reports front of house (FOH) clearance

Orchestra clearance, final FOH call Technician interjects: ‘Can we get on with this; some of us have a train to catch!’ Standby for the pit, that is clearance for the conductor to start (someone says teasingly ‘he’s looking the other way!’) Cue 1 (house lights go out) … go!

Conductor starts overture Overture

We see the conductor on the black and white monitor at the DSM’s desk Foldback (sound broadcast from orchestra to backstage) is switched on, but it is too quiet in the

Call: Leporello, Don Giovanni, Donna Anna (this is on a separate channel to the main one everybody on cans hears, so the DSM reports when she has called soloists)

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Act 1. Stage

(Continued )

Backstage wings and not at all audible backstage. A technician goes to check

Introduction 1. ‘Nott’e giorno faticar’, Leporello, Donna Anna, Don Giovanni, Commendatore

Cans Towards the end of the overture: standby for tabs, for the ‘iris’ to open, the four surtitle monitors in the auditorium and some LX cues

Tabs go out It becomes apparent that what is on stage is just one of the many parallel processes in the space. As I can only see a small window of the stage from where I am sitting, the wing space takes much more of my attention when anything is happening there. The performance of the score dominates far less than it would in the auditorium, of course, even though I can hear three different versions of it: live (with a bias for what is close to where I am sitting), fragments through the cans and then the amplified version through the foldback microphone.

Cues for iris opening, followed by top window, where Don Giovanni and Donna Anna become visible

I can also see the assistant conductor, who has a music desk with the score and is conducting backstage in preparation for the performances he is conducting in a few weeks time Recitative and Duet 2. ‘Ah, del padre in periglio …’ Donna Anna, Don Ottavio

Sequences of intense actions on stage and backstage are often not simultaneous, although they can be. There is invariably a concentration of cues at the start and finish of each number, and dramatic action on stage is not always accompanied by technology Singers waiting for their next entrance in the wings often warm up by singing or humming along to the music on stage at the time A tall, entirely hooded figure moves through the wings — in the blue light this looks a bit like a

During the recitative, the DSM remarks that the volume for the foldback transmission is still not right, as she can normally hear the fortepiano in the recitatives and cannot at the moment. A colleague reports that the problem is solved a few minutes later (she is not actually on duty, but is backstage on cans, as she is shadowing the SM in case she needs to cover for her later)

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Act 1. Stage

Recitative Aria 3. ‘Ah chi mi dice mai’, Donna Elvira

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(Continued )

Backstage

Cans

ghost and reminds me of the ancestor in Ruddigore! It is Donna Elvira on the way to her first entrance

In keeping with the ghostly appearance backstage, the DSM calls standby for smoke and the opening of the ‘time portal’, the door through which Don Giovanni often appears

Leporello and Don Giovanni make eye contact ‘privately’ to time their simultaneous entrance from DSR and DSL, transforming into their characters as they start moving towards each other across the stage

Calls and cues continue

Two chorus ladies and props colleagues get an array of hats ready which they will put on Elvira’s head during the next aria Recitative

As the chorus ladies take the hats with them for their entrance, the props colleagues set up the next set of props on the table

Calls and cues continue, the preset behind the curtain is monitored and soloists and chorus gather on stage

Recitative

As Leporello and Elvira exit DSL, their path is lit by one of the ASMs with a torch, as it is difficult to see backstage when coming out of the very bright stage light

Calls and cues continue (LX, follow spot and iris all start simultaneously)

Chorus and duet 5. ‘Giovinetti’, Zerlina, Masetto, chorus

Laughter is audible from the audience at the ‘Gangnam Style’ moves from chorus and singers

DSM: I think more people have seen Gangnam now, so they’re laughing more

Aria 4. ‘Madamina’, Leporello

Glasses are set up backstage in preparation for finale Recitative Aria 6. ‘Ho capito’, Masetto

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Act 1. Stage

(Continued )

Backstage

Recitative Duettino 7. ‘La ci darem la mano’, Don Giovanni, Zerlina

A steady stream of performers move past me on the way back to their dressing rooms. Some stay backstage, as it is not very long until their next entrance

Recitative

Quick changes are prepared for Donna Elvira and Don Giovanni

Aria 8. ‘Ah fuggi il traditor’, Donna Elvira Recitative Quartet 9. ‘Non ti fidar, o misera’, Donna Elvira, Don Giovanni, Donna Anna, Don Ottavio

Very quick and silent costume change for Donna Elvira SL. It is so tightly timed that it finishes only seconds before she re-enters, this time in a Victorian costume

Recitative and Aria 10. ‘Don Ottavio, son morta’ — ‘Or sai chi l’honore’, Donna Anna Recitative Aria 10a. ‘Dalla sua pace’, Don Ottavio Recitative Aria 11. ‘Fin ch’an dal vino’, Don Giovanni Zerlina, Masetto and chorus ladies take their positions on stage during the aria that is taking place in front of the iris Recitative Aria 12. ‘Batti, batti’, Zerlina

Cans

Call for stage technicians to set up platform that is needed in the first finale

There is time to do some checking that everything is still running smoothly during these two arias, mixed with a little joke to everyone. The colleague who is shadowing the SM goes through a cue list Leporello collects and checks his props for his next entrance

Cue for iris to come back in

Don Giovanni’s aria takes place in front of the iris, so the next scene is set up on stage — this renders the on stage space into a backstage one temporarily, although everything has to be done quietly and with great care, as the audience will hear noise more than they would if it were in the wings Three cloaked hooded figures (Donna Anna, Don Ottavio and Donna Elvira) appear, checking masks, hoods and gloves. The lantern they will group around to sing their trio is lit and waiting for them

Cue: iris opens Calls: everyone for Finale 1

Act 1. Stage

(Continued )

Backstage Laughter is heard from the audience at Zerlina and Masetto having ‘make-up’ sex and also at the sound of a chorus lady vomiting in the silence before the final part of Zerlina’s aria

Cans Calls and cues continue

Recitative Cue for iris to close for ‘conspirators’ trio

Finale, 13. Zerlina, Masetto, Don Giovanni, Waiters, Donna Anna, Don Ottavio, Donna Elvira Singers and chorus (exc Commendatore) Part 3 of Finale set up behind iris (drunken conga) Glimpses of Anna, Ottavio and Elvira singing their trio in front of the iris, as well as everyone getting into position behind it (see above).

Iris opens

There are three competing orchestras in the dance scene, joining one after the other. My attention is on the one emerging from prompt corner, which makes for a very different experience to front of house, where of course the pit orchestra dominates much more Zerlina exits with Don Giovanni SL, ‘screams’ offstage while running round to SR and reappears. While she is in motion, assistant conductor and chorus master keep the beat, as this is easier for her to see than a monitor Exit Don Giovanni at prompt corner. View of Don Giovanni’s face (reckless, triumphant) transforming back into the performer’s own while he is still in motion, but past the threshold of the proscenium Interval

Cues LX, preparation for scene change etc Curtain, house lights, workers on, iron curtain’s coming in Announcement: Zerlina has lost an earring

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Once the applause is finished, staff come ‘off cans’ and announce to everyone that they are doing so. There is rarely a sense of relaxation in the interval, though. The corridor is busy with costume, wig and make-up staff, one hears vocal exercises behind dressing room doors and cheerful exchanges between colleagues. A scene change takes place, props are reset and water glasses are refilled for singers backstage. Stage management stay close to prompt corner if they leave the backstage area at all. The DSM will then make the five-minute call, just as she did at the start of the opera, and the sound of the orchestra tuning will be just as prominent as the sound of the audience front of house. Beginners are called, singers wait for their cues in the wings, the conductor signals he is there and is sent to the orchestra pit to start the second half of Don Giovanni.

ACT 2 Stage

Backstage Sound of audience chatting Applause for conductor and orchestra

Duet 14. ‘Eh via buffone’, Don Giovanni and Leporello

Act 2 starts

Recitative

Props and ASM on standby to help with very quick change (getting rid of Leporello’s puppet, so he can appear in ‘real size’ in the recitative)

15. Trio ‘Ah taci, ingiusto core’, Don Giovanni, Leporello, Donna Elvira

Elvira’s puppet is prepared for her quick change — she appears in the centre stage window, then has a puppet strapped around her neck and appears in the small window that is central to the ‘iris’ with Leporello

Recitative 16. Canzonetta ‘Deh vieni’, Don Giovanni

Donna Elvira reports she cannot hear the stage or any calls in her dressing room. The SM goes to investigate the problem

Cans Cues: lose upstage workers, various standbys, house lights go down Cue: iris opens

Calls and cues continue

Act 2. Stage 17. Aria ‘Meta di voi qua vadano’, Don Giovanni

(Continued )

Backstage

Cans

Sound of audience laughing at the transformation of Masetto and the chorus gents into pigs

Recitative ASM waits until Don Giovanni has left the stage and Masetto has had his puppet removed before giving the clear for the iris to half open 18. Aria ‘Vedrai carino’, Zerlina

Standby for other half of iris to open

Recitative Sextet 19. ‘Sola sola in buio loco’

Footsteps heard from the fly floor Tech crew and Commendatore stand by for scene change

Recitative and Aria 21b. ‘In quali eccessi’ …‘Mi tradi …’, Donna Elvira Once the iris has closed, the extremely quiet scene change for the graveyard scene starts, separated from the front by some thin cloth. The Commendatore goes into his preset position under the stage

I am mesmerised by the simultaneous actions of Elvira’s beautifully sung final aria and the scene change without sound. Things are very quiet backstage; everyone is listening. Then I drop my notebook and everyone looks at me. I am mortified, having been so determined to be as quiet and invisible as possible. The DSM laughs it off. My glance falls on the prop table, where two breast-shaped puddings are awaiting the finale. The prop person stands with two long ragged veils to put over the door where the ‘undead’ brides of Don Giovanni will appear. It looks quite spooky in silhouette as he is standing in the entrance between the tabs.

A myriad of door cues for staff backstage (which look like Don Giovanni operating them as if by magic on stage)

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Act 2. Stage

(Continued )

Backstage

Recitative

Calls: scene change, harness check, lighting. One of the recipients does not seem to be picking the DSM’s calls up and it is checked whether he is out of range

22. Duet ‘O statua gentilissima’, Leporello, Don Giovanni 23. Recitative and Rondo ‘Crudele’ — ‘Non mi dir’, Donna Anna

All quiet, but prepared

24. Finale ‘Gia la mensa e preparata’, Don Giovanni, Leporello, Donna Elvira, Commendatore, chorus

A constant sequence of the props person passing trays, glasses and dishes to Leporello, who serves them to Don Giovanni on stage. The ladies of the chorus appear backstage in their ‘dead bride’ attire, some pretending to spook the assistant conductor at his music stand backstage

Entrance Elvira (after yet another quick change)

Cans

Smoke that flows from offstage onto the stage is distributed by expert wafting. As I look closely, I see that the SM is doing this with a wafter that has her name on it Entrance Commendatore

Entrance chorus ladies

Slightly heightened atmosphere, although still very collected, as the HMI (light) failed to work at the Commendatore’s entrance. A brief conversation as to what caused the problem As everything on stage is running smoothly, the attention backstage is momentarily on finding out what went wrong Colleagues from the wardrobe department watch Don Giovanni’s ascent

Last scene, ensemble ‘Ah, dov’e il perfido?’

Relaxed singers who have finished their parts chat quietly backstage. The double for Don Giovanni, who appears right at the end with

Cues: flying, LX, quick change around to final scene

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Perspective 2 — Appendix: Don Giovanni Backstage

Act 2. Stage

Curtain calls

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(Continued )

Backstage

Cans

gloved hands by the ladies’ chorus, appears from backstage, where the chorus gents have just been singing

Final set of cues, relating to LX, the iris closing, black, applause lighting cues

The DSM remains at her desk, the SM co-ordinates the singers taking their curtain calls with cheerful shouting and gesturing (‘and everybody, bow please!’)

The applause from front of house mingles with some applause backstage

Very genial mood backstage, feeling of a job well done. Everyone is enjoying the audience’s appreciation now

As applause finishes, cues for tabs to come in, house lights and workers to come on Everyone on cans is thanked

The libretto for Don Giovanni can be accessed at: http://www.teatroallascala.org/includes/doc/2011 2012/libretto/ don-giovanni.pdf The libretto and a translation from 1858 can be accessed at: https://archive.org/details/dongiovannidonj00pontgoog

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Illustration 2. Don Giovanni. Finale Act 2. William Dazeley (Don Giovanni), Michael Druiett (Commendatore), Ladies of the Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

PERSPECTIVE 3 OPERA NORTH’S PRODUCTIONS IN PERFORMANCE

This perspective is not as concerned with chronology as the previous two, although it is informed by their respective chronologies. It adds to the historical and ethnographic perspectives of the previous perspectives by offering analytical perspectives on a selection of Opera North productions. It benefits from the extensive historical and historiographical research and the detailed investigation of Opera North’s processes of production, which is the reason it comes last — and it is hoped the reader will benefit from the context provided in Perspectives 1 and 2. The red thread of this study is constituted by opera productions: their planning, their realisation in rehearsal, their performance and their retrospective analysis. In Perspective 1, I was often reporting on a production as seen by others (company members, press et al) for the years I did not witness, trying not to prioritise my own enthusiasms or misgivings for the productions I did witness (although this will have happened inadvertently). Perspective 2 concentrated on the mechanics of opera work and analysed behaviour (including the ‘behaviour’ of productions) in rehearsal. There is a performance perspective on Don Giovanni at the end of Perspective 2, but this is concerned with the simultaneity of processes backstage, not with the production as seen from the auditorium. This perspective is presented as a series of illustrated mini-essays on productions that have been chosen as examples of the company’s interest in repertoire rarities and for their striking stylistics, brought about by some of the most interesting UK directors and designers at various stages of their careers. One could call them landmark productions. Some have been chosen because they were successes with audiences and critics, and are still often mentioned by company members — but the main criterion was that they are representative of Opera North’s style, individuality and high artistic standards. The foundations of the analysis consist of contextual and historical knowledge surrounding works and productions. As a next step, the ‘binocular vision’ of responding to and describing performance that Bert O. States details in his book Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (1985, p. 8) is also helpful here: it means reading what constitutes theatrical signification in

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parallel with a more reactive approach, which is phenomenological in origin, but also mnemonic, as one’s reactions and feelings while seeing the work are recalled: ‘You have not exhausted a thing’s interest when you have explained how it works as a sign’ (States, 1985, p. 6). So my approach here could best be described as tripartite: it employs the semiotic, the phenomenological and the contextual perspectives in turn. These are probably the most important tools of the dramaturgical trade, which is appropriate, as it is this perspective and its working methods I have most consistently returned to during the years of Opera North research. It is not possible to employ all these angles on productions I have not seen live, although mediated versions go some way towards representing them, as do the recollections of others. The only regret that comes with retrospective interpretation is that it cannot foreground the aspects of the musical performance, as this is more ephemeral than other ingredients of the operatic production. There is no consistent pattern of analysis, the way of looking determined by the work, musical, visual and dramatic moments or sequences, prioritised in turn.

The Love for Three Oranges When I described the first few productions I had chosen for this section, it was given the subtitle ‘When Opera North went a bit mad’ by Christine Jane Chibnall (2013). There had been productions with surreal flair and sophisticated scenography from the early years of Opera North, but none is better remembered than Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, premiered in Leeds in 1989. The company was programming a scarcely known opera without the safety net of a wellknown directorial name, as Richard Jones was in the early stages of his career — but The Love for Three Oranges turned out to be an ideal choice — complemented by the experienced support of David Lloyd-Jones, conductor and translator (see also Perspective 1). Prokofiev’s phantasmagoric fairy-tale opera was conceived on his way into American exile from revolutionary Russia after World War I. He had been given an ingenious libretto by Meyerhold and collaborators, who had adapted Carlo Gozzi’s 1761 comedy, with which he had wanted to put rival playwrights Goldoni and Chiari in their place. The play and the opera have a frame that is a battle about preferred theatrical forms, and comments, arguments and interruptions occur throughout. This world of make-believe is fragmented, as fairy tale mingles with manifesto and onstage spectators also get involved in the quarrel, opposing the opera’s commedia dell’arte characters. Characters switch fluidly between being part of the action and commenting on it, with considerable digs at contemporary practitioners.

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Director Richard Jones and the Brothers Quay, inventors of scenographic worlds, had an established creative relationship. The Quays are film makers and animators, renowned for their stop-action films and installations, described as surreal or absurdist by critics and displaying strong Eastern European influences. Jones is renowned for his humorous, non-ceremonial approach to opera and the ease with which he moves between opera and theatre and between performance styles — in this case fairy tale, commedia dell’arte, farce and slapstick. Company Manager Jane Bonner remembers instructions being given to the audience in front of the curtain by assistant director Tim Hopkins in character, a role she performed on tour later on. The audience were instructed to watch for signs being held up, at which point they were to activate their scratch-and-sniff cards to add an olfactory experience to the scene unfolding. At the end of this dead-pan introduction, shots sounded and Hopkins fell backwards, to be dragged offstage to the audience’s shock and then amusement (Bonner, 2013). The men’s chorus, in black berets, comic moustaches and thick glasses, performed their compère roles with comic agility. Participatory theatre was not commonplace in the late 1980s, and is still a rarity in main house opera, so the production (in both its Opera North and ENO runs) became a cult phenomenon, with audience members seeing it several times. One of the climactic moments of any Oranges production is the famous march (Act 2). In the Opera North production, it was an exemplar of Jones and the Quays’ interpretation, responding to the perpetual motion of the score with absurdist, disturbingly funny imagery and direction, of which the following might give an impression. The chorus march on, their heads covered in what could be gas masks, octopus’s heads, or insect antlers. They dutifully march to the front of the stage and back again, going through the motions. The three entertainments that are supposed to make the morose Prince laugh are announced. The first one is a monstrous concoction: a large glass cabinet with a moving homunculus inside it, its dancing bone legs emerging from the cabinet, which is topped by a disfigured doll’s head with one enormous rolling eye. This is archetypal Quays nightmare imagery. A live bird flies out of one of the cabinet’s drawers as the second entertainment is announced, and for the third, we witness a man swallowed by a large plastic crocodile. In tune with the antiillusionist character of the production, which constantly shows stage and magic tricks and reveals their mechanics, it is entirely clear how he is creating the illusion, but it is compellingly funny. There is laughter and applause from the audience as the crocodile (now moved by the man inside of it) waddles offstage, slapped on its mouth as it threatens to bite a female chorister on the way. It is not just the phantasmagoric scenography that makes Oranges an unforgettable experience to those who witnessed it, it is the fact that scale, pace and direction can never be taken for granted. A moment on stage may be suspended in time, switched to slow motion, fast forwarded or subverted in a myriad of creative ways. Jones and the Quay’s collaboration seems to be the perfect realisation of this score, defined by interruptions, reversals and a sense of breathlessness.

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There is virtually no let-up from beginning to end — the tiny love scene between Ninetta and the Prince takes up barely twenty pages of more than six hundred in the orchestral score, and the rest is a dizzying succession of fanfares, marches, toccatas, chases, crashes, declamations, runs, trills and great chord sequences […] The trick is frequently left to the last five seconds, but Prokofiev pulls it off every time before taking a fractional pause and darting off in some quite different direction […]. (Ratcliffe, 1993)

Julietta

Illustration 1.

Julietta. Paul Nilon (Mischa), ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

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Opera North has an impressive track record of performing both well-known and more obscure works from the Slavonic repertoire — Janáček, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky all well represented in the chronology. A rediscovery by David ° was programmed by Opera North in 1997. Pountney is a long-time champion of Czech Pountney, Julietta by Bohuslav Martinu, music in the United Kingdom and the opera had been on his wish list for a while. The work’s subtitle ‘The key to dreams’, suggests being imprisoned in dreams, the edges of consciousness and cinematic influences. The opera (premiered in 1938) is an adaptation of a 1930s French surrealist play by Georges Neveux, written while composer Martinu° lived in Paris. His setting of the play’s first act prompted Neveux to withdraw the rights from Kurt Weill, who had also been interested in making it into an opera. In the story, a bookseller searches for a girl he once heard singing in a French town, but nobody there can remember anything. Protagonist Mischa (sung by Paul Nilon in the Opera North production), baffled by the non-sequiturs and the collage of recollections, tells of his first memory, a rubber duck. This results in him being elected Mayor of the seaside town, but it is instantly forgotten. He finds the girl he has been looking for, Julietta, they fall in love, but he shoots her after an argument, although it is not clear whether he has killed her. His search for her takes him to the Central Office of Dreams, where everyone is looking for Julietta. Continuing his quest, Mischa rejects life and ‘normality’. There are difficulties in staging dreams, but Pountney’s starting point was the ‘vivid reality’ that characterises them: dreams are woven together from places and events we know. Dreams are also not scenarios where actions, consequences and motivations follow logically from each other. The opera is emotionally heightened and intense, but has no clear narrative line (Pountney, 1997, p. 6). In Stefanos Lazaridis’s set and with Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes, the world of the seaside town is set up in single space, evoking an attic or winter garden, with a large tilted and mirrored window leaning towards the auditorium. The stage floor is covered in sand and also slopes towards the auditorium. Setting the action in just one space makes for a stronger sense of dream, as the narrative suggests constantly changing locations which are then not visible on stage, a search in perpetual motion. The score mirrors the protagonist’s manic search as well as the short attention spans and memories of the ensemble, hurtling forward. The lyrical moments thus have all the more intensity — such as Julietta’s first appearance, singing bewitching coloratura from offstage, while the scene ‘calms down’ for the first time and the lights are dimmed. Pountney’s production demonstrates his aptitude in showing cracks in the veneer of ‘normal’ behaviour in a deft switching between the surreal and the naturalistic.

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Eight Little Greats The themed season has been an interesting feature in Opera North’s programming on several occasions. In the 1990s, three productions for the price of two new productions and a revival had resulted in acclaimed interpretations of La traviata, Katya Kabanova and Don Giovanni (1999/2000), described as working through simple but effective scenographies, strong character focus and excellent casts. An expansion of this idea led to the wish to programme neglected short operas, or those often not programmed for practical reasons. The initial ideas and the planning process are described in Perspective 1. It was the first time Opera North had engaged an ensemble of 21 singers for a whole season and everyone remembers this as a particular happy time, as ensembles for more than just one production are a rarity in the United Kingdom. A lot of the energy and vitality in performance came through this ensemble — this, the designer in common and the two directors sharing the eight operas contributed to the ‘connectivities’ in style between the works. Most of the principals appeared in two operas and some covered a part in a third. Jonathan Summers, who sang three big parts across the eight operas (Tonio in Pagliacci, Michele in Il tabarro and Malatesta in Francesca) said in 2007 that it had been his favourite work for Opera North. It was particularly beneficial for younger artists, who could profit from the knowledge and support of more experienced colleagues and add to their growing repertoire. In order to re-invoke all eight short operas, a series of ‘snapshots’ have been chosen, following the viewing of photos, some media records and discussions with Opera North staff. The Dwarf is an adaptation of Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta, fuelled by composer Zemlinsky’s own rejection in love by Alma Schindler (later Alma Mahler-Werfel). David Pountney’s production told the tale of the kind, but disfigured dwarf and the beautiful but heartless princess through reversed appearances: the dwarf, given to the spoilt Infanta as a present, was of ‘normal’ appearance, whereas the Infanta and her ladies-in-waiting looked deranged and deformed. This simple device made for a startling theatricality, centring on the Dwarf’s moment of realisation that it is not he who is ugly, captured memorably in Paul Nilon’s performance. Il tabarro is a dark tale of jealousy, frustration and revenge. Michele runs a barge business in Paris and is married to the much younger Giorgetta. She and one of Michele’s workers, Luigi, fall in love. The situation comes to a brutal and macabre end when a lovers’ sign, a lit match, is misread and as a result, the older husband kills the younger lover by smothering him with his cloak.

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For Francesca da Rimini, described by some critics as more a tone poem than an opera, Pountney translated Dante’s Inferno as the hell-on-earth of a prison camp for refugees, restlessly pondering their fate. Although the story of Francesca and Paolo matched Il tabarro as a relationship triangle (enforced by the casting of Nina Pavlovski and Jonathan Summers across the two), the ‘undramatic’ nature of the plot and score were debated by critics. The Seven Deadly Sins, a striking and unsettling production, was set in a boxing ring juxtaposed by Anna’s narrow-minded family’s living room. The story is based on the externalisation of two sides of Anna’s personality, and a singer (Rebecca Caine) and a dancer (Beate Vollack) shared the part. In a parable about exploitation and self-deception, the singing Anna 1 rationalises away the horrendous sacrifices the dancing Anna 2 makes to get ahead, including rape, prostitution, and abuse by her family. Tanner (2004) called Pountney’s production ‘one of the total triumphs of the season. One wonders whether David Pountney will ever be admitted into the USA after this’. The Seven Deadly Sins possessed a breathless, desperate energy captured in the image of Anna 2 (Beate Vollack) being held up to the audience at the end of a boxing match. She is topless and smeared in blood, with a pained and distressed expression, clearly showing the effect of her long journey of exploitation by her sister/alter ego. Anna 1 (Rebecca Caine) is the ringmaster, counting down, and it is Anna’s degenerate family, smeared in food leftovers, who are holding Illustration 2. The Seven Deadly Sins. Beate Vollack (Anna 2), Rebecca Caine (Anna 1), ensemble. Photo: Clive Barda/ArenaPAL. her up and making her continue.

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Christopher Alden’s production of I Pagliacci converted the travelling commedia troupe into a contemporary travelling rock band, ‘Canio and the Clowns’, the first scene performed as a gig (with the chorus on stage as audience, facing the actual audience), the second was set in a greasy spoon café, where Silvio is the waiter. The performance showed enormous dramatic commitment and energy by a strong cast of singer-actors, particularly from Majella Culagh as Nedda. Love’s Luggage Lost, Amanda Holden’s witty translation of Rossini’s L’occasione fa il ladro was also directed by Alden. He removed many of the recitatives and with his cast produced a funny and fast-paced postmodern comedy on the hazards of travel. Singers interacted with a luggage carousel and airplane seats with all the slapstick conventions and puns that could be fitted into the manic farce. Djamileh (George Bizet) is a 19th century story about a girl who falls in love with a rich man with his own harem ‘a piece of orientalist hokum, enough to have the late Edward Said spinning in his grave’ (Tanner, 2004). In Alden’s production it was updated and involved the use of new technology to record the sexual exploits of Haroun, with the suggestion of people trafficking and voyeuristic exploitation. His apparent conversion to true love ended in him strangling Djamileh in this reading. La vida breve by Manuel de Falla was described as unsettling experience, delivered with relentless concentration and tension by its cast, particularly the fearless and beautifully sung performance of Mary Plazas as Salud, the young girl jilted by her

Illustration 3. Vaughan.

La Vida Breve. Mary Plazas (Salud), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Stephen

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lover, Paco. All scenes were set in a dressmaking workshop in a ramshackle shed, in relentless neon-lit brightness. The dramatic style reminded some of Pedro Almodovar’s films. The image of Mary Plazas, having slit her wrists and being held up by the chorus, looking upward in a moment of transfiguration, is another iconic image from the season that is etched on company members’ memories. ‘Alden made every moment seem like a matter of life or death […] Definitely one for the pantheon’ (Blewitt, 2004).

The Portrait Another Pountney rediscovery by Polish composer Weinberg, The Portrait, is linked to The Love for Three Oranges and to Julietta in its Eastern European, absurdist characteristics. The Portrait had been unearthed at Bregenz in 2010 for a Weinberg season, where it was performed alongside one of the most interesting operas on the topic of the Holocaust of the 20th century, The Passenger, directed by Pountney. Weinberg wrote it in the late 1960s and it was not allowed a performance in the USSR, so the composer had to choose well-known works for operatic adaptation, in order for his work to reach the stage. It was entirely safe to set Gogol, whose credentials were impeccable (for the time being anyway). But it is unquestionable that a story about the destruction of artistic integrity had enormous resonance in a Soviet society in which the experience of the purges and the daily evaluation of Significant Personages had an all too real impact on every choice that was made. (Pountney, 2011)

Pountney asserted in his model showing at Opera North (November 2010) that The Portrait was a piece about compromise and integrity — artists in a totalitarian regime lived to tell the tale unless they compromised. Audiences were used to reading in code; a tale of corruption automatically read as tale of getting through without being arrested — and given Weinberg’s own tragic story, The Portrait did have biographical significance. ‘After The Passenger, even choosing to write this piece is a compromise’. Pountney and his scenographer Dan Potra conceptualised the opera as a wide-ranging allegory on the artist and society. The painter Chartkov was performed by Paul Nilon, who had co-created a wide range of roles with Pountney in Opera North productions, including Julietta. In The Portrait, the impoverished artist Chartkov is lured from his innovative work by money magically falling out of a portrait he has bought, whereupon he becomes the favourite artist of the upper classes. The fin-de-siècle setting is created mainly through costumes in the Opera North production. The set evokes a giant painter’s palette, or an artist’s studio covered in paint,

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with some inspiration taken from photos of Lucien Freud’s studio. Notions of scale and pace (similar to some of the Oranges scenography) are subverted: the high society, for whom Chartkov now works, appear on stilts, one cameo whizzes around on wheels hidden by her costume and an army colonel is pushed around in a fantastical cycling machine.

Illustration 4.

The Portrait. Act 1, Peter Savidge (Landlady), Richard Angas (General), Paul Nilon (Chartkov). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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These devices are reminiscent of Meyerhold and modernist stage machinery — this also applies to the set that comes alive with hands protruding from it in Chartkov’s dream. Time speeds up throughout the second half of the opera, which starts in Stalin’s era, numerous identical portraits of him staring out at the audience as the curtain goes up for the second half, the walls entirely bare and white. Chartkov is instructed: ‘We don’t need a genius, we just need an obedient worker’. Pountney and Potra create an art-based journey through concept and scenography, starting in expressionism, travelling through the art of the Stalin period, Illustration 5. The Portrait. Act 3, Richard Angas (General), Nicholas Sharrat (Lamplighter). visiting the 1960s, referencing minimalism Photo: Malcolm Johnson. and video art. They pay critical homage to Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst, who managed to combine artistic acclaim with enormous financial success. There is a ‘nemesis’ figure to Chartkov, Peter Savidge performing five parts in different guises; some parallels can be drawn with the sinister characters in Death in Venice and the four evil ones in The Tales of Hoffman. The portrait of the title is a cracked mirror in this production, the ‘grotesque old man’ staring out at Chartkov is his own image. The artist not recognising himself makes a point about his increasing self-loathing at ‘selling out’. As Chartkov reaches the end of his journey, taking an overdose in despair, his death is documented and made public through a live video feed, filmed by his muse, Psyche. After the death of the artist, Psyche switches the camera off and leaves her master, together with his servant Nikita. The wall stage right swings round by 180 degrees, revealing undecorated ‘backstage’ walls and the Lamplighter. He is old and has resigned to the fact that the ‘little spark’ he has been singing about has now gone out. Decisively, he switches off the fuse at the mains, which simultaneously extinguishes the light

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and electrocutes him. The warning sign near the fuse box has a skull on it — a discrete anticipation of the image to come: the wall swings back to its former position to reveal, on a rostrum, Damian Hirst’s diamond skull, starkly lit from above. The corpse of Chartkov has been joined by a chic representation of death. The Opera North stage crew bringing the wall round have ‘The Portrait’ printed on their T-shirts.

Illustration 6.

The Portrait. Act 4, Paul Nilon (Chartkov), Hedda-Maria Oosterhoff (Psyche). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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OPERA NORTH AND BRITTEN Britten’s music is part of the Company’s DNA. (Mantle, 2013)

Most of the five permanent UK opera company have a special relationship with Britten, one of the most important national composers of the 20th century, whose works have the status of modern classics. Opera North is no exception, their first Peter Grimes produced soon after the company’s inception as ENON, followed by a steady stream of productions, of all of Britten's operas, except for Paul Bunyan, the television opera Owen Wingrave and the three Church Parables. While there are many memorable productions of the frequently performed works (Grimes, Billy Budd, Albert Herring, A Midsummer Nights Dream et al), some Opera North productions, particularly those directed by Phyllida Lloyd, have attracted a lot of attention. This is particularly true of her 1993 production Gloriana, which rehabilitated a work regarded as problematic (mainly due to its coolly received 1953 first production as part of the Coronation festivities). The production was revived in 1997, 1999 and 2001 and was adapted as a television film for BBC TV in 2000 (and subsequently released on DVD on the Opus Arte label, also winning an Emmy Award). Lloyd’s film abridged the score of the opera, concentrating on the Elizabeth Essex narrative. It used footage of three performances, as well as some scenes filmed backstage at Leeds Grand Theatre and in a television studio. During performances, Lloyd had observed the opera’s theme — the struggle between public duty and private identity — to be mirrored backstage: Gloriana is about the relationship between the public and the private face, between the mask and reality, between costume and performance. It's about hierarchy and knowing one’s place. All those things seemed to be mirrored in what was going on behind the scenes. (Lloyd in Fawkes, 2000, p. 96)

The stage production had a single location and had to provide a space flexible enough to accommodate the public scenes, involving court ceremony and pageantry, as well as the more intimate exchanges between the Queen and her favourite, the Earl of Essex. Anthony Ward’s set defined a central rectangular area, surrounded with two galleries, a smaller wooden one and a higher one clad in dark material. Two large sliding doors made of metal enclosed the stage at the back. Both galleries were open to the front, so the space made allusions to an Elizabethan theatre, but with the stage surrounded from all sides, including the auditorium. Lloyd’s approach, combining historical detail (costumes, the courtly dances and fights) with intense psychological insight, is illustrated through the Queen’s first spectacular entrance, a coup de théâtre:

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Announced by distant trumpets during Mountjoy and Essex’s fight, the walls part and Elizabeth I is carried forward, her rostrum swaying in time with the fanfares. She is styled in gold, evoking famous portraits by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger (the Ditchley portrait from 1592, but also a lesser-known one from the school of the same artist, where the virginal ideal of the Fairy Queen has given way to a more realistic image of her woman in her 60s). In her first stage appearance of the opera, the Queen stands in a golden frame, which hints at her iconic status, but also signifies the gilded cage in which she finds herself due to her status. The lighting state makes her entrance a quasi-divine appearance, looking down with disdain on the two quarrelling nobles (‘Heavens, what have we here?’). The sense of ‘court’ is not so much achieved through scenographic detail, but through costumes, physical action and proxemics. The hierarchical way the court is shown presents a micro-structure of Elizabethan society, the raked, wooden structure making allusions to a court in the monarchic, but also the judicial sense. It is interesting to juxtapose stage and film versions for this particular scene, as the film narrative is centred around the singer of Elizabeth, Dame Josephine Barstow, in the lead up to her first entrance ‘on stage’. The overture shows the setting of the stage (the floor is laid, Essex’s silver horse is winched in through the scene dock) and the busy backstage area, with singers arriving and stage management noticing that Dame Josephine has not yet arrived. When she does, we see her transform from singer to character in her dressing room. The process of becoming Queen Elizabeth I is made more urgent by the quarrel that has broken out on stage between Essex and Mountjoy. We only see the beginning of the argument and then the camera takes us back to Dame Josephine's dressing room, where she listens to the quarrel over the tannoy with growing concern. We then see the process of her being dressed, made up and wigged from her point of view, without actually seeing her. We then go backstage with the Queen, where company members react to her reverentially and help her onto the rostrum. She is lifted, ready for her entrance cue, chorus and trumpeters around her. At the moment of her appearance, the camera shows her from the front in her Queen’s regalia for the first time, as in the stage version, above everyone else, in her frame or golden cage. The cage or picture frame of the first entrance is shown in another climactic scene, at the beginning of Act 3 where Essex overpowers the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting to invade Elizabeth’s bed chamber on his arrival from Ireland. The ladies-in-waiting busily move around in front of a white box, the Queen’s bed chamber. In the stage version, Essex appears at the top of the inner gallery, then climbs over the bannisters and pulls his sword in response to the protective phalanx of the ladies-in-waiting in front of the white box. As they disperse, he slashes its paper screen with his sword, and it reveals a wigless, unadorned, white-faced Queen, looking back at him in total stillness. Her response ‘My Lord of Essex?’ is sung unaccompanied and once again, she is arranged in a portrait fashion in her ‘frame’ or cage — but in contrast to her first appearance as her public persona, here ‘you

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Gloriana. Act 1, Josephine Barstow (Queen Elizabeth I), ensemble. Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

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see me as I am’, as she tells Essex, subdued, but not intimidated, and full of fierce dignity. The political quickly takes over the personal, however, and the confrontation ensuing between her and Essex reveals the breach of trust of which Elizabeth is accusing him for not having fulfilled her orders in his Irish campaign. After the dramatic conclusion of the Essex narrative, including the pleading of his sister and wife, the Queen signs the warrant for his execution. The opera continues through a series of sketches, almost tableau-like, where the separation between the adorned, public Queen-figure and the old woman she has become behind this mask is elaborated. The interaction between the monarch in stark white and her grandiose dress on a dummy is powerful on stage. Lloyd chose a different way to conclude her television film of 2000, however. She connected the beginning in the dressing room (the Queen being prepared for her first entrance, see above) with the ending of the opera. After her pronouncement of duty to her people, the Queen is helped offstage by her ladies-in-waiting in a state of exhaustion. The company backstage look on with concern as she is brought into her dressing room. In a gradual shedding of masks, her imposing red wig comes off, which has the white wig underneath. She sings ‘mortua, mortua, sed non sepulta’ (dead, dead, but not yet buried) to her mirror image. After the final exchange with Cecil (who speaks from the off), her face relaxes, and she starts taking her jewellery, white wig and hairnet and white make-up off as she listens to the concluding chorus, ‘Green leaves are we’, over the tannoy, her expression changing from exhaustion to satisfaction that a

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Gloriana. Act 3, Josephine Barstow (Queen Elizabeth I). Photo: Stephen Vaughan.

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demanding performance has finished. Josephine Barstow sheds the burdens of the monarchy layer by layer, as the metamorphosis from public to private is transferred backstage and then reversed. The opera ends, applause sounding through the tannoy, and the stage manager's directions are heard: ‘And everybody bow, please. Jo to the centre! Jo! Jo, please!’ Phyllida Lloyd directed Britten’s comic opera Albert Herring in 2002, with Josephine Barstow in the role of Lady Billows — the production was admired for being contemporary, but not compromising any of the opera’s essential ‘Englishness’. It was this aspect, Lloyd explained, that connected Gloriana and Herring, even though the pieces were of such different styles and scales: ‘in the English pageantry and ritual and in the delicate way he etches in character I would say there are similarities’ (Lloyd, 2001). The chamber-size orchestra was on stage and deftly integrated into the action. The enclosed social sphere of Loxford can, of course, also be linked to the stifling environment of the Borough, the setting for Peter Grimes, the third Britten opera Lloyd directed for Opera North in 2006. Her relationship with the company has been an excellent match for both parties since 1991. Lloyd had never been interested in working on the international opera circuit, doing ‘one opera after another. I don’t have an international opera career and I don’t want one, it doesn’t suit me’ (Lloyd, 2001, p. 19). Herring and Grimes were ideal operas for her to direct, given her interest in the social dynamics of enclosed spaces, but also her ensemble ethos as a director. The continuing creative dialogue with designer Anthony Ward was a strong contributing factor. Peter Grimes was shown in the newly refurbished Grand Theatre in the autumn of 2006 and was revived in 2008 and again as part of the Company’s Festival of Britten in the autumn of 2013. Similar to Gloriana during the 1990s, Grimes was one of the defining productions of Opera North’s history, on account of its dramatic and musical ensemble achievement as well as the powerful simplicity of production and scenography. Lloyd broke with the convention of having blackouts or bringing curtains down during the Sea Interludes (also a popular part of the concert repertoire). She used these additional spaces in the opera to shape notions only suggested in libretto and score into narrative threads, adding depth to the interpretation. It also resulted in a detailed portrait of the protagonist Peter Grimes, who in this production has manic-depressive characteristics. He is pensive and lyrical one moment, abrupt and prone to violence the next moment, particularly in the disastrous attempts to communicate with people of the Borough and his new apprentice. An almost empty stage is displayed, clad with canvas-like material, folded upwards seamlessly at the back of the space, evoking the place where the sea meets the horizon (Anthony Ward’s design lit beautifully by Paule Constable). Only a few devices are used to define or create space. In the first Sea Interlude, which starts on the same note as Grimes and Ellen’s unison ‘it is a

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Peter Grimes. First Sea Interlude, ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Peter Grimes. Act 2, ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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friend’ just before, we see more detail about their relationship. A supportive hug results in the suggestion of a kiss from Ellen, at first rejected by Grimes, but then accepted in a moment of great tenderness. Children run in, interrupting the scene, and Grimes and Ellen leave. The villagers bring in the enormous fishing net, lay it out, connect it to a hook, and then spread it across the width of the stage as it rises. The chorus move slowly with the net to the rhythm dictated to them by the swell of the sea, and their singing cue ‘Oh hang at open doors, the net, the cork’ links with the end of the interlude (see also Illustration 9). The fishing net is used to show the Borough’s dependence on the sea for their livelihoods, as well as being at the mercy of it. It also visualises demarcations and separations in the community, expressing enclosure, segregation and entrapment in turn. As Grimes appears from fishing out at sea, his voice at first heard offstage, the segregation between him and the community becomes clear. He comes from the outside, with the community going about its business inside the net (which could be The Board Inn at this point). Villagers watch him with suspicion as he hauls his boat onto the beach, with some help by his ally, Captain Balstrode, and by Ned Keane. School teacher Ellen Orford and Balstrode are integrated into the Borough, but are seen to cross the threshold of the enclosing net to interact with Grimes. In the Second Sea Interlude, the women fight with the net, which is being blown from one side of the stage to the other (see also front cover image). The lighting is low and at times, they are almost indistinguishable from it, forming a sculpture that is constantly shifting shape. They could be on board a ship with the shadows the net throws and in the way it rises up and down. Grimes stands at the front — a figure in turmoil, more comfortable with the unleashed elements than with other people. As the storm becomes intermittent, Auntie enters, carrying a wooden pallet, running unsteadily against the wind. She is followed by the nieces and by Ned Keane (in pursuit of a niece), each carrying one of the wooden elements, which they piece together on the floor. The Board Inn is gradually completed, pallet by pallet, by other members of the Borough as they enter, Mrs Sedley blowing in through the ‘door’ with the last chord. These simple wooden pallets constitute the other key scenographic element beside the net, pieced together on stage by the performers to create the Moot Hall (the ensemble behind barriers in a horse shoe), the Board Inn (the pallets on the floor in a rectangle, suggesting a room), the aisle of the church, the ‘rafts’ on which the reflective women sit in their quartet and the village hall during the dance (the pallets are stacked up to form a circular structure) (see also Illustrations 11 and 14). In the Third Sea Interlude (Sunday morning), the bright and pacy theme in the strings is juxtaposed with Grimes’s apprentice waiting for Ellen outside the church (the wooden pallets form a row towards the back of the stage). The boy is excluded from

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Peter Grimes. Act 3, Jennifer France (Niece), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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the games of the local children, shown to be already tarnished by working for Grimes, the outsider. Ellen enters, distributing treats for the children, followed (on the orchestral tutti) by the villagers going to church. As they stand in a row, facing away from the audience, Ellen and the boy sit down at the front of the stage. In Sea Interlude 4 (Passacaglia), we see Grimes’s dream. It starts as a nightmare, bringing back the ghost of his previous boy apprentice, who died at sea. A young boy walks along the wooden platform in unreal lighting. Grimes watches him and tries to reach out to him, but the vision disappears. The dream then turns into a happy one as Grimes imagines the building of his

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Peter Grimes. Act 2, Fourth Sea Interlude, ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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hut, seeing the plans for it with Ellen and three little girls, interacting with everyone in the community and even having a group photo taken by Mrs Sedley. There is a brief ‘freeze’ moment and the atmosphere turns into the ‘normal’ hostility and resentment Grimes provokes from the villagers. Grimes’s bad-tempered realisation that it was just a dream is carried over into his entrance with the apprentice ‘go there!’, pushing the boy up the ladder of the fishing hut. In Interlude 5 (Moonlight), Grimes sits, then lies down next to the dead apprentice. He arranges the body carefully, evoking a helpless funeral or wake. He then lifts the dead boy up, carries him forward with determination and ‘presents’ him to the front by lifting him up above his head, straining and trembling with the effort, crying with remorse. Then, with the reprise of the funereal theme, he sorrowfully carries the body offstage, simultaneously with the inhabitants of the Borough coming on. The forms of Grimes and the dead boy almost merge in the dim, greenish light. None of the villagers see them as they walk among them. Earlier, at the end of Act 2, the crowd disperses, searching for Grimes — and he is again revealed to be in the middle of them. These interludes reveal depth of thinking about Grimes’s relationship with the Borough. He is constantly found in the middle of the people who want to lynch him (as they do his effigy, a crude straw puppet they tear to pieces), but he is invisible to them, an inhabitant of a different world, a visualisation of a community averting its gaze or keeping its eyes shut in the face of problems. Ward’s scenography strengthens the point on the few occasions Grimes is among the villagers: he is separated through being in the dock in the Moot Hall, then separation occurs

Illustration 13. Peter Grimes. Act 3, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Grimes), William Mercer (Apprentice). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Peter Grimes. Act 1, ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades …’. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (Grimes), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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through the large fishing net in the first scene. When Grimes enters the Board Inn in the storm to wait for the arrival of his apprentice, the ensembles mimes falling over due to the strong wind, their disruption caused by his entrance. Grimes, at the ‘helm’ of the Board Inn, with the villagers still on the floor behind him, sings his visionary ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’. The round ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’, started to avert a fight, sees Grimes joining in for once, but corrupting the tight rhythm of the Borough in his singing: he sings to his own tune and moves to his own rhythm.

OPERA NORTH AND JANÁČEK The operas of Leoš Janáček have been a fixture in the UK repertoire since Charles Mackerras’s championing and his work on the composer’s autographs, producing authoritative scores of all the operas in collaboration with the musicologist John Tyrrell. ° The Cunning Little Vixen and Katya Kabanova are the works As in the case of Britten, the operas vary in popularity — Jenufa, ° and The Adventures of Mr Brouček (performed by Opera North in 2009) are performed most frequently, and works like Osud repertoire rarities. Even the two works discussed here, Janáček’s last opera, From the House of the Dead (composed in 1927/ 1928 and performed by Opera North in 2011) and his penultimate one, The Makropulos Case (composed in 1923 and performed by Opera North in 2012), are not fixtures of the repertoire. From the House of the Dead was programmed in the spring season of 2011 together with Fidelio and Carmen, around the theme of liberty, and the absence of it — a link could also be made back to the winter season, where The Portrait considered artistic freedom.

From the House of the Dead From the House of the Dead is Janáček’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel, titled either The House of the Dead or Memoirs from the House of the Dead. It is a first-person narrative, where an unnamed man finds notes of the former prisoner Goryantchikov near a prison camp. The shifting perspective leaves it unclear who is telling whose story at times, with Dostoyevsky’s own experiences looming large in the ‘reportage’ style narration. Adapting the opera from the novel himself, Janáček changed the order of the prisoners’ stories, fragmented some of them and removed ‘the comforting element of the author’s voice’ (Siddique, 2011, p. 9), making for a collage of narratives. The story starts with Goryantchikov’s arrival and ends with his release, the first act is set in the prison yard, the second act features an Easter celebration and a play performed by the prisoners, and

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the third act is set in the prison hospital at night, and then moves to the prison yard once more. We hear the stories of men who have committed serious crimes in relentless detail. Janáček’s note on the score ‘in each creature, a spark of God’ communicates a lack of judgement, an encouragement to listen to these men alienated from society by their own doing, through their crimes and now imprisoned, most of them for the rest of their lives. Some prisoners have come to terms with their guilt, others prove to be unreliable narrators, adding or omitting detail and leaving the audience to interpret the way they present their lives and their crimes. But while these personal histories are largely violent and grisly, and the setting in a Siberian labour camp undoubtedly grim, it seems to me there’s an irrepressible life force within Janáček’s music here, almost as if the more dark the personal tragedy, the more intensely bright the musical energy burns. You can easily detect the composer’s interest in Moravian folk culture — the music positively dances in places — and with no overindulgence or sentimentality Janáček seems to seek out the humanity in even the cruellest of tales. (Farnes, 2011)

Opera North’s production introduces the prison camp from Goryantchikov’s perspective, as he arrives to taunts of ‘bring him in, the noble, our new noble’ from the prisoners behind an iron fence. We see him humiliated, stripped down and become part of the closed world the prisoners inhabit, yet we do not hear his story, but those of his fellow inmates. For example, in the prisoner Skuratov’s story, we learn about his life up to the crime for which he was sent to the prison camp. It is told in a different way from the earlier narrative by Luka (Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts), which is fragmented, difficult to follow and deliberately obscure. Skuratov (performed by Alan Oke) is a character who is

Illustration 15.

From the House of the Dead. Alan Oke (Skuratov). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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referred to as a lunatic or a madman by the other prisoners and who has already introduced himself with a slightly manic dance theme in Act 1, when the prisoners were sewing. To tell his story, he jumps onto a concrete slab, positioned diagonally across the stage, mounted on two iron structures. Skuratov’s story is projected onto the slab as he tells it, the letters appearing as though they have been scratched into the concrete. Oke shows a complex and compelling interpretation of the prisoner prone to outbursts, naïve ponderings and mockery of his inmates. Skuratov’s abrupt mood changes characterise the way his story is told, but he tells it chronologically right up to the point where he commits murder — a passion crime, shooting a German watchmaker who married his beloved Luisa. The story of the lovers is touching (‘nicer than any girl I knew’), and Skuratov’s music echoes his surprise and triumph at the realisation that Luisa would be prepared to marry him — Oke rises from his kneeling position, clutches the metal chain that holds the slab and raises his arm in triumph with ‘imagine — me, a husband!’. Another prisoner, dismissing his story, brings Skuratov out of his reminiscing, and he reveals his quick temper, attacking him. Oke lowers himself into a crouching position when things get darker and he tells of Luisa not visiting him. As his listeners get drawn in, he moves to the middle of the slab, where he recalls meeting Luisa and she tells him she is to marry someone else. The sung monologue uses direct speech, which makes for vocal and facial re-enactments — quiet and tender for Luisa, abrupt and authoritarian for her German husband. He tells of his appearance at Luisa’s wedding with postures and gestures that reveal a twisted bravado when he describes taking his pistol ‘just in case’. Oke shows some ‘man of action’ poses, exaggerating his physicality ever so slightly to show the character’s naivety, slapping the pocket where he carried his pistol. He reverts to his crouching position for the more tender recollection of Luisa in her wedding dress, followed by another abrupt change before the confrontation with the watchmaker groom, and Skuratov’s shooting of him. The story is interrupted at this point, leaving the prisoners’ question ‘And Luisa?’ unanswered. It is only much later in the opera that we hear Skuratov shot her, too. In another striking interaction of words and scenography, we hear prisoner Shishkov’s tale in Act 3 (performed by Robert Hayward). The stage is littered by ladders of different heights, prisoners moving slowly up or down them, dimly lit, evoking hospital beds. Other prisoners sit on the floor, looking after their sick fellow inmates — Goryantchikov tends to the injured Alyeya. Shishkov’s tale of brutality, societal and family oppression and murder is very episodic, as Janáček intended to give the impression of him drifting in and out of it during the night on the ward. As he tells the story of his bride Akulina from his ladder bed, the text unfolds next to him on a gauze, which, due to the dim lighting, seems to float in mid-air. The man whom Shishkov accuses of corrupting Akulina, Filka Morozov, turns out to be Luka, who is also on the ward and dies before his identity is revealed — which would have led to another murder.

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From the House of the Dead. Robert Hayward (Shishkov), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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From the House of the Dead describes the prisoners nursing an injured eagle at the beginning of the opera. By the time Goryantchikov is released at the end of the opera, the bird is well enough to fly again and leaves the closed world. It is a symbol of hope, and various conventions have been used to integrate it in past productions, a live eagle never among them. In this production, the dancer Philippe Giraudeau (also the choreographer for the production) played the part of the eagle,

Illustration 17.

From the House of the Dead. Finale. Ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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a slight man with a large tattooed eagle on his shoulders, much abused by some of the prisoners, cared for by others. His musical theme ‘Tsar of all forests!’, a flourish in the brass and woodwind, is a spark of hope and optimism. In the final scene, Goryantchikov changes back into his clothes and says goodbye to the desperate Alyeya. The ‘eagle’ moves around the semi-circle of prisoners and is pushed from one to the other as he runs faster. In the final moments of the opera, he launches himself at the wire of the fence facing the auditorium and climbs up to escape with desperate determination. The guards quickly pull him down, beat him and kick him until he is no longer moving. Goryantchikov, now outside the prison, looks on, and his expression tells us that, while he might have been released, he is not free. Opera North's production of Janáček’s penultimate opera premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2012 and opened in Leeds in the autumn of 2012. It completed Opera North’s productions of Janáček’s mature operas, and as Richard Mantle remarked in the programme booklet, the opera’s plot about a woman of 337 years having to accept mortality was a suitable way to end the journey. The opera, like From the House of the Dead, shows Janáček’s ingenuity as an adapter from eclectic sources, including newspaper cartoons, novels and this legalistic comedy. Makropulos is also testament to his obsession with time, its measurement and replication through music. Generically, the opera is difficult to categorise: part conversation piece, part legal comedy, part supernatural story, part metaphysical reflection on life and death. The conversational nature of the piece is brought about through Janáček’s style of giving the speech pattern the lead in composing a phrase or sentence, and means the music is closely wedded, dependent even, on the Czech language. Opera North performed the opera in English, a concession to accessibility, as the intricate legalistic plot, together with the vagaries of Emilia Marty’s adventures over 300 years and her changing identities are a challenge for even the seasoned opera-goer, used to convoluted plots. Makropulos is less specific to its setting (Prague) than other Janáček’s operas and contains fewer folkloristic influences than all of the other mature operas. Instead, a binary is set up between the setting contemporary to the story and echoes of past epochs of Marty’s life, notably the offstage brass from the age of Emperor Rudolf II: Furthermore, Makropulos is hardly more an opera of its place than an opera of its time. Just as there are no foxtrots or Bostons to remind us that we are in the 1920s, there are no musical clues that we are in Prague. […] The music that does bring with it associations of time and place is from long ago or far away. Offstage horns, trumpets and timpani play fanfares that evoke emperor Rudolf II’s reign and castanets colour Marty’s revelation that she was once the Spanish Eugenia Montez. (Katz, 2009, p. 123)

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Emilia Marty has little in common with Janáček’s other female protagonists, and Gavin Plumley has commented on the ‘drop in temperature’ constituted by this woman, wearied by long life and emotionally cold and inscrutable. Musically, Marty is not ‘privileged with grand lyricism’ (Plumley, 2012, pp. 8 9), as are protagonists like Katya Kabanova and the Vixen. She is part of the quick-fire conversational texture of the opera — until the earth-shattering final 10 minutes of the opera. The beginning of the end starts when Marty reveals her real name: Elina Makropulos. The two sequences described below finally give insights into the woman behind the mask and the revelation of her incredibly strange story in Act 3, which gives her and the opera a whole new musical language. Makropulos has some dramaturgical problems. One of them is its relentlessness, its hurtling pace; the other is the audience’s potential lack of empathy with its protagonist, Emilia Marty. Knowing her secret would help, but giving the fundamental revelation of the plot away in order to foster understanding of a cold and detached woman might also be a problematic strategy. Marty’s emptiness, ennui and cynicism have an effect on the dramatic dynamics — we never see her alone and so there can be no disclosure or seeing behind the façade. Is it wise to accept the audience will have preknowledge of the plot and know her secret and instead focus on the suspense of Marty being found out? For such a remarkable character, she makes an unremarkable entrance in Act 1. She is on a

Illustration 18. The Makropulos Case. Act 2, Ylva Kihlberg (Emilia Marty), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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quest to find the formula her father invented to give the Emperor Rudolf eternal life, back in the 17th century. Marty has returned to Prague, knowing that the outcome of a court case is connected with her retrieving the formula that allows her to continue living. Her time is running out, she is not interested in pleasantries and very bored by the effect she has on men. ‘So he’s dead then’ is her reaction when told about the court case, which started when her lover Prus’s will was contested, in 1827. The audience laugh at this, as it refers to someone who died over a century ago. The fact that Marty does not seem to realise that this is a strange statement makes the mystery around her grow. Another moment occurs in the scene with Albert Gregor, the descendant of her 19th century lover Prus (as she will reveal in Act 3, she is Albert’s ‘great great great great great great grandmother’). He could be of use to her in her search for the formula, so, in order to get closer to him, she asks whether his ‘mummy called him Bertie’. When he confirms but says his mother has been dead for many years, Marty sadly muses on how everyone ends up dying. This sounds trivial without knowing the context, but echoes the ‘dreadful loneliness’ she laments in Act 3. Everyone she has ever known in her many guises (all of them with the initials E.M.) has aged and died. Even though Marty claims not to care about all the children she has had over the years, the ‘many bastards roaming the world’, one can but wonder whether her brusque dismissal is rooted in not wanting to see them die before her. Her nihilism is carried through Act 2: Marty seems to delight in insulting people — she rejects a gift of jewellery from Bertie, declares Janek ‘stupid’ and mocks young lovers Janek and Christa, telling the latter that sex is not really worth it — nothing is. Holding court, Marty sits on a red crescent of a sofa in her bright purple coat, surrounded by men in suits whose heads are visible behind the back rest — ‘who is next?’ — a wearisome, routined and utterly disillusioned performance (see Illustration 18). When demented Baron Hauk Sendorf (‘I am the local lunatic’) recognises her as the gypsy Eugenia Montez from many decades ago, Marty shows a moment of nostalgic Spanish tenderness and the old Flamenco moves of Montez over 50 years ago. But this does not entertain her for long, either, and she gives Hauk a valedictory, but dismissive wave without turning round to him and takes up her ‘business’ dealings yet once again. So, while her spirit flickers here and there and causes mischief, upset, surprise and consternation, the existentialist problem of the 337-year-old woman’s loneliness comes to haunt her at every stage. Time is running out for Marty. At first, there are only small hints of this: she seems very conscious of her appearance, looking into a pocket mirror, putting on lipstick, applying powder to her face. Ageing has set in and decay is affecting her body. In Act 3, we learn that she has been hiding her whitened hair under wigs. Clocks are everywhere in Hildegard Bechtler’s set and the digital clock in the hotel room suddenly shows that it is 20 minutes to midnight. Marty, who is being cross-questioned by a phalanx of men in her hotel room, again shows a spark of mischievousness by refusing to co-operate,

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bouncing on her bed and swigging whisky from her hip flask to a mocking orchestral motif. She then rattles off her astounding story in quick-fire tempo, while the still disbelieving men listen to her. ‘You can’t live 300 years without sometimes changing names’ she explains dryly. At the climax of the story about the elixir her father concocted and which was tested on her as a young girl, the phrase ‘it gives life for 300 years!’ is a moment of musical culmination (maestoso). We approach the watershed of the opera, when Marty, vigorously questioned by Dr Kolenaty, finally admits to her real name: ‘Elina Makropulos’, upon which she faints, waking up to a transfigured score that Illustration 19. The Makropulos Case. Act 3, Ylva Kihlberg (Emilia Marty), ensemble. Photo: rings with echoes of different epochs. She Malcolm Johnson. has also been transfigured: the voile curtain around her hotel bed draws back to the ‘Elina Makropulos’ motif, with heavy percussion, to reveal her looking ethereal, with glistening white hair, the men fading into the shadows, becoming indistinguishable as they don identical hats and coats. While Elina Makropulos realises that ‘death has laid his hand on me’, she is still fighting to stay alive, mirrored in the score, where two violins play a lyrical, but halting variation of her motif. In the Makropulos Case, the unnatural element is Marty’s age. Until she accepts mortality, her music is just as untethered from functional tonal harmony as that of Harasta [The Cunning Little Vixen]. As she becomes resigned to submitting to the natural process of aging, her music becomes more triadic. The fact that this return to a centuries-old harmonic procedure should coincide with Marty’s return to the natural cycle of aging and death is a masterstroke and fully merits the acclaim it has received. (Katz, 2009, pp. 135 136)

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As voices from the past join the score offstage, Elina Makropulos is at pains to give away the formula, eventually tempting young Christa to use it and seek eternal life. After seemingly resigning herself to imminent death, Makropulos has a change of heart, holding her arms out to get the formula back, but death overcomes her in front of the bed. The light is up on all the clocks as they turn to midnight and flames spring up next to the bed. As the men leave the stage, Christa lights the paper with the formula, holding it up as it burns. In these last astounding minutes of the opera, Makropulos has unfolded all the complexity and emotion that is dramatically and musically condensed and suppressed for most of the opera. In her final minutes, Elina Makropulos joins Janáček’s passionate, flawed and tragic heroines.

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The Makropulos Case. Act 3, Ylva Kihlberg (Elina Makropulos), Stephanie Corley (Christina). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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OPERA NORTH AND THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG Performing Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is a defining moment for an opera company, or maybe a watershed, given the work’s genesis from the depths of the Rhine. Mounting Wagner’s work is a big draw on any company’s resources for its length and complexity. As often before in Opera North’s history, circumstances presented the ‘givens’, but pragmatically based conditions resulted in work that had artistic autonomy. It was not going to be possible to produce all four of the operas in the cycle in one season, and the size of the Leeds Grand Theatre orchestra pit was not a match for the company’s ambition and ability, so rather than deny artists and audiences this cornerstone of the repertoire, a functional compromise was devised. There was to be one annual instalment of the Ring between 2011 and 2014 at Leeds Town Hall. Designed by Cuthbert Brodrick and built during the 1850s, it is a building that captures the civic pride of Leeds in the 19th century and is still a central focus for the identity of the city. It hosts concerts by the Orchestra of Opera North as part of the Leeds International Concert Season, and, as seen in the first section of this book, there had been a number of semi-staged performances or concert performances in the Town Hall prior to the Ring cycle, peaking during the time when Leeds Grand Theatre was undergoing Transformation. Tristan und Isolde in 2001 was also performed at the Town Hall, in Keith Warner’s semi-staged production, with two circular podiums in front of the main rostrum. The orchestra, although in full view, was behind a black gauze, so singers were foregrounded. These performances had been a success with audiences, also refreshing the ‘typical’ Opera North demographic and making the transition from concert-goer to opera-goer more fluid. From the start, spatial and financial considerations were thus joined by the ambition to bring Wagner to first-time opera attenders, with the hope that experiencing the work in the ‘people’s space’ of the Town Hall would lower the threshold — and, importantly, keep the ticket prices affordable, too. If this was an ‘Austerity Ring’, as it was asserted, then its affordability was a determining factor alongside the simplified setting of the operas. After being coined, the term was framed positively (‘Less can be more when it comes to Wagner, and Opera North’s “Austerity Ring” — now on its second instalment in its second year — continues to enthral and amaze’, Ashley, 2012). Company aspiration, accessibility and austerity blended successfully, not just because of the quasi-Wagnerian alliteration. The company was also keen to tour work to an excellent set of concert venues, the Birmingham Philharmonic Concert Hall, and in particular The Sage in Gateshead, where big support for Opera North’s work had been shown in the few years it had existed, also boasting one of the finest acoustics for large scale work in the United Kingdom. According to Richard Farnes, The Sage had a choice of orchestras and proposals for the Ring, but wanted

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an opera company to perform the work. Peter Mumford delivered the design of the stage and projections, as well as direction. Although the Ring was not advertised as semi-staged, the intention was to provide a bigger and more varied experience than that of a concert performance, with the emphasis on dramatic illustration and storytelling. Mumford called the convention ‘a fully staged concert version’. I don’t like the phrase semi-staged because it sounds like an apology for something, so I opted for a fully-staged concert version, and that is different. It’s obviously different because you don’t have huge sets — the presence of the orchestra is very strong on stage. (Mumford, 2012)

The layout of the stage, consistent through all instalments of the Ring, has the orchestra on stage, partly elevated on the chorus rake, and the soloists in front of orchestra, singing outwards and taking their cues from the monitors in the auditorium. The space is framed by a large triptych of three screens, displaying continuous footage mixed with words. It strikes a compromise between giving information on the location of a scene (moving water for the Rhine scene, cloud-covered mountain tops for the Gods’ residence) and its atmospheric value, which might also relate to characters’ states of mind or decisions. The colouring of the screens is strongly linked with lighting stages, which often incorporate the orchestra. The English translation of the libretto is titled on monitors to the left and to the right of the large screens. Synoptic and character-based information (‘who is who and what is happening in a scene’, Richard Farnes at the first rehearsal) is incorporated on the three large screens in various ways. Earlier scenes are summarised at the start, introductions becoming less necessary as the opera progresses. In Rheingold, fragments of the text occasionally ride across the screen. During Loge’s narration, for example, Wotan is given advice to steal the gold back and return it to the Rhine maidens. The lettering reads ‘Wotan must steal the Ring’ and gets larger as it moves towards the viewer. Text is generally displayed in the past tense. In Rheingold, the surtitles on the screens to each side of the stage were criticised by some, partly because they were not integrated with the aesthetic of the production, partly because they meant the viewers’ attention was pulled into too many directions. Not everyone relished the text on the large screens, either, although many deemed it perfect for audiences encountering Wagner for the first time. Singers were not in costume, but in evening dress, adding small elements that signified the characters’ statuses and relationships with each other, such as blue gloves for the Rhine maidens, golden gloves for the goddesses and matching red ties and handkerchiefs for the giants.

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Mumford referred to intermedial comparison to explain the acting style he asked the singers to adopt. Words and limited actions were performed, similar to an opera performance, but singers did so facing outward, so more akin to performing a recital of Lieder. It’s a bit like a cutaway shot — if you do a movie and you ask someone to do an action shot to camera when the other person isn’t there. And it’s remarkably difficult for performers to do it — I’m asking for just as much performance and acting, but in a different direction to everything they’ve ever been told. (Mumford, 2012)

Because of the pared-down style, the expressive qualities of singers’ voices and the colours given to phrases or emphasis given to words (often with the help of body posture), the energy and emotion invested in voices had a central role. During the rehearsal process, the right balance between ‘acting’ and ‘not acting’ had to be found and incorporated across the cast, also taking into account the narrow, but very wide rostrum from which the singers performed. In harmony with the huge importance given to orchestral characterisation in Wagner’s work, this concept, the visibility of the orchestra in contradiction to established Ring conventions, allowed for the casting of the orchestra almost as a character, or as the instrumental equivalent of a Greek Chorus, underscoring or contradicting meaning, suggesting imminent events and expressing feelings. Its incorporation into lighting cues added a visual dimension to the musical drama — for example, the red wash during Wotan and Loge’s descent to Nibelheim fell across the orchestra, including the anvil players, higher up on the chorus rake. The screens showed images of a bubbling green and red inner earth, and the orchestra shapes the space deep under the earth where Alberich has used the power of the stolen Rhinegold to make the Nibelungs mine more treasures. In order to demonstrate the interaction of singers, orchestra and screens, an account of the prelude and first scene of Opera North’s is given: Richard Farnes is already on the rostrum. From blackout, he is lit by a spotlight, while the rest of the orchestra remains in darkness that continues into the deep sound of the bassoon that starts the opera and the cycle in e-flat major. This carries allusions to the genesis of the world of the epic story, as well as a link with the way a performance at the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth might start. Due to its famous descending orchestra pit, out of sight of the audience, the opera would also start in complete darkness there. With the horns building an arpeggio on the e-flat major, the music stands are illuminated, the orchestra is lit in

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Das Rheingold. Prelude, Orchestra in Leeds Town Hall. Conductor: Richard Farnes. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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watery colours and the three screens, one by one, start displaying water with light reflections. The storytelling starts soon afterwards, in a tone reminiscent of fairy tales: ‘Long before the world we know there was an ancient realm’ — ‘Through it flowed a mighty and spellbound river, the Rhine’ (Birkett, 2009). After telling us about the gold at the bottom of the Rhine, its three guardians are introduced by name, on a screen each: Wellgunde, Woglinde, Flosshilde. The singers appear from both sides of the rostrum shortly before their singing cues and then meet in the middle. The chase game of which they sing is here slowed down to a circular walk of the Illustration 22. Das Rheingold. Sarah Castle (Flosshilde), Jeni Bern (Wellgunde), Jennifer Johnston (Woglinde). Photo: Malcolm Johnson. three Rhine maidens, keenly observed by Alberich, who has appeared from stage right. Characters’ interactions with each other are all sung outward, singers’ faces reacting to each others’ statements, but the physical interaction the text tells of does not take place. Alberich’s pursuit of the water nymphs is performed by them moving again into their ‘bubble’, which cannot be penetrated by the gnome. The women stand close together for protection, a pose from which they are stirred by the appearance of the Rhinegold. The water on the screens takes on a gold shimmer with the beginning of the Rhinegold motif in the brass, its significance described in gold letters across the screens. The water becomes more animated during the Rhine maidens’ worship of the gold, along with the orchestra, while the singers remain relatively still. Alberich’s question ‘what is this treasure that

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glistens and gleams so brightly?’ is spread across all three screens. As Alberich takes the centre in the lead up to his curse of love, which will make him the owner of the gold, the water on the screens looks choppier, and the singer is lit in a green tint during and after his curse. After the theft, the shocked Rhine maidens disappear and a large text detailing Alberich’s robbery appears on the screen, is reduced to a readable size and then fades into the distance. The orchestral interlude that signals the transition from Rhine to mountain side (the Gods’ temporary dwelling place while they wait for Valhalla to be completed) changes the screens in alignment with the orchestration, which shifts from the circular arpeggio of the strings to the sumptuous brass-led sound of the sonorous Valhalla-motif. The screens fade from water to a foggy mountain scene. Entrances happen when they would happen in a staged production. Fricka and Wotan approach from different sides on their first entrance and walk towards each other slowly. Other than in concerts, singers do leave the stage when the action prompts them to do so, but when this is not possible, they ‘retire’ in view of the audience. Fafner, when killing his giant brother Fasolt, removes the blood-red handkerchief from his breast pocket, whereupon Fasolt folds his arms in front of him and turns his back to the audience with his head lowered, signifying his death. Acting that requires more movement generally takes place when a singer is not singing. In rehearsal, it was not always easy for singers to suppress their natural inclination towards acting. So a lot of the production work was about reigning in these impulses, or at least regulating them (what works — what goes too far). The styles differed subtly: singers who had sung their parts before would bring gesture, movement and reaction from other productions and adapt them to the specifics of the concert version. So it’s magnificently to Opera North’s credit that its semi-staged concert version of this bottomlessly challenging work reaches its half-way mark with all colours flying. […] You’d be lucky to hear as good at Bayreuth. (Christiansen, 2012)

Die Walküre was broadly consistent in style to that of Rheingold, but a few amendments had been made to the way the production was presented: all surtitles had been integrated with the visuals on the three large screens, there were no longer separate monitors to the sides of them. This gave the text several functions: while titling the libretto, the positioning of the words above the character singing them on the stage gave clarity as to who was speaking. The screens retained the scene-setting and guiding narrative that had already been used in Rheingold, giving a sense of place and of timescale together with what Mumford called the ‘earth, wind and fire type material’ on the screen triptych: ‘Although it’s animated and moving, it’s

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Illustration 23. Die Walküre. Act 3, Meeta Raval (Ortlinde), Jennifer Johnston (Waltraute), Emma Carrington (Schwertleite), Miriam Murphy (Gerhilde), Katherine Broderick (Helmwige), Madeleine Shaw (Siegrune), Antonia Sotgiu (Grimgerde), Catherine Hopper (Rossweisse). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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intended to be quite painterly, so it creates a sense of place but not in an entirely naturalistic way, even though all the material is actually real. It’s like making a 4½ hr movie’ (Mumford, 2012). Act 3 starts with the tense and trembling introduction to The Ride of the Valkyries. The three screens display large birds in flight, the contrast between the light screen and the dark birds gradually becoming stronger. Some narration on the middle screen announces the imminent gathering of the Valkyries, assembling with the dead heroes they are transporting to Valhalla on the backs of their horses. The singers enter in accordance with their musical cues, some in pairs, some alone. Cheerful greetings take place between the sisters, while the screens show a cloudy rock face. The Valkyries watch their sisters approaching, and, once they are all assembled, stand still with the glorious noise of their ride’s orchestral reprise is unleashed in the orchestra behind them — they join this forcefully with their canonical ‘Hojotohoh!’. This is always a climactic moment of the entire Ring, but the proximity to the audience, with no orchestra pit in between, makes for a visceral experience — indeed, many audience members describe the experience as physical in conversation (see also Perspective 2 for an account of the scene in rehearsal). The Valkyries observe Brünnhilde’s ride, invisible to the audience, looking outward, and astonishment turns to horror as she enters with the exhausted Sieglinde and, taking centre stage, explains why she has acted in defiance of their father Wotan’s orders and has saved Sieglinde from death. Her pleas to her sisters to offer the woman a hiding place from Wotan’s wrath are met with worry by the other Valkyries, and Sieglinde herself wants to die until Brünnhilde’s revelation that she is pregnant with ‘the most wonderful hero in the world’ — Siegfried. The worried motion of the score is transformed into one of the most important musical moments of the Cycle, the ‘redemption through love’ motif, which we hear for the first time from Sieglinde (‘Oh hehrstes Wunder!’). She is then rushed offstage in time before Wotan’s arrival, while Brünnhilde is shielded by the fearful and protective cluster of her sisters. Orchestral tensions culminate in martial sounding intervals at Wotan’s arrival, confronting his daughters and demanding Brünnhilde’s appearance, so he can punish her. Apart from the introductory setting of the scene, explanatory copy on the screens is limited in this scene, as the titles on the triptych (no longer on the monitors) display the words being sung. The audience is by now (Act 3) used to the conventions at work and will ‘read’ worded and scenographic information more quickly than earlier in the Cycle, or even earlier in this opera. In summary, Opera North’s continued artistic ambition, together with its determination to do things differently, has resulted in a Ring Cycle that unfolds not over four nights at the opera, but over four years in Leeds Town Hall. The culmination of a

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Illustration 24. Die Walküre. Act 3, Annalena Persson (Brünnhilde), Béla Perencz (Wotan). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Illustration 25. Siegfried. Act 1, Richard Roberts (Mime). Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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complete touring Ring is planned for 2016, when Opera North will also make a visit to London’s South Bank. The project has enthused newcomers and seasoned Wagnerians alike — the former relating to its accessibility, the latter to its simplicity and foregrounding of the music. It is one of the most difficult tasks of a contemporary subsidised opera company to honour its remit of accessibility and to counter allegations of elitism, while at the same time satisfying those who have good knowledge of the operas — not forgetting those who generously support the work through private donations. The Ring, showing a wide social range of its own, from Gods to Nibelungs, from human to mythical, seemed to reconcile most spheres of the Opera North audience. This Perspective started out by suggesting States’s binocular vision (phenomenology and semiotics joined in analysis, with dramaturgy added as a unifying device), the simultaneous contexts brought about by compiling the three perspectives on Opera North have coloured everything. Joined-up knowledge cannot be organised in a linear fashion, but exists in the ‘simultaneity’ of history, knowledge of process, production context and the final production. The knowledge amassed has made it difficult to talk ‘only’ about the public performance of a work — it appears almost as the tip of the iceberg! But there are moments where all the knowledge falls away and the focus is completely on the moment experienced in performance. I have tried to find a series of such moments where an emotional or subconsciously lead response progressed to thinking about why these responses were provoked, to thinking quite systematically about the code system that brings forth emotional abandon.

Illustration 26. Siegfried. Act 3, Annalena Persson (Brünnhilde), Mati Turi (Siegfried), Richard Farnes (conductor), Orchestra of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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REFERENCES Ashley, T. (2012). Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/17/die-walkure-opera-north-review. Accessed on 17 June 2013. Birkett, M. (2009). The story of the ring retold. London: Oberon. Blewitt, D. (2004). Opera Now, July/August. Bonner, J. (2013). Interview with author. 24 April. Die Walküre. (2012). DVD of orchestra dress rehearsal. Opera North, Leeds Town Hall, 14 June. Christiansen, R. (2012). Walküre review. Daily Telegraph, 19 June. Farnes, R. (2011). An extraordinary opera. Opera North Blog. Retrieved from http://www.operanorth.co.uk/blogs/192. Accessed on 9 March 2014. Fawkes, R. (2000). Fit for a queen. Opera Now, January/February. Katz, D. (2009). Janáček beyond the borders. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Lloyd, P. (2001). Gloriana. Opera North programme. Mantle, R. (2013). Festival of Britten. Opera North programme, Autumn. Mumford, P. (2012). Die Walküre. BBC Radio 3 broadcast, 20 June. Plumley, G. (2012). The Makropulos Case. Opera North programme. Pountney, D. (1997). “The key to dreams”, interview by Henrietta Bredin. Upbeat (the magazine of Opera North), Issue 3, autumn, p. 6. Pountney, D. (2011). The Portrait. Opera North programme, February. Ratcliffe, M. (1993). The Love for Three Oranges. Opera North programme, winter season. Siddique, J. (2011). “A spark of God” from the house of the dead. Opera North programme, March. States, B. (1985). Great reckonings in little rooms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (New ed. 1992). Tanner, M. (2004). Spectator, 29 May 2004.

CONCLUSION

Illustration 1.

Ruddigore. Grant Doyle (Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd), Richard Angas (Adam Goodheart), ensemble. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

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Think of a swan, floating gracefully along the river, but underneath its feet are going like the clappers. It’s our job to paddle away to make sure the swan, or in our case Opera North, looks as serene as possible. (Bonner, 2011)

This simile by Opera North’s Company Manager is amusing, but it also encapsulates what I hope has been communicated by the first two perspectives of this study: opera as a structured and multi-faceted process of work, only its culmination seen by audiences. Considerations about how to write about rehearsal and performance are in motion in the fields of music and performance and it is hoped that this volume will make a small contribution towards involving companies in these discussions. Opera needs more conversations about the many ways in which it can be represented, described, analysed and contextualised. Nothing can engage the senses like the multi-layered phenomenon of an opera in performance, but ethnographic description (or ‘thick description’, a term coined by Clifford Geertz) can add layers of meaning and understanding, adding tools for decoding for complex processes and workplace interactions. A ‘feedback loop’ between attending a live rehearsal or performance and ethnographic reflections on the experience can be created; the two modes can enhance each other. Mediatisation also has a part in this relationship — do HD broadcasts, opera downloads and opera DVD recordings influence the way in which live opera is perceived? Is there a hierarchy between a live event and its virtual representation? These are not questions addressed by this study, but they arise from it (particularly from the backstage account of Don Giovanni) and it is hoped Opera North will take an active part in future discussions. At the outset of this study, definitions of what an opera company might be were explored. While a company is a result of its history, its work is about ‘now’. This may sound strange for an art form where most of the work that is programmed comes from previous centuries. To be more specific: the repertoire is sometimes hundreds of years old, but needs to be linked to the ‘now’. There needs to be a connection to the lives and emotions of the audience and there are many different ways in which this can be achieved. The production process of opera (in its creative and administrative senses) is entirely about the ‘now’. Certainly, Opera North’s focus on its production standards makes the organisation almost entirely about the present and the future — but just as with family trees, it is useful to see resonances of its past within the company. Many good things established in Opera North’s formative years continue: the annual structure, with cycles of Leeds residences and touring, its philosophy (developing the audience, the artist and the art form), its commitment to a detailed rehearsal period for both new productions and revivals and its never dwindling artistic ambition. My research began at a time when the UK’s cultural sector was in the grip of a global recession and some very significant cuts to the Arts sector were announced in the spring of 2011.

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After decades of a regular annual cycle of Leeds seasons and tours, Opera North’s resolve to not lower the standards of its work and to maintain its reputation for being adventurous was put to the test. Creative thinking and detailed financial analysis went into the planning, as the company reconfigured its delivery to produce more varied models of work. Since 2012, this has meant that two annual seasons (autumn and winter) are programmed in much the same way as before, but that the spring season has taken on a different shape. The company might present a production ‘en-suite’ at home and on tour, with a large number of performances, such as the successful run of Carousel in spring 2012. In spring 2013, the Howard Assembly Room was explored as a performance space for main house opera with Albert Herring. Spring 2014 saw two young, vibrant casts alternate in 18 performances of La Bohème. While some audiences have criticised the absence of a third season, through these ‘different’ projects, the company has increased its percentage of first-time opera attenders, and therefore has a much more diverse audience than previously. The Ring instalments (2010 2014) have been the central event of the summer season for four years, but Opera North has also undertaken a range of festival visits during the summer months, with Edinburgh (Makropulos) and Tallinn (Albert Herring and Faust) as just two examples. While it has not been an easy few years, working conditions at Opera North have improved considerably over the last decade. The company is no longer scrambling for space, spreading out all over Leeds during rehearsals and only united from production week onwards. Opera North can now produce its work on its own well-equipped premises. Through gaining a second space in the Howard Assembly Room, the range and scale of projects have increased considerably. The Grand Theatre, for all its beauty, can be an exclusive space — a narrow foyer, a threshold that has to be crossed before the Victorian splendour unfolds. While it is accessed through Leeds Grand Theatre’s premises, the welcoming, contemporary feel and the flexibility offered by the Howard Assembly Room satisfies the ambitions of the company — for example with regard to being leaders in the field of music education and presenting an ever-greater diversity under the banner of Opera North Projects — world music, film, art installation and recitals. It also reduces the commercial risk of adventurous programming, where a ‘niche’ main house production could produce adverse budget shortfalls. The space is also in demand commercially — for conferences, dinners, ceremonies and weddings — and thus provides potentially important additional earnings for the company. The Assembly Room sits at the heart of the company, the bridge between its permanent headquarters and its performance base. While public funding has decreased since 2011 (and had been decreasing in real terms for quite a while before that time), the company has managed to double its income from individual and corporate giving over the same period. This benefits main house opera, but

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also other initiatives, such as cultural fellowships programmes, the ‘In Harmony’ scheme with Windmill Primary School in South Leeds and other community-based schemes. There is an internal agreement that the chorus, the orchestra and the music staff will be the last to be affected by cuts. While this maintains artistic standards and will hopefully safeguard against developments similar to Scottish Opera’s loss of their full-time chorus and orchestra, it means that the staff cover to communicate the work of the company can be thin. In conversation, Richard Mantle (2014) displayed a cautious sense of optimism over Opera North’s relationship with the ACE (2014). Support for the arts and their benefits seemed to be more in evidence from politicians than it had been for the first few years of the Cameron government. The ACE was tasked with the implementation of wide-ranging cuts to their own administration from 2011, as well as more complex bureaucratic procedures (e.g. bidding processes). These factors have made for an embattled period for the funding council as well as the organisations dependent on its grants. A rise in ACE funding from 2015 will hopefully make for a period of stability. There are a number of things on the company’s wish list for the near future: the Howard Assembly Room will host new smallscale productions on a regular basis after the successful start with Albert Herring in 2013. It is, given economical considerations, also the more likely venue of the company’s two spaces to host new opera commissions. It is acknowledged that commissions are now most likely to come about through artistic partnerships, such as the new work coming out of the Linbury Studio (Royal Opera House), the Aldeburgh Festival and Opera North in spring 2014 (Mantle, 2013). Opera North’s highly successful Ring Cycle will not conclude in 2014 with Götterdämmerung, but will culminate in 2016, when all four operas will have staged concert performances in Leeds, in Nottingham and Gateshead, and finally in London. This will conclude Richard Farnes’s music directorship after twelve years of musical excellence and will be the start of a phase of change and renewal. My time with the company convinces me that Opera North will embrace these new challenges with creativity and resilience. The arts are essential to our sense of identity, to regeneration and to the plurality we should be pursuing as a nation, region or city. The priorities in expenditure of those who seemingly represent us need examining, not the dwindling funds that make for inequality and envy across companies. Large organisations such as Opera North are an essential part of the arts ecology. They cost a lot, but they return a lot of value, something that the Chair of the ACE, Sir Peter Bazalgette, also clearly communicates: […] the primary reason we make both public and private investments in the arts is for the inherent value of culture: life-enhancing, entertaining, defining of our personal and national identities.

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When I bang the drum for this investment, with national and local government, with philanthropists, charities and companies, a consensus is emerging as to why this is so important. It starts with the inherent value of culture, continues through all the social and educational benefits and only ends with the economic. (Bazalgette, 2014)

The musicians permanently employed by Opera North, for example, do not just sit in the orchestra pit or appear on stage: they run their own orchestras and concert series, they sing in concerts, they work in schools, teach and interact with the community in many ways. All the different skillsets under one roof continually spread out to be applied elsewhere. For this arts ecology to work, there has to be sharing. Large arts organisations need to function as community centres — schemes such as ‘In Harmony’ or Opera North’s new community engagement programme funded by the Paul Hamlyn organisation could lead the way for more to come. To run a full-time repertory or opera company, there has to be a financial baseline. Philanthropy, while essential, is not the only solution to keep the expensive art form of opera alive — it can strengthen the influence of people who hold the purse strings, but over time their sphere of influence can become more dominant, decreasing opportunities for the organisations to work for everyone. So, in times of economic trouble, does an opera house need to be more mindful of its museum remit, as discussed in the Introduction to this study — or is it a time to infuse the art form with more new work? Taking a risk is a difficult choice if it is an existential risk. Companies are judged by box office returns and by the capacity of tickets sold and by percentages of first-time bookers. Does opera thus market itself as entertainment or education? Does Opera North identify itself with Richard Farnes’s ‘teaching hospital’ definition, or does it stress ‘a fun night on the town’ — if it does so, is this a Trojan Horse approach to making new audiences appreciate the benefits they can incur from the art form? If there is any impact I would like this book to have, it is to communicate with great conviction the enormously important role subsidised art has to play in our society. Arts organisations form an ecosystem, and a balance of different sized organisations is vital to the survival of the overall organism. Opera North had an immediate place in the national and northern ecosystem from its foundation and continues to work hard in order to give taxpayers a good return for their continued investment. It therefore deserves support and the threat of the ‘axe’, seen on the production still from Norma below, must be kept away from the creative, daring and wide-ranging work it does.

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OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

Illustration 2.

Norma. Annemarie Kremer (Norma), Chorus of Opera North. Photo: Malcolm Johnson.

Kara McKechnie

Conclusion

351

REFERENCES Bazalgette, P. (2014). We have to recognise the huge value of arts and culture to society. The Observer. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2014/apr/27/value-of-arts-and-culture-to-society-peter-bazalgette. Accessed on 27 April 2014. Bonner, J. (2011). Living North, 5 June. Informal conversation with Richard Mantle. (2014). 23 February.

CHRONOLOGY OF OPERA NORTH PRODUCTIONS 1978 2013 (Compiled by Stuart Leeks and Stefanie Klinge-Davis) 1978/1979 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Samson et Dalila

Camille SaintSaëns

New production First performance: 15 November 1978 (Autumn) 7 June 1979 (Summer)

Dalila: Katherine Pring Samson: Gilbert Py High Priest: John Rawnsley

David Lloyd-Jones

Patrick Libby

John Stoddart

Les Mamelles de Tiresias

Francis Poulenc

New production First performance: 16 November 1978 (double bill with Dido and Aeneas)

The Director of the Theatre: Ian Caddy Thérèse: Joy Roberts Her Husband: Stuart Harling Monsieur Lacouf: Paul Wade Monsieur Presto: Mark Lufton

Clive Timms

John Copley

Robin Don

Dido and Aeneas

Henry Purcell

New production First performance: 16 November 1978 (double bill with Les Mamelles de Tiresias)

Dido: Ann Murray Belinda: Sandra Dugdale Aeneas: Ian Caddy

Clive Timms

Ian Watt-Smith

Alexander McPherson

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 23 November 1978 (Autumn) 26 March 1979 (Spring)

Mimì: Eilene Hannan Musetta: Margaret Haggart Rodolfo: Robert Ferguson Marcello: John Rawnsley

David Lloyd-Jones (Autumn) Clive Timms (Winter)

Stephen Pimlott

Margaret Harris

354

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1978/1979. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Wendy Toye

Malcolm Pride

Orpheus in the Underworld

Jacques Offenbach

First performance: 20 December 1978

Eurydice: Sandra Dugdale Orpheus: Peter Jeffes Pluto: Nigel Douglas Jupiter: Eric Shilling/ Thomas Lawlor John Styx: Bonaventura Bottone

Clive Timms

The Magic Flutre

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 21 December 1978

Tamino: Robert Ferguson Pamina: Eiddwen Harrhy Papageno: Stuart Harling Queen of the Night: Margaret Haggart/Iris Saunders Sarastro: Don Garrard/John Tranter

David Lloyd-Jones

Anthony Besch

John Stoddart

Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck

New production First performance: 3 January 1979

Hansel: Claire Powell Gretel: Elisabeth Gale Witch: Ann Howard

David Lloyd-Jones

Patrick Libby

Adam Pollock

Die Fledermaus

Johann Strauss II

New production First performance: 21 March 1979

Rosalinde: Sheila Armstrong Adele: Joy Roberts Eisenstein: Nigel Douglas Dr Falke: Ian Caddy Alfred: Ramon Remedios Orlofsky: Claire Powell

David Parry

Patrick Libby

Consultant Designer: Gordon Aldred

Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten

First performance: 22 March 1979

Grimes: Robert Ferguson Ellen: Ava June Balstrode: Geoffrey Chard

David Lloyd-Jones

Colin Graham

Alix Stone

Associate Director: Hugh Halliday

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1978/1979. Title

Composer

Production details

355

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 22 May 1979

Susanna: Joy Roberts Countess Almaviva: Eiddwen Harrhy Cherubino: Marie McLoughlin Figaro: Paul Hudson Count Almaviva: Stuart Harling

David LloydJones/John PryceJones

Patrick Libby

Robin Donn

La traviata

Guiseppe Verdi

First performance: 20 June 1979

Violetta: Lois McDonall Alfredo: Ryland Davies Germont: Christian de Plessis

Clive Timms

John Copley

David Walker

1979/1980 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 4 October 1979 (Autumn) 22 May 1980 (Summer)

Gilda: Joy Roberts (Autumn) Margaret Neville (Summer) Duke of Mantua: Michael Renier (Autumn) Robert Ferguson (Summer) Rigoletto: John Rawnsley (Autumn) Michael Lewis (Summer)

John Pryce-Jones (Autumn) Clive Timms (Summer)

Patrick Libby

Designer: Maria Bjørnson

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 7 October 1979

Tosca: Elizabeth Vaughan Cavaradossi: Kenneth Collins Scarpia: Geoffrey Chard

David Lloyd-Jones

Steven Pimlott

Margaret Harris

The Flying Dutchman

Richard Wagner

First performance: 1 November 1979

Senta: Arlene Saunders Dutchman: Peter Glossop Daland: Paul Hudson Erik: Robert Ferguson

David Lloyd-Jones

Basil Coleman

Robin Don

356

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1979/1980. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Merry Widow

Franz Lehàr

New production First performance: 28 December 1979

Hanna Glawari: Elizabeth Harwood Count Danilo: David Hillman Valencienne: Bente Marcussen Camille de Rosillon: Adrian Martin Baron Zeta: Thomas Lawlor

David Lloyd-Jones/ John Pryce-Jones

Wendy Toye

Bob Ringwood

Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck

First performance: 29 December 1979

Hansel: Fiona Kimm Gretel: Kate Flowers Witch: Ann Howard

David Parry

Patrick Libby

Adam Pollock

Carmen

Georges Bizet

First performance: 9 January 1980

Carmen: Gillian Knight/Ann Howard Micaela: Joy Roberts José: Robert Ferguson Escamillo: Michael Lewis

Clive Timms

Original Director: John Copley Revival Director: Andrew Wickes

Stefanos Lazaridis

Der Rosenkavalier

Richard Strauss

First performance: 21 March 1980

Marschallin: Lois McDonall Octavian: Eiddwen Harrhy Sophie: Laureen Livingstone Ochs: Dennis Wicks

David Lloyd-Jones

Original Director: John Copley Revival Director: Roderick Horn

David Walker

The Mines of Sulphur

Richard Rodney Bennett

First performance: 27 March 1980

Braxton: Phillip Summerscales Rosalind: Fiona Kimm Boconnion: Robert Ferguson Tovey: Thomas Lawlor Sherrin: Eric Garrett Leda: Ann Howard Fenney: Mark Hamilton Tooley: Michael Lewis Jenny: Sally Burgess Trim: John Fryatt

Clive Timms

Colin Graham

Alix Stone

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1979/1980. Title

Composer

Production details

357

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Nabucco

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 31 March 1980

Zaccaria: John Tranter Abigaille: Milla Andrew Ismaele: Adrian Martin Nabucco: Camillo Meghor Anna: Fionnuala Hough Fenena: Helen Walker

Elgar Howarth

Steven Pimlott

Stefanos Lazaridis

A Village Romeo and Juliet

Frederick Delius

New production First performance: 21 May 1980

Manz: Patrick Wheatley Marti: Thomas Lawlor Sali: Adrian Martin Vrenchen: Laureen Livingstone The Dark: Fiddler Stuart Harling Young Sali: Eleanor Smith Young Vrenchen: Joy Naylor

David Lloyd-Jones

Patrick Libby

John Fraser

Count Ory

Gioachino Rossini

First performance: 27 May 1980

Alice: Rosemary Ashe Ragonde: Anne Collins Isolier: Della Jones Countess Adele: Eiddwen Harrhy Raimbaud: Russell Smythe Count Ory: Graham Clarke The Tutor: Paul Hudson

David Lloyd-Jones

Anthony Besch

Peter Rice

358

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1980/1981 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

° Jenufa

Leoš Janáček

First performance: 2 October 1980

° Lorna Haywood Jenufa: Kostelnička: Margaret Kingsley Grandmother: Jean Allister Lača: Robert Ferguson Števa: Philip Mills

David LloydJones

Original Director: David Pountney Revival Director: Sally Day

Maria Bjørnson

The Elixir of Love

Gaetano Donizetti

New production First performance: 6 October 1980

Adina: Lillian Watson Giannetta: Eleanor Smith/ Leonie Mitchell Nemorino: Ryland Davies Belcore: Richard Jackson Dulcamara: Forbes Robinson

Clive Timms

Michael Geliot

Michael Beavan

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

First performance: 13 October 1980

Violetta: Elizabeth Vaughan Alfredo: Franco Bonanome Germont: Michael Lewis

Gabrielle Bellini

John Copley Revival Director: Steven Pimlott

David Walker

The Merry Widow

Franz Lehàr

Revival of 1979 production First performance: 30 December 1980

Hanna Glawari: Elizabeth Robson Count Danilo: Christopher Booth-Jones Valencienne: Eirian James Camille de Rosillon: Arthur Davies Baron Zeta: Thomas Lawlor

John PryceJones

Wendy Toye

Bob Ringwood

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1980/1981. Title

Composer

Production details

359

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Tales of Hoffmann

Jacques Offenbach

New production First performance: 31 December 1980

Olympia/Antonia/Giuletta/ Stella: Joan Carden Hoffmann: David Hillman Lindorf/Coppelius/Dr Miracle/Dapertutto: Norman Bailey

David LloydJones

Anthony Besch

John Stoddart

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1978 production First performance: 9 January 1981

Mimì: Sally Burgess Musetta: Bente Marcussen Rodolfo: Robert Ferguson Marcello: Terence Sharpe

Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

Margaret Harris

Oedipus Rex

Igor Stravinsky

New production (double bill with Les Mamelles de Tiresias) First performance: 24 March 1981

Oedipus: Robert Ferguson Jocasta: Josephine Veasey Creon: Hugh-Nigel Sheehan Tiresias: John Tranter

David LloydJones

Patrick Libby

Stefanos Lazaridis

Les Mamelles de Tiresias

Francis Poulenc

Revival of 1978 production

The Director of the Theatre: Adrian Clarke Thérèse: Kate Flowers Her Husband: Stuart Harling Monsieur Lacouf: Paul Wade Monsieur Presto: Mark Lufton

Clive Timms

John Copley

Robin Don

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 26 March 1981

Tosca: Elizabeth Vaughan Cavaradossi: Kenneth Collins Scarpia: Geoffrey Chard

David LloydJones

Steven Pimlott

Margaret Harris

360

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1980/1981. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1978 production First performance: 1 April 1981

Tamino: Adrian Martin Pamina: Helen Walker Papageno: Michael Lewis Queen of the Night: Margaret Haggart Sarastro: John Tranter

Steuart Bedford/Roy Laughlin

Anthony Besch

John Stoddart

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 6 June 1981

Anna: Elizabeth Robson Elvira: Felicity Palmer Giovanni: Tom McDonnell Leporello: Michael Rippon Commendatore: John Tranter

David LloydJones

David Pountney

Maria Bjørnson

The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini

First performance: 8 June 1981

Rosina: Della Jones Almaviva: John Brecknock Figaro: Michael Lewis Bartolo: Derek HammondStroud

John PryceJones

Patrick Libby

Frances Tempest and Steve Addison

Der Freischütz

Carl Maria von Weber

New production First performance: 13 June 1981

Agathe: Sally Burgess/Bente Marcussen Max: Robert Ferguson Aennchen: Sandra Dugdale Caspar: Malcolm Rivers

Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

John Fraser

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

361

1981/1982 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Carmen

Georges Bizet

First performance: 11 September 1981

Carmen: Gillian Knight Micaela: Barbara Walker José: Robert Ferguson Escamillo: Michael Lewis

John Pryce-Jones

John Copley

Stefanos Lazaridis

Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 17 September 1981

Lady Macbeth: Elizabeth Vaughan Macbeth: John Rawnsley Macduff: Anthony Roden

David Lloyd-Jones

Michael Geliot

Set Designer: John Gunter Costume Designer: Sally Gardner

Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck

Revival of 1979 production First performance: 21 September 1981

Hansel: Patricia Parker Gretel: Laureen Livingstone Witch: Patricia Payne

Clive Timms

Patrick Libby

Adam Pollock

Orpheus in the Underworld

Jacques Offenbach

First performance: 25 November 1981

Eurydice: Patricia Cope Diana: Elizabeth Collier Orpheus: John Winfield Pluto: Paul Wade Jupiter: Thomas Lawlor

John Pryce-Jones/ Roy Laughlin

Wendy Toye

Malcolm Pride

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1979 production First performance: 26 November 1981

Gilda: Helen Field/Hilary Jackson Duke of Mantua: Robert Ferguson Rigoletto: John Rawnsley/Terence Sharpe

Robin Stapleton

Patrick Libby

Maria Bjørnson

362

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1981/1982. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Bartered Bride

Bedřich Smetana

New production First performance: 27 November 1981

Mařenka: Marie Slorach Esmeralda: Elizabeth Collier Ludmila: Joan Clarkson Jeník: Arthur Davies Vašek: Justin Lavender Krušina: Patrick Wheatley Kečal: Eric Garrett/ Thomas Lawlor

David LloydJones/Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

Stefanos Lazaridis

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Benjamin Britten

First performance: 9 March 1982

Oberon: Kevin Smith Tytania: Nan Christie Helena: Barbara Walker Hermia: Fiona Kimm Lysander: Ian Caley Demetrius: Christopher Booth-Jones Bottom: Stephen RhysWilliams

Elgar Howarth

Ian WattSmith

Alexander McPherson

Manon Lescaut

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 11 March 1982

Manon Lescaut: Arlene Saunders Des Grieux: Benito Maresca Lescaut: Christian du Plessis Edmondo: Keith Mills Geronte di Ravoir: Thomas Lawlor

David Lloyd-Jones

Christopher Renshaw

Bruno Santini

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1981/1982. Title

Composer

Production details

363

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Nabucco

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1980 production First performance: 17 March 1982

Zaccaria: John Tranter Anna: Fionnuala Hough Abigaille: Pauline Tinsley Ismaele: Robert Ferguson Nabucco: Norman Bailey Fenena: Anne Mason

Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

Stefanos Lazaridis

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 21 May 1982

Fiordiligi: Eiddwen Harrhy Dorabella: Patricia Parker Despina: Kate Flowers Ferrando: Robin Leggate Guglielmo: Robert Dean Don Alfonso: Rodney Macann

David Lloyd-Jones

Graham Vick

Russell Craig

Werther

Jules Massenet

New production First performance: 26 May 1982

Charlotte: Carol Wyatt Sophie: Lesley Garrett Werther: John Brecknock

Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

Maria Bjørnson

The Flying Dutchman

Richard Wagner

Revival of 1979 production First performance: 1 June 1982

Friedrich Pleyer

Basil Coleman

Robin Don

364

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1982/1983 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Prince Igor

Alexander Borodin

New production First performance: 25 September 1982

Yaroslavna: Margaret Curphey Igor: Malcolm Donnelly Galitzky: Tom McDonnell Konchak: Roderick Kennedy

David Lloyd-Jones

Steven Pimlott

Stefanos Lazaridis

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 29 September 1982

Susanna: Lesley Garrett Countess Almaviva: Margaret Neville Cherubino: Elise Ross Figaro: William Shimell Count Almaviva: Stephen Roberts

Richard Hickox

Andrew Wickes

Robin Don

Samson et Dalila

Camille SaintSaëns

Revival of 1978 production First performance: 6 October 1982

Dalila: Ann Howard Samson: Gilbert Py High Priest: Jonathan Summers

Clive Timms

Patrick Libby and Sally Day

John Stoddart

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 18 December 1982

Cio Cio San: Elizabeth Vaughan Suzuki: Maureen Morelle Pinkerton: Kristian Johannsson Sharpless: Terence Sharpe

David Lloyd-Jones

John Copley

Robin Don

La Cenerentola

Gioachino Rossini

First performance: 20 December 1982

Angelina: Della Jones Clorinda: Hilary Thomas Tisbe: Susan Lees Ramiro: John Brecknock/Richard Morton Dandini: Stuart Harling Alidoro: Rodney Macann

Guido AmojneMarsan/Roy Laughlin

Colin Graham Revival Director: David Walsh

Roger Butlin

The Tales of Hoffmann

Jacques Offenbach

Revival of 1980 production First performance: 4 January 1983

Olympia/Antonia/Giuletta/Stella: Suzanne Murphy Hoffmann: David Hillman Lindorf/Coppelius/Dr Miracle/ Dapertutto: Raimund Herincx

Clive Timms

Anthony Besch

John Stoddart

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1982/1983. Title

Composer

Production details

365

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 17 March 1983

Mimì: Anne Williams-King Musetta: Maria Moll Rodolfo: William Livingston Marcello: William Shimmell

David Lloyd-Jones (Autumn) Clive Timms (Winter)

Stephen Pimlott

Margaret Harris

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1981 production First performance: 18 March 1983

Anna: Suzanne Murphy Elvira: Eiddwen Harrhy Giovanni: Christian du Plessis Leporello: Roderick Earle Commendatore: John Tranter

Clive Timms

David Pountney Revival Director: Andrew Wickes

Maria Bjørnson

Katya Kabanova

Leoš Janáček

New production First performance: 26 March 1983

Katya: Marie Slorach Varvara: Barbara Walker Kabanicha: Judith Pierce Boris: Keith Mills Tikhon: Anthony Roden Kudryash: Bonaventura Bottone Dikoy: Dennis Wicks

David Lloyd-Jones

Graham Vick

Stefanos Lazaridis

Beatrice and Benedict

Hector Berlioz

New production First performance: 23 May 1983

Beatrice: Claire Powell Hero: Eilene Hannan Benedict: John Brecknock Claudio: Christopher Booth-Jones

David Lloyd-Jones

David Alden

David Fielding

The Elixir of Love

Gaetano Donizetti

Revival of 1980 production First performance: 24 May 1983

Adina: Gillian Sullivan Giannetta: Eleanor Smith Nemorino: Alexander Oliver/ Bonaventura Bottone Belcore: Gordon Sanderson Dulcamara: Michael Rippon

John Pryce-Jones

Michael Geliot

Jenny Beavan

Der Freischütz

Carl Maria von Weber

Revival of 1981 production First performance: 31 May 1983

Agathe: Margaret Curphey Max: John Mitchinson Aennchen: Kate Flowers Caspar: Malcolm Rivers

Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

John Fraser

366

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1983/1984 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Die Fledermaus

Johann Strauss II

New production First performance: 7 October 1983

Rosalinde: Penelope Mackay Adele: Lynda Russell Eisenstein: Jonny Blanc Dr Falke: Stephen Roberts/ Adrian Clarke Alfred: Adrian Martin/ Bonaventure Bottone Orlofsky: Marilyn de Blieck

Clive Timms

Hans Hollman

Set Designer: John Gunter Costume Designer: Sue Blane

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1982 production First performance: 13 October 1983

Fiordiligi: Marie Slorach Dorabella: Cynthia Buchan Despina: Elizabeth Gale Ferrando: John GrahamHall Guglielmo: Robert Dean/ Geoffrey Dolton Don Alfonso: Rodney Macann

John PryceJones

Graham Vick

Russell Craig

Rebecca

Wilfred Josephs

New production First performance: 15 October 1983

The Girl: Gillian Sullivan Mrs Danvers: Ann Howard Mrs van Hopper: Nuala Wilis Maxim de Winter: Peter Knapp Jack Favell: Malcolm Rivers

David LloydJones

Colin Graham

Stefanos Lazaridis

Il trovatore

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 21 December 1983

Leonora: Natalia Rom Azucena: Cynthia Buchan Manrico: Eduardo Alvares Count di Luna: James Dietsch

Yan Pascal Tortelier

Andrei Serban

Michael Yeargan

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1983/1984. Title

Composer

Production details

367

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Eugene Onegin

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

First performance: 22 December 1983

Tatyana: Eilene Hannann Olga: Fiona Kimm Onegin: Jonathan Summers Lensky: Robin Leggate Gremin: John Tranter/ Geoffrey Moses

David LloydJones

Graham Vick

Set Designer: Roger Butlin Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

The Cunning Little Vixen

Leoš Janáček

First performance: 6 January 1984

Vixen: Helen Field Fox: Gordon Christie Forester: Willard White Schoolmaster: Neil Jenkins Parson: Thomas Lawlor

Wyn Davies

David Pountney

Maria Bjørnson

Orpheus and Eurydice

Christoph Willibald von Gluck

New production First performance: 3 March 1984

Orpheus: Felicity Palmer Eurydice: Patricia Rozario Amor: Cathryn Pope

David LloydJones

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 9 March 1984

Tosca: Valerie Popova Cavaradossi: Kristian Johannsson Scarpia: Brent Ellis

John PryceJones

Andrew Wickes

Margaret Harris/ Steven Gregory

The Bartered Bride

Bedřich Smetana

Revival of 1981 production First performance: 19 March 1984

Mařenka: Eiddwen Harrhy Ludmila: Marie HaywardSegal Jeník: Laurence Dale Vašek: Mark Curtis Krušina: Glenville Hargreaves Kečal: Thomas Lawlor

Clive Timms

Steven Pimlott

Stefanos Lazaridis

Salome

Richard Strauss

First performance: 25 May 1984

Salome: Penelope Daner Herodias: Della Jones Jokanaan: Phillip Joll Herod: Nigel Douglas

David LloydJones

Joachim Herz

Rudolf Heinrich

368

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1983/1984. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

A Village Romeo and Juliet

Frederick Delius

New production First performance: 29 May 1984

Manz: Henry Newman Marti: Philip O’Reilly Young Sali: Vivienne Bailey Young Vrenchen: Joy Naylor Sali: Peter Jeffes Vrenchen: Anne Williams-King The Dark Fiddler: David Wilson-Johnson

Nicholas Cleobury

Robert Carsen

Set Designer: Russell Craig Costume Designer: John Fraser

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 5 June 1984

Cio Cio San: Mani Mekler Suzuki: Anne Mason Pinkerton: Franco Farina Sharpless: Rodney Macann

Clive Timms

John Copley

Robin Don

The Threepenny Opera

Kurt Weill

New production First performance: 28 June 1984

Polly: Beverley Mills Mrs Peachum: Clare Moll Jenny Diver: Eiddwen Harrhy Macheath: Peter Savidge Peachum: Mark Lufton

John PryceJones

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

369

1984/1985 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Cavalleria Rusticana

Pietro Mascagni

New production First performance: 26 September 1984 (Autumn) 4 January 1985 (Winter)

Santuzza: Phyllis Cannan (Autumn) Jane Eaglen (Winter) Lucia: Maureen Morelle Turiddu: Frederick Donaldson

David Lloyd-Jones/ Clive Timms (Autumn) David Lloyd-Jones (Winter)

Steven Pimlott

Raimonda Gaetani

Pagliacci

Ruggero Leoncavallo

New production First performance: 26 September 1984 (Autumn) 4 January 1985 (Winter)

Nedda: Kate Flowers Tonio: Florian Cerny Canio: Angelo Marenzi

David Lloyd-Jones/ Clive Timms (Autumn) David Lloyd-Jones (Winter)

Steven Pimlott

Raimonda Gaetani

Nabucco

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1980 production First performance: 28 September 1984

Zaccaria: Giovanni Gusmeroli Abigaille: Elizabeth Vaughan Anna: Gladwyn Taylor Ismaele: Anthony Roden Nabucco: Jonathan Summers Fenena: Margaret McDonald High Priest of Baal: Keith Brookes

Elgar Howarth/John Pryce-Jones

Steven Pimlott Revival Director: Andrew Wickes

Stefanos Lazaridis

Johnny Strikes Up

Ernst Krenek

New production First performance: 6 October 1984

Anita: Penelope Mackay Yvonne: Gillian Sullivan Max: Kenneth Woollam Johnny: Jonathan Sprague Daniello: Lyndon Terracini

David Lloyd-Jones

Anthony Besch

John Stoddart

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 19 December 1984

Pamina: Jane Leslie Mackenzie Queen of the Night: Evelyn Nicholson Tamino: Laurence Dale Papageno: Alan Watt Sarastro: Geoffrey Moses

Peter Hirsch

Graham Vick

Russell Craig

370

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1984/1985. Title

Composer

(Continued )

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Gondoliers

Arthur Sullivan

First performance: 20 December 1984 (Winter) 12 March 1984 (Spring)

Gianetta: Gillian Sullivan Tessa: Beverley Mills (Winter) Louise Winter (Spring) Marco: Gordon Christie Giuseppe: Peter Savidge

David Lloyd-Jones/ Anthony Shelley (Winter) Anthony Shelley (Spring)

Christopher Renshaw

Tim Goodchild

The Threepenny Opera

Kurt Weill

Revival of 1984 production First performance: 16 January 1985

Polly: Beverley Mills Mrs Peachum: Clare Moll Jenny Diver: Eiddwen Harrhy Macheath: Peter Savidge Peachum: Mark Lufton

John Pryce-Jones

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 5 March 1985

Violetta: Helen Field/Natalia Rom Alfredo: Adrian Martin Germont: Jonathan Summers

Roderick Brydon

François Rochaix

Jean-Claude Maret

Tamburlaine

George Frideric Handel

New production First performance: 7 March 1985

Tamburlaine: Felicity Palmer Asteria: Eiddwen Harrhy Andronicus: Sally Burgess Irene: Wendy Verco Bajazet: Richard Morton Leone: Peter Savidge

Clive Timms

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg

Richard Wagner

New production First performance: 28 May 1985

Eva: Marie Slorach Magdalena: Della Jones Walther: Denes Striny David: Bonaventura Bottone Beckmesser: Nicholas Folwell Sachs: Michael Burt Pogner: John Tranter

David Lloyd-Jones/ Clive Timms

Ladislav Štros

Set Designer: Vladímir Nyvlt Costume Designer: Josef Jelínek

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1984/1985. Title

Composer

Production details

371

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Il trovatore

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1983 production First performance: 3 June 1985

Leonora: Wilhelmenia Fernandez Azucena: Patricia Payne Manrico: Gordon Greer Count di Luna: Keith Latham

John Pryce-Jones

Andrei Serban

Michael Yeargan

Werther

Jules Massenet

Revival of 1982 production First performance: 7 June 1985

Charlotte: Cynthia Buchan Sophie: Patricia Rosario Werther: Tibère Raffalli

Yan Pascal Tortelier

Steven Pimlott

Maria Bjørnson

1985/1986 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

I Puritani

Vincenzo Bellini

First performance: 14 September 1985

Elvira: Suzanne Murphy Riccardo: Donald Maxwell Arturo: Dennis O’Neill/ Anthony Mee Giorgio: Roderick Earle

Clive Timms

Original Director: Andrei Serban Revival Director: David Walsh

Michael Yeargan

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1984 production First performance: 20 September 1985

Pamina: Jane Leslie Mackenzie Queen of the Night: Evelyn Nicholson Tamino: Richard Morton Papageno: Henry Newman Sarastro: Stephen Richardson

Martin FischerDieskau

Graham Vick

Russell Craig

372

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1985/1986. Title

Composer

(Continued )

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Midsummer Marriage

Michael Tippett

New production First performance: 30 September 1985

Jenifer: Rita Cullis Bella: Patricia O’Neill Mark: Donald Stephenson King Fisher: Phillip Joll Jack: Peter Jeffes Sosostris: Penelope Walker The Ancients: Linda Ormiston, Roderick Earle

David Lloyd-Jones

Tim Albery

Tom Cairns, Antony McDonald

La fanciulla del west

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 19 December 1985

Minnie: Mary Jane Johnson Jack Rance: Malcolm Donnelly Dick Johnson: John Treleaven Sonora: Keith Latham

David Lloyd-Jones

David Pountney

Set Designer: Günther SchneiderSiemssen Costume Designer: Lewis Brown

The Golden Cockerel

Nikolay RimskyKorsakov

First performance: 20 December 1985

The Golden Cockerel: Bronwen Mills Queen of Shemakha: Elizabeth Gale Astrologer: Justin Lavender King Dodon: Andrew Shore

Alexander Rahbari

Original Director: David Pountney Revival Director: Richard Jones

Maria Bjørnson/Sue Blane

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1985 production First performance: 3 January 1986

Violetta: Natalia Rom/ Helen Field Alfredo: Adrian Martin Germont: Donald Maxwell

John Pryce-Jones

François Rochaix

Jean-Claude Maret

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1985/1986. Title

Composer

Production details

373

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Mikado

Arthur Sullivan

First performance: 17 January 1986

The Mikado: John Tranter Nanki-Poo: Harry Nicoll Ko-Ko: Alan Oke Pooh-Bah: Thomas Lawlor Yum Yum: Kate Flowers

Clive Timms

Original Director: Christopher Renshaw Revival Director: Christopher Pickles

Tim Goodchild

Aida

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 11 March 1986

Aida: Wilhelmenia Fernandez/Valerie Popova Amneris: Sally Burgess/ Linda Finnie Radames: Frederick Donaldson/Seppo Ruohonen Amonasro: Keith Latham

David LloydJones/John PryceJones

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Intermezzo

Richard Strauss

First performance: 21 March 1986

Christine: Rita Cullis Robert: Storch Peter Savidge Baron: Lummer Harry Nicoll

Steven Barlow

John Cox

Martin Battersby

The Rake’s Progress

Igor Stravinsky

New production First performance: 27 May 1986

Anne: Jane Leslie MacKenzie Trulove: John Tranter Tom Rakewell: Anthony Rolfe Johnson Nick Shadow: William Shimmell

Roderick Brydon

François Rochaix

Jean-Claude Maret

374

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1985/1986. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Faust

Charles Gounod

First performance: 2 June 1986

Marguérite: Valerie Masterson Faust: Jerome Pruett Méphistophélès: John Tomlinson Valentin: Keith Latham

Clive Timms

Ian Judge

Set Designer: John Gunter Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 11 June 1986

Donna Anna: Christine Teare Donna Elvira: Kathryn Harries Don Giovanni: Peter Savidge Leporello: Nicholas Folwell Commendatore: John Tranter

David Lloyd-Jones

Tim Albery

Maria Bjørnson, Antony McDonald

1986/1987 Title The Capture of Troy

Composer Hector Berlioz

Production details New production First performance: 27 September 1986

Cast

Conductor

Cassandra: Kristine Ciesinski Aeneas: Ronald Hamilton Chorebus: Richard Salter Priam: John Hall

David Lloyd-Jones

Director Tim Albery

Designer Antony McDonald, Tom Cairns

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1986/1987. Title

Composer

Production details

375

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 3 October 1986

Cio Cio San: Natalia Rom Suzuki: Claire Primrose Pinkerton: Arthur Davies/ Frederick Donaldson Sharpless: Keith Latham

Rico Saccani

Sally Day

Robin Don

The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini

New production First performance: 10 October 1986 (Autumn) 14 January 1987 (Winter)

Rosina: Beverley Mills Almaviva: Harry Nicoll Figaro: Peter Savidge Bartolo: David Wilson-Johnson

Clive Timms

Giles Havergal

Russell Craig

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 18 December 1986 (Winter) 8 April 1987 (Spring)

Mimì: Eirian Davies (Winter) Lynne Dawson/Eirian Davies (Spring) Musetta: Anna Steiger (Winter/Spring) Roisin McGibbon (Spring) Rodolfo: Adrian Martin Marcello: William Shimell (Winter) Anthony: Michaels-Moore (Spring)

Elgar Howarth (Winter) Clive Timms (Spring)

David Freeman

David Roger

Norma

Vincenzo Bellini

New production First performance: 20 December 1986

Norma: Monica PickHieronimi Adalgisa: Eiddwen Harrhy Pollione: Frederick Donaldson

Clive Timms

Andrei Serban

Michael Yeargan

376

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1986/1987. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Oedipus Rex

Igor Stravinsky

Revival of 1981 production First performance: 13 January 1987 (double bill with Pulcinella)

Jocasta: Della Jones Oedipus: Anthony Roden Creon: Keith Latham Tiresias: John Tranter

David Lloyd-Jones

Stefanos Lazaridis and Michael Hunt

Stefanos Lazaridis

Pulcinella

Igor Stravinsky

New production First performance: 13 January 1987 Ballet Rambert Dance Company (double bill with Oedipus Rex)

Jocasta: Della Jones Oedipus: Anthony Roden Creon: Keith Latham Tiresias: John Tranter

David Lloyd-Jones

Stefanos Lazaridis and Michael Hunt Choreographer: Richard Alston

Howard Hodgkin

The Abduction from the Seraglio

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 2 April 1987

Constanze: Sally Wolf Blonde: Elizabeth Gale/ Bronwen Mills Belmonte: Laurence Dale/Jerome Pruett Pedrillo: Bonaventura Bottone Osmin: Tom Haenan

Tomasz Bugaj

Graham Vick

Kevin Rupnik

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1985 production First performance: 18 April 1987

Violetta: Sheri Greenawald Alfredo: Jerome Pruett/ Patrick Power Germont: Keith Latham

John PryceJones

Original Director: François Rochaix Revival Director: David Gann

Jean-Claude Maret

Daphne

Richard Strauss

New production First performance: 2 May 1987

Daphne: Helen Field Leukippos: Peter Jeffes Apollo: William Lewis

David Lloyd-Jones

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

377

1987/1988 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Trojans at Carthage

Hector Berlioz

New production First performance: 18 September 1987

Dido: Sally Burgess Anna: Patricia Bardon Aeneas: William Lewis

David Lloyd-Jones

Tim Albery

Tom Cairns, Antony McDonald

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 8 October 1987

Susanna: Helen Field Countess Almaviva: Iva-Maria Turri Cherubino: Beverley Mills Figaro: Robert Hayward Count Almaviva: Peter Savidge

Stephen Barlow

Peter Gill

Alison Chitty

Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 12 October 1987 (Autumn) 16 December 1987 (Winter)

Lady Macbeth: Josephine Barstow Macbeth: Brent Ellis (Autumn) Keith Latham (Winter)

John Pryce-Jones

Ian Judge

Set Designer: John Gunter Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

Carmen

Georges Bizet

New production First performance: 15 December 1987 (Winter) 29 April 1988 (Spring)

Carmen: Cynthia Buchan Micaela: Marie Slorach José: Dennis O’Neill (Winter) Edmund Barham/Arthur Davies (Spring) Escamillo: Anthony Michaels-Moore/Donald Maxwell

Alexander Rahbari/ Clive Timms/Anthony Jenner

Richard Jones

Nigel Lowery

378

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1987/1988. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Rebecca

Wilfred Josephs

Revival of 1983 production First performance: 2 January 1988

The Girl: Anne Williams-King Mrs Danvers: Ann Howard Mrs van Hopper: Linda Ormiston Maxim de Winter: Peter Knapp Jack Favell: Peter Savidge

David Lloyd-Jones

Original Director: Colin Graham Revival Director: Vernon Mound

Designer: Stefanos Lazaridis

The Merry Widow

Franz Lehàr

Revival of 1979 production First performance: 16 January 1988

Baron Zeta: Thomas Lawlor Valencienne: Andrea Bolton Count Danilo: Peter Savidge Hanna Glawari: Kathryn Harries Camille de Rousillon: Paul Nilon

Clive Timms

Original Director: Wendy Toye Revival Director: David Gann

Original Designer: Bob Ringwood Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell

Katya Kabanova

Leoš Janáček

Revival of 1983 production First performance: 26 March 1988

Katya: Eiddwen Harrhy Varvara: Louise Winter Kabanicha: Catherine Wilson Boris: Edmund Barham Tikhon: John Harris Kudryash: Paul Nilon Dikoy: David Gwynne

Elgar Howarth

Original Director: Graham Vick Revival Director: Matthew Richardson

Stefanos Lazaridis

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1987/1988. Title

Composer

Production details

379

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 6 April 1988

Tosca: Mary Jane Johnson/Valerie Popova Cavaradossi: John Treleaven Scarpia: Sergei Leiferkus

Clive Timms

Ian Judge

Set Designer: Gerard Howland Costume Designer: Ann Curtis

Fidelio

Ludwig van Beethoven

New production First performance: 28 April 1988

Leonore: Janice Cairns Marzelline: Jane Leslie Mackenzie Florestan: Jeffrey Lawton Rocco: Mark Munkittrick Pizarro: Donald Maxwell

David Lloyd-Jones/Roy Laughlin

Michael McCarthy

Peter Mumford

380

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1988/1989 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Love for Three Oranges

Sergei Prokofiev

New production First performance: 17 September 1988 (Autumn) 11 January 1989 (Winter)

Princess Clarissa: Patricia Payne Fata Morgana: Pauline Tinsley Smeraldina: Maria Jagusz The King of Clubs: Mark Glanville The Prince: Peter Jeffes Leander: Andrew Shore (Autumn) Robert Poulton (Winter) Truffaldino: Paul Harrhy Pantaloon: Alan Oke Chelio: Roger Bryson (Autumn) Philip: Guy Bromley (Winter)

David LloydJones

Richard Jones

Set Designers: The Brothers Quay Costume Designer: Sue Blane

Lucia di Lammermoor

Gaetano Donizetti

New production First performance: 1 October 1988

Lucia: Valerie Masterson Enrico: Keith Latham Edgardo: Jorge Pita/Ingus Peterson

Clive Timms

David Gann

Original Designer: Ultz Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1986 production First performance: 7 October 1988

Mimì: Joan Rodgers Musetta: Marie Angel Rodolfo: Adrian Martin Marcello: Peter Savidge

Diego Masson

David Freeman

David Roger

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1988/1989. Title

Composer

Production details

381

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Pearl Fishers

Georges Bizet

New production First performance: 10 December 1988 (Winter) 10 May 1989 (Spring)

Leila: Anne Dawson Nadir: Arthur Davies (Winter) Adrian Martin (Spring) Zurga: Sergei Leiferkus (Winter) Keith Latham (Spring) Nourabad: John Tranter

David LloydJones

Philip Prowse and Sally Day

Philip Prowse

Aida

Georges Bizet

Revival of 1986 production First performance: 16 December 1988

Aida: Janice Cairns Amneris: Sally Burgess Radames: John Treleaven Amonasro: Keith Latham

Clive Timms

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

The Flying Dutchman

Richard Wagner

New production First performance: 10 January 1989

Senta: Kristine Ciesinski Dutchman: Donald Maxwell Daland: David Gwynne Erik: Jeffrey Lawton

Jacek Kaspszyk

Stephen Medcalf

Lez Brotherston

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1987 production First performance: 3 April 1989

Susanna: Judith Howarth Countess: Ida-Maria Turri Cherubino: Linda Kitchen Figaro: Anthony MichaelsMoore Count Almaviva: Peter Savidge/Geoffrey Dolton

Elgar Howarth

Original Director: Peter Gill Revival Director: David Gann

Alison Chitty

Manon

Jules Massenet

New production First performance: 19 April 1989

Manon: Helen Field The Chevalier des Grieux: Patrick Power Lescaut: Geoffrey Dolton The Count des Grieux: Matthew Best

Clive Timms

Richard Jones

Richard Hudson

382

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1988/1989. Title Boris Godunov

Composer Modest Mussorgsky

(Continued )

Production details

Cast

New production First performance: 9 May 1989

Conductor

Boris: John Tomlinson Grigory: Edmund Barham Shuisky: Kim Begley

David LloydJones

Director Ian Judge

Designer Set Designer: Russell Craig Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

1989/1990 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 23 September 1989

Ellen: Marie Slorach Grimes: John Treleaven Balstrode: Malcolm Donnelly

David LloydJones/Roy Laughlin

Ronald Eyre

Mark Thompson

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1988 production First performance: 30 September 1989 (Autumn) 21 December 1989 (Winter)

Tosca: Mary Jane Johnson/ Edith Davis (Autumn)/ Janice Cairns (Winter) Cavaradossi: Edmund Barham Scarpia: Donald Maxwell (Autumn) Keith Latham (Winter)

Carlo Rizzi

Ian Judge

Set Designer: Gerard Howland Costume Designer: Ann Curtis

La finta giardiniera

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 6 October 1989

Ramiro: Katherine Steffan Sandrina: Anne Dawson Serpetta: Linda Kitchen Arminda: Juliet Booth Podesta: Nigel Robson Nardo: Peter Savidge Belfiore: Paul Nilon

Alan Hacker

Tim Albery

Tom Cairns

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1989/1990. Title

Composer

Production details

383

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Show Boat

Jerome Kern

New production First performance: 8 December 1989

Julie: Sally Burgess Queenie: Karla Burns/Ellia English Parthy: Dilys Laye Joe: Bruce Hubbard/José Garcia Kim: Linda Kitchen

Graeme Jenkins/ Wyn Davies

Ian Judge

Set Designer: Russell Craig Costume Designer: Alexander Reid

The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini

Revival of 1986 production First performance: 16 December 1989

Rosina: Clare Shearer Almaviva: Neill Archer Figaro: Russell Smythe Bartolo: Andrew Shore

Marco Guidarini

Original Director: Giles Havergal Revival Director: Aidan Lang

Russell Craig

Don Pasquale

Gaetano Donizetti

New production First performance: 11 January 1990 (Winter) 25 April 1990 (Spring)

Norina: Juliet Booth (Winter) Judith Howarth (Spring) Ernesto: Adrian Martin Pasquale: Andrew Shore (Winter) Roger Bryson (Spring) Malatesta: Robert Hayward

David LloydJones (Winter) Hilary Griffiths (Spring)

Patrick Mason

Joe Vaněk

Jerusalem

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 31 March 1990

Hélène: Janice Cairns Gaston: Arthur Davies Roger: José Garcia Count of Toulouse: Keith Latham

Paul Daniel/Roy Laughlin

Pierre Audi

Set Designer: Michael Simon Costume Designer: Jorge Jara

L’Heure espagnole

Maurice Ravel

New production First performance: 12 April 1990 (double bill with Gianni Schicchi)

Concepción: Louise Winter Torquemada: Paul Wilson Ramiro: Jason Howard Gonzalve: Harry Nicoll Inigo: Gomez Andrew Shore

David LloydJones

Martin Duncan

Tom Cairns

384

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1989/1990. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Gianni Schicchi

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 12 April 1990 (double bill with L'Heure Espagnole)

Lauretta: Juliet Booth Rinuccio: David MaxwellAnderson Gianni Schicchi: Andrew Shore

David LloydJones

Martin Duncan

Tom Cairns

Orpheus and Eurydice

Christoph Willibald von Gluck

Revival of 1984 production First performance: 21 April 1990

Orpheus: Sally Burgess Eurydice: Jane-Leslie Mackenzie Amor: Claire Daniels

Clive Timms

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Masquerade

Carl Nielsen

New production First performance: 23 June 1990

Leonora: Mary Hegarty Magdelone: Meriel Dickinson Leander: Paul Nilon Henrik: Geoffrey Dolton Jeronimus: Clive Bayley Arv: Mark Curtis Mr Leonard: Paul Wade

Elgar Howarth

Helena KautHowson

Lez Brotherston

Conductor

Director

Designer

1990/1991 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Ariane and Bluebeard

Paul Dukas

New production First performance: 17 September 1990

Ariane: Anne-Marie Owens Bluebeard: Jonathan Best

Paul Daniel

Patrick Mason

Joe Vaněk

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1985 production First performance: 28 September 1990

Violetta: Eva Jenisová Alfredo: Bonaventura Bottone Germont: Anthony Michaels-Moore/Jason Howard

Carlo Rizzi

Original Director: Francois Rochaix Revival Director: Francisco Negrin

Designer: JeanClaude Maret

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1990/1991. Title

Composer

Production details

385

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Threepenny Opera

Kurt Weill

Revival of 1984 production First performance: 3 October 1990

Polly: Linda Kitchen Mrs Peachum: Sandra Francis Jenny Diver: Kate Flowers Macheath: Alan Oke Peachum: Mark Lufton

Martin Pickard

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1982 production First performance: 14 December 1990

Fiordiligi: Jane Leslie MacKenzie Dorabella: Beverley Mills Despina: Kate Flowers Ferrando: Paul Nilon Guglielmo: Robert Hayward Don Alfonso: Eric Roberts

Alan Hacker

Original Director: Graham Vick Revival Director: Matthew Richardson

Set Designer: Russell Craig Costume Designer: Rohanna Bryan

Attila

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 20 December 1990

Ezio: Jason Howard Foresto: Edmund Barham Attila: John Tomlinson/ Jan Galla Odabella: Karen Huffstodt/Josephine Barstow

Paul Daniel

Ian Judge

Set Designer: John Gunter Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

The Jewel Box

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/Paul Griffiths

New production First performance: 19 February 1991

Colombina: Mary Hegarty Composer: Pamela Helen Stephen Singer: Jennifer Rhys-Davies Dottore: Mark Curtis Pantalone: Quentin Hayes Pedrolino: Barry Banks Father: Stephen Richardson

Elgar Howarth

Francisco Negrin

Anthony Baker

386

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1990/1991. Production details

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Faust

Charles Gounod

Revival of 1986 production First performance: 15 April 1991

Marguérite: Anne Dawson Faust: Arthur Davies Méphistophélès: Richard Van Allan Valentin: Peter Savidge/ Geoffrey Dolton

David LloydJones/Roy Laughlin

Original Director: Ian Judge Revival Director: Jonathan Alver

Set Designer: John Gunter Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

Carmen

Georges Bizet

Revival of 1987 production First performance: 20 April 1991

Carmen: Sally Burgess Micaela: Anne WilliamsKing José: Edmund Barham Escamillo: Robert Hayward/Jason Howard

Oliver von Dohnányi

Original Director: Richard Jones Revival Director: Tim Hopkins

Nigel Lowery

King Priam

Michael Tippett

New production First performance: 3 May 1991

Hecuba: Eiddwen Harrhy Andromache: Linda McLeod Helen: Patricia Bardon Paris: Christopher Ventris Achilles: Neill Archer Hector: Geoffrey Dolton Priam: Andrew Shore

Paul Daniel

Tom Cairns

Tom Cairns

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 2 July 1991

Anna: Helen Field Elvira: Jane Leslie MacKenzie Giovanni: Robert Hayward Leporello: John Hall Commendatore: Sean Rea

Paul Daniel

Tim Albery

Ashley MartinDavis

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

387

1991/1992 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

L’étoile

Alexis Emmanuel Chabrier

New production First performance: 17 September 1991

Aloès: Kate Flowers Princess Laoula: Mary Hegarty Lazuli: Pamela Helen Stephen King Ouf: Anthony Mee Siroco: John Hall Hérisson: Alan Oke Tapioca: Mark Curtis

Jean-Yves Ossonce/Martin Pickard

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

La finta giardiniera

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1989 production First performance: 30 September 1991

Ramiro: Luretta Bybee/ Ann Taylor Sandrina: Lynne Dawson Serpetta: Janis Kelly Arminda: Juliet Booth Podesta: Neil Jenkins Nardo: Richard Jackson Belfiore: Paul Nilon

Alan Hacker

Tim Albery

Tom Cairns

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 5 October 1991 (Autumn) 16 January 1992 (Winter)

Donna Anna: Helen Field/ Bronwen Mills Donna Elvira: Jane Leslie MacKenzie Don Giovanni: Robert Hayward Leporello: John Hall Commendatore: Sean Rea

Christopher Gayford

Tim Albery

Ashley MartinDavis

388

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1991/1992. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Jewel Box

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/Paul Griffiths

First performance: 10 October 1991

Colombina: Mary Hegarty Composer: Pamela Helen Stephen Singer: Jennifer Rhys-Davies Dottore: Mark Curtis Pantalone: Quentin Hayes Pedrolino: Barry Banks Father: Mark Glanville

Roy Laughlin/ Elgar Howarth

Francisco Negrin

Anthony Baker

Caritas

Robert Saxton

World premiere First performance: 21 November 1991

Christine: Eirian Davies Agnes: Linda Hibberd Bishop Henry of Norwich: Jonathan Best Robert: Christopher Ventris William: Roger Bryson Richard: David Gwynne Mathew: Paul Wilson

Diego Masson

Patrick Mason

Joe Vaněk

Masquerade

Carl Nielsen

Revival of 1990 production First performance: 9 December 1991

Leonora: Mary Hegarty Magdelone: Linda Ormiston Leander: Paul Nilon Henrik: Geoffrey Dolton Jeronimus: Clive Bayley Arv: Mark Curtis Mr Leonard: Paul Wade

Roy Laughlin

Helena KautHowson

Lez Brotherston

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1991/1992. Title

Composer

Production details

389

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 23 December 1991

Cio Cio San: Maryanne Telese Suzuki: Patricia Bardon Pinkerton: Richard Taylor/ David Maxwell Anderson Sharpless: Keith Latham Kate Pinkerton: Sandra Francis

Martin André

Jonathan Alver

Set Designer: Lez Brotherston Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell

Der ferne Klang

Franz Schreker

British premiere First performance: 14 January 1992

Grete: Virginia Kerr Fritz: Kim Begley Count: William Dazeley Dr Vigelius: Peter Sidhom

Paul Daniel

Brigitte Fassbaender

Ultz

The Thieving Magpie

Gioachino Rossini

New production First performance: 24 April 1992

Ninetta: Anne Dawson Pippo: Elizabeth McCormack Giannetto: Barry Banks Fabrizio: Arwel Huw Morgan Fernando: Matthew Best Mayor: Andrew Shore

Ivor Bolton

Martin Duncan

Sue Blane

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 8 May 1992

Gilda: Juliet Booth Duke of Mantua: David Maxwell Anderson Rigoletto: Keith Latham/ Michael Lewis

John PryceJones

Patrick Mason

Joe Vaněk

Boris Godunov

Modest Mussorgsky

Revival of 1989 production First performance: 16 May 1992

Boris: John Tomlinson Grigory: Paul Charles Clarke Shuisky: Jeffrey Lawton Simpleton: Mark Curtis Pimen: Matthew Best

Paul Daniel

Original Director: Ian Judge Revival Director: Jonathan Alver

Set Designer: Russell Craig Costume Designer: Deirdre Clancy

390

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1992/1993 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Duenna

Roberto Gerhard

British premiere First performance: 17 September 1992

Luisa: Susan Chilcott The Duenna: Gillian Knight Clara: Pamela Helen Stephen Gypsy: Mary Plazas Jerome: Andrew Shore Ferdinand: Adrian Clarke Antonio: Gordon Wilson Isaac: Eric Roberts

Antoni RosMarbà

Helena KautHowson

Sue Blane

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

First performance: 3 October 1992

Gilda: Rosa Mannion Duke of Mantua: David Maxwell Anderson Rigoletto: Michael Lewis

Paul Daniel

Patrick Mason

Joe Vaněk

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 10 October 1992 (Autumn) 19 January 1993 (Winter)

Susanna: Linda Kitchen (Autumn) Mary Plazas (Winter) Countess: Almaviva Jane Leslie MacKenzie Cherubino: Ann Taylor-Morley/ Pamela Helen Stephen (Autumn) Pamela Helen Stephen (Winter) Figaro: Gerald Finley (Autumn) David Mattinson (Winter) Count Almaviva: Robert Hayward (Autumn) William Dazeley (Winter)

Andrew Parrott (Autumn) Roy Laughlin (Winter)

Caroline Gawn

Alison Chitty

Orpheus in the Underworld

Jacques Offenbach

New production First performance: 10 October 1992

Eurydice: Yvonne Barclay Diana: Janis Kelly Public Opinion: Linda Ormiston Orpheus: Harry Nicoll Pluto: Alan Oke Jupiter: Eric Roberts

Wyn Davies

Martin Duncan

Tim Hatley

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1992/1993. Title

Composer

Production details

391

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Billy Budd

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 11 December 1992

Billy Budd: Jason Howard Vere: Nigel Robson/Philip Langridge Claggart: John Tomlinson

Elgar Howarth

Graham Vick

Chris Dyer

Yolande

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

New production First performance: 18 December 1992 (double bill with The Nutcracker)

Yolande: Joan Rodgers Robert: Robert Hayward Vaudémont: Kim Begley René: Gwynne Howell/Norman Bailey

David LloydJones/Martin Pickard

Director: Martin Duncan

Anthony Ward

The Nutcracker

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

New production First performance: 18 December 1992 (double bill with Yolande)

Adventures in Motion Pictures

David LloydJones/Martin Pickard

Choreographer: Matthew Bourne

Anthony Ward

Don Carlos

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 8 January 1993

Elisabeth: Linda McLeod Eboli: Claire Powell Carlos: Richard Burke Posa: Anthony Michaels-Moore Philip II: John Tomlinson Grand Inquisitor: Richard Van Allan/David Gwynne

Paul Daniel/Roy Laughlin

Tim Albery

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 16 April 1993

Mimì: Jane Leslie MacKenzie Musetta: Juliet Booth Rodolfo: William Burden Marcello: Robert Hayward

Roy Laughlin/ Paul Daniel

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

La Gioconda

Amilcare Ponchielli

New production First performance: 1 May 1993

La Gioconda: Rosalind Plowright/Marie Slorach Laura: Sally Burgess La Cieca: Catherine Wyn-Rogers Enzo: Edmund Barham Barnaba: Keith Latham

Oliver von Dohnányi

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

392

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1992/1993. Title Wozzeck

Composer Alban Berg

Production details New production First performance: 13 May 1993

(Continued )

Cast Marie: Vivian Tierney Wozzeck: Andrew Shore Captain: Jeffrey Lawton Drum Major: Alan Woodrow Doctor: John Rath

Conductor Paul Daniel

Director Deborah Warner

Designer Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

1993/1994 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Love for Three Oranges

Sergei Prokofiev

Revival of 1988 production First performance: 18 September 1993

Princess Clarissa: Patricia Payne Fata Morgana: Maria Moll Smeraldina: Clare Shearer The Prince: Christopher Ventris Leander: Andrew Shore Truffaldino: Paul Harrhy Pantaloon: Nicholas Sears

Wyn Davies/Martin Pickard

Richard Jones

Set Designers: The Brothers Quay Costume Designer: Sue Blane

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

First performance: 27 September 1993

Mimì: Juliet Booth Musetta: Janis Kelly Rodolfo: Gordon Wilson Marcello: Robert Hayward

Bruno Aprea

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1993/1994. Title

Composer

Production details

393

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Tamburlaine

George Frideric Handel

Revival of 1985 production First performance: 2 October 1993

Tamburlaine: Christopher Robson Asteria: Rosa Mannion Andronicus: Graham Pushee Irene: Patricia Bardon Bajazet: Philip Langridge Leone: Geoffrey Dolton

Roy Goodman

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Baa-Baa Black Sheep

Michael Berkeley

World premiere First performance: 3 July 1993

Auntirosa: Fiona Kimm Mowgli: William Dazeley Captain: Henry Newman

Paul Daniel

Jonathan Moore

David Blight

Il re pastore

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 15 November 1993

Amyntas: Joan Rodgers Elisa: Mary Hegarty Tamyris: Patricia Bardon Alexander: Martyn Hill Agenor: Philip Salmon

Paul Daniel

David McVicar

Set Designer: Frank Higgins Costume Designer: David McVicar

Gloriana

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 18 December 1993

Elizabeth I: Josephine Barstow Essex: Thomas Randle Countess of Essex: Yvonne Burnett Penelope, Lady Rich: Susan Chilcott Cecil: Eric Roberts Mountjoy: Karl Morgan Daymond Raleigh: Clive Bayley

Paul Daniel

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

394

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1993/1994. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1985 production First performance: 8 January 1994

Violetta: Michal Shamir Alfredo: David Maxwell Anderson Germont: Peter Sidhom

Jean Yves Ossonce/ Roy Laughlin

François Rochaix

Jean-Claude Maret

L’étoile

Emanuel Chabrier

Revival of 1991 production First performance: 20 January 1994

Aloès: Kate Flowers Princess Laoula: Mary Hegarty Lazuli: Pamela Helen Stephen King Ouf: Paul Nilon Siroco: Jonathan Best/ Richard Van Allan Hérisson: Alan Oke Tapioca: Mark Curtis

Valentin Reymond

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

La rondine

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 14 April 1994

Magda: Helen Field Ruggero: Tito Beltran Lisette: Anna Maria Panzarella Prunier: Peter Bronder Rambaldo: Peter Savidge

David Lloyd-Jones

Francesca Zambello

Bruno Schwengl

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 30 April 1994

Pamina: Linda Kitchen Queen of the Night: Eileen Hulse Tamino: William Burden Papageno: William Dazeley Sarastro: John Rath

Andrew Parrott

Annabel Arden

Rae Smith

Playing Away

Benedict Mason

World premiere First performance: 31 May 1994

LA Lola: Rebecca Caine Terry Bond: Philip Sheffield

Paul Daniel

David Pountney

Huntley Muir

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

395

1994/1995 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Reluctant King

Emanuel Chabrier

New production First performance: 1 September 1994

Minka: Rosa Mannion Nangis: Justin Lavender Albert: Maurice Bowen Henri: Russell Smythe Laski: Nicholas Folwell

Paul Daniel

Jeremy Sams

Lez Brotherston

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 27 September 1994

Pamina: Linda Kitchen Queen of the Night: Eileen Hulse Tamino: William Burden Papageno: Karl Daymond Sarastro: John Rath

Harry Bicket

Annabel Arden

Rae Smith

Il trovatore

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 1 October 1994

Leonora: Katerina Kudriavchenko Azucena: Sally Burgess/Claire Powell Manrico: Edmund Barham Count di Luna: Ettore Kim

Paul Daniel/Roy Laughlin

Inga Levant

Charles Edwards

The Secret Marriage

Domenico Cimarosa

First performance: 10 December 1994

Carolina: Linda Kitchen Elisetta: Mary Plazas Fidalma: Tamsin Dives Paolino: Paul Nilon Geronimo: Andrew Shore Count Robinson: Jonathan Best

Richard Farnes

Original Director: Jonathan Miller Revival Director: Mark Tinkler

Set Designer: John Conklin Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell

396

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1994/1995. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Oberto

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 15 December 1994

Leonora: Rita Cullis Cuniza: Linda Finnie Riccardo: David Maxwell Anderson Oberto: John Tomlinson

David Porcelijn

Ian Judge

Russell Craig

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1988 production First performance: 30 December 1994

Tosca: Josephine Barstow/Marie Slorach Cavaradossi: Patrick Power Scarpia: Matthew Best

Stefano Ranzani/ Roy Laughlin

Original Director: Ian Judge Revival Director: Jonathan Alver

Set Designer: Gerard Howland Additional Costumes: Stephen Rodwell

Troilus and Cressida

William Walton

New production First performance: 14 January 1995

Cressida: Judith Howarth Troilus: Arthur Davies Calkas: Clive Bayley Pandarus: Nigel Robson Evadne: Yvonne Howard Diomede: Alan Opie

Richard Hickox/ Martin Pickard

Matthew Warchus

Neil Warmington

The Pearl Fishers

Georges Bizet

Revival of 1988 production First performance: 21 April 1995

Leila: Maria D’Aragnes Nadir: Arthur Davies Zurga: André Cognet Nourabad: John Rath

Dietfried Bernet

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1994/1995. Title

Composer

Production details

397

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Orpheus in the Underworld

Jacques Offenbach

Revival of 1992 production First performance: 27 April 1995

Eurydice: Yvonne Barclay Diana: Margaret Preece Public Opinion: Frances McCafferty Orpheus: Jamie MacDougall Pluto: Alan Oke Jupiter: Eric Roberts

Paul McGrath

Martin Duncan

Tim Hatley

Pelléas and Mélisande

Claude Debussy

New production First performance: 15 May 1995

Mélisande: Joan Rodgers Geneviève: Catherine Wyn Rogers Pelléas: William Dazeley Golaud: Robert Hayward Arkel: Clive Bayley

Paul Daniel

Richard Jones

Set Designer: Antony McDonald Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

1995/1996 Title Hamlet

Composer Ambroise Thomas

Production details New production First performance: 21 September 1995

Cast Ophélie: Rebecca Caine Gertrude: Linda Finnie Hamlet: Anthony Michaels-Moore/Karl Daymond Claudius: Jan Galla Ghost: John Rath

Conductor Oliver von Dohnányi

Director David McVicar

Designer Michael Vale

398

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1995/1996. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Pearl Fishers

Georges Bizet

Revival of 1988 production First performance: 22 September 1995

Leila: Maria D’Aragnes Nadir: Léonard Pezzino Zurga: André Cognet/ Peter Savidge Nourabad: John Rath

Brad Cohen

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

° Jenufa

Leoš Janáček

New production First performance: 11 October 1995

° Stephanie Friede Jenufa: Kostelnička Buryjovka: Josephine Barstow Grandmother Buryjovka: Pauline Tinsley Laca: Julian Gavin Števa: Neill Archer/Jeffrey Stewart

Paul Daniel

Tom Cairns

Tom Cairns

Luisa Miller

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 22 December 1995

Luisa: Susannah Glanville Rodolfo: Arthur Davies Miller: Alan Opie Walter: Matthew Best Wurm: Clive Bayley

Paul Daniel

Tim Albery

Stewart Laing

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 6 January 1996 (Winter) 21 May 1996 (Spring)

Mimì: Margaret Richardson Musetta: Elena Ferrari Rodolfo: Tito Beltrán (Winter) Alan Oke (Spring) Marcello: Karl Daymond

Jean Yves Ossonce/ Martin Fitzpatrick (Winter) Jean Yves Ossonce (Spring)

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

Love Life

Kurt Weill

New production First performance: 25 January 1996

Susan: Margaret Preece Sam: Alan Oke Magician/Vaudevillian/ Hobo: Geoffrey Dolton

Wyn Davies

Caroline Gawn

Set Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1995/1996. Title

Composer

Production details

399

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Medea

Luigi Cherubini

New production First performance: 15 April 1996

Medea: Josephine Barstow Jason: Thomas Randle Creon: Norman Bailey

Paul Daniel

Phyllida Lloyd

Set Designer: Ian MacNeil Costume Designer: Kandis Cook

The Duenna

Roberto Gerhard

Revival of 1992 production First performance: 25 April 1996

Luisa: Susannah Glanville The Duenna: Claire Powell Clara: Ann Taylor Gypsy: Denise Mulholland Jerome: Richard Van Allan Ferdinand: Adrian Clarke Antonio: Neill Archer Isaac: Eric Roberts

Antoni Ros-Marbà

Helena KautHowson

Sue Blane

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 20 May 1996

Susanna: Linda Kitchen Countess Almaviva: Janis Kelly Cherubino: Alice Coote/Ann Taylor Figaro: Clive Bayley Count Almaviva: William Dazeley

Richard Farnes

Caroline Gawn

Alice Purcell

400

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1996/1997 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 4 September 1996

Susanna: Mary Hegarty Countess Almaviva: Janis Kelly Cherubino: Ann Taylor Figaro: Richard Whitehouse Count Almaviva: Roderick Williams

Paul Goodwin

Original Director: Caroline Gawn Revival Director: Annerieke Groen

Alice Purcell

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 19 September 1996 (Autumn) 19 December 1996 (Winter)

Cio Cio San: Chen Sue Suzuki: Liane Keegan Pinkerton: Mark Nicolson Sharpless: Peter Savidge (Autumn) Peter Savidge/Simon Thorpe (Winter) Kate Pinkerton: Alice Coote/Philippa Thompson

Marco Zambelli (Autumn) Martin Pickard/ Paul Daniel (Winter)

Dalia Ibelhauptaite

Oleg Cheintsis

Iphigenia in Aulis

Christoph Willibald von Gluck

New production First performance: 30 September 1996

Iphigenia: Lynne Dawson Clytemnestra: Della Jones Achilles: Neill Archer Agamemnon: Christopher Purves Calchas/Arcas: John Rath

Valentin Reymond

Tim Hopkins

Nigel Lowery

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1996/1997. Title

Composer

Production details

401

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Wozzeck

Alban Berg

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 10 October 1996

Marie: Josephine Barstow Wozzeck: Andrew Shore Captain: Peter Bronder Drum Major: Jacque Trussel/Keith Mills Doctor: Clive Bayley

Paul Daniel

Deborah Warner

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

Gloriana

Benjamin Britten

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 2 January 1997

Elizabeth I: Josephine Barstow Essex: Thomas Randle Countess of Essex: Ruth Peel Penelope, Lady Rich: Susannah Glanville Cecil: Eric Roberts Mountjoy: Karl Daymond Raleigh: Clive Bayley

James Holmes/ Paul Daniel

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

Falstaff

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 16 January 1997

Falstaff: Andrew Shore Alice Ford: Rita Cullis Nannetta: Margaret Richardson Meg Page: Yvonne Howard Mistress Quickly: Frances McCafferty Fenton: Paul Nilon Ford: Robert Hayward

Paul Daniel

Matthew Warchus

Laura Hopkins

The Return of Ulysses

Claudio Monteverdi

New production First performance: 15 April 1997

Penelope: Alice Coote Ulysses: Nigel Robson

Harry Bicket/ Martin Pickard

Annabel Arden

Tim Hatley

402

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1996/1997. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Tannhäuser

Richard Wagner

New production First performance: 3 May 1997

Venus: Anne-Marie Owens Elisabeth: Rita Cullis Tannhäuser: Jeffrey Lawton Wolfram: Keith Latham Hermann: Norman Bailey

Paul Daniel/ James Holmes

David Fielding

David Fielding

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 21 May 1997

Fiordiligi: Susannah Glanville Dorabella: Emma Selway Despina: Linda Kitchen Ferrando: Paul Nilon Guglielmo: William Dazeley Alfonso: Jonathan Best

Claire Gibault/ Martin Fitzpatrick

Tim Albery

Set Designers: Matthew Howland, Robin Rawstorne Costume Designer: Tania Spooner

1997/1998 Title Aida

Composer Giuseppe Verdi

Production details Revival of 1986 production First performance: 13 September 1997

Cast Aida: Josephine Barstow Amneris: Sally Burgess Radames: Edmund Barham

Conductor Giuliano Carella

Director Philip Prowse

Designer Philip Prowse

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1997/1998. Title

Composer

Production details

403

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

First performance: 20 September 1997

Fiordiligi: Elena Ferrari Dorabella: Alice Coote/Claire Evans Despina: Margaret Preece Ferrando: Jeffrey Stewart Guglielmo: Garry Magee Alfonso: Eric Roberts

Martin Fitzpatrick

Tim Albery

Set Designers: Matthew Howland, Robin Rawstorne Costume Designer: Tania Spooner

Julietta

Bohuslav Martinu°

New production First performance: 3 October 1997

Mischa: Paul Nilon Julietta: Rebecca Caine Other Roles: Richard Angas, Jonathan Best, Adrian Clarke, Francis McCafferty, Alan Oke, Debra Stuart

Steuart Bedford

David Pountney

Set Designer: Stefanos Lazaridis Costume Designer: Marie-Jeanne Lecca

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 17 December 1997

Pamina: Margaret Richardson Queen of the Night: Cara O’Sullivan/ Laure Meloy Tamino: Jamie MacDougall/Jeffrey Stewart Papageno: Eric Roberts Sarastro: Clive Bayley

Brad Cohen/ Martin Pickard

Annabel Arden

Roswitha Gerlitz

Sweeney Todd

Stephen Sondheim

New production First performance: 17 January 1998

Sweeney Todd: Steven Page Mrs Lovett: Beverley Klein

James Holmes

David McVicar

Set Designer: Michael Vale Costume Designer: Kevin Knight

The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini

Revival of 1986 production First performance: 23 April 1998

Rosina: Ann Taylor Almaviva: Iain Paton Figaro: Roderick Williams Bartolo: Eric Roberts

Daniel Beckwith/ Dominic Wheeler

Giles Havergal

Russell Craig

404

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1997/1998. Title

Composer

Production details

Eugene Onegin

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

New production First performance: 9 May 1998

Joan of Arc

Giuseppe Verdi

Of Thee I Sing

George Gershwin

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Tatyana: Alwyn Mellor Olga: Emer McGilloway Lensky: Paul Nilon Onegin: Peter Savidge Gremin: Norman Bailey

Steven Sloane/ Martin Pickard

Dalia Ibelhauptaite

Set Designer: Giles Cadle Costume Designer: Sue Willmington

New production First performance: 23 May 1998

Giovanna: Susannah Glanville Carlo VII: Julian Gavin Giacomo: Keith Latham Delil: Keith Mills Talbot: Jeremy White

Richard Farnes

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

New production First performance: 27 May 1998

Diana: Kim Criswell Mary: Margaret Preece Wintergreen: William Dazeley Throttlebottom: Steven Beard

Wyn Davies

Caroline Gawn

Set Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

1998/1999 Title Il re pastore

Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Production details Revival of 1993 production First performance: 10 September 1998

Cast Amyntas: Rebecca Caine Elisa: Mary Hegarty Tamyris: Alice Coote Alexander: Peter Bronder Agenor: Nicholas Sears

Conductor Paul Goodwin

Director David McVicar

Designer Set Designer: Frank Higgins Costume Designer: David McVicar

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1998/1999. Title

Composer

Production details

405

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Bartered Bride

Bedřich Smetana

New production First performance: 23 September 1998

Mařenka: Alwyn Mellor Esmeralda: Colette Delahunt Ludmila: Carole Wilson Jeník: Neill Archer Vašek: Iain Paton Krušina: Glenville Hargreaves Kecal: Clive Bayley

Oliver von Dohnányi

Daniel Slater

Robert Innes Hopkins

Don Carlos

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 7 October 1998

Elisabeth: Lori Phillips Eboli: Sally Burgess Carlos: Julian Gavin Posa: Jeffrey Black Philip II: Alastair Miles Grand Inquisitor: Clive Bayley

Yves Abel

Tim Albery

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

The Nightingale’s to Blame

Simon Holt

New production First performance: 19 November 1998

Belisa: Patricia Rozario Marcolfa: Fiona Kimm Belisa’s Mother: Frances McCafferty Perlimplín: Donald Maxwell

Richard Farnes

Martin Duncan

Neil Irish

Carmen

Georges Bizet

New production First performance: 19 December 1998 (Winter) 16 April 1999 (Spring)

Carmen: Ruby Philogene Micaela: Susannah Glanville (Winter) Majella Cullagh (Spring) José Antoni: Garfield Henry Escamillo: Mark Stone

Andras Ligeti/ Martin Pickard

Phyllida Lloyd

Tim Hatley

406

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1998/1999. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued ) Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Thieving Magpie

Gioachino Rossini

Revival of 1992 production First performance: 15 January 1999

Ninetta: Mary Hegarty Pippo: Ann Taylor Giannetto: Jeffrey Stewart Fabrizio: Iain Paterson Fernando: Jonathan Best Mayor: Christopher Purves

David Charles Abell

Original Director: Martin Duncan Revival Director: Mark Tinkler

Sue Blane

Arabella

Richard Strauss

New production First performance: 22 May 1999

Arabella: Susannah Glanville Zdenka: Isabel Monar Adelaide: Carole Wilson Matteo: Jeffrey LloydRoberts Mandryka: Robert Hayward Waldner: Richard Angas

Elgar Howarth

Francisco Negrin

Set Designer: Paul Steinberg Costume Designer: Jon Morrell

Gloriana

Benjamin Britten

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 28 June 1999

Elizabeth I: Josephine Barstow Penelope, Lady Rich: Susannah Glanville Countess of Essex: Emer McGilloway Essex: Thomas Randle Cecil: Eric Roberts

Paul Daniel

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

407

1999/2000 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 16 September 1999

Violetta: Janis Kelly Alfredo: Tom Randle Giorgio Germont: Keith Latham

Richard Farnes/ Martin Pickard

Annabel Arden

Nicky Gillibrand

Katya Kabanova

Leoš Janáček

New production First performance: 27 September 1999

Katya: Vivian Tierney Varvara: Ann Taylor Kabanicha: Gillian Knight Boris: Alan Oke Tikhon: Andrew Forbes Lane Kudryash: Jamie MacDougall Dikoy: Jeremy White

Steven Sloane

Tim Albery

Hildegard Bechtler

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 7 October 1999

Anna: Majella Cullagh Elvira: Claron McFadden/ Emma Bell Giovanni: Garry Magee Leporello: Jonathan Best/ Iain Paterson Commendatore: Clive Bayley

Dominic Wheeler

David McVicar

Kevin Knight

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 16 December 1999

Oberon: Christopher Josey Tytania: Claron McFadden Helena: Helen Williams Hermia: Ann Taylor Lysander: Nicholas Sears Demetrius: Mark Stone Bottom: Jonathan Best

Steven Sloane

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier

Set Designer: Christian Fenouillat Costume Designer: Agostino Cavalca

408

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

1999/2000. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1996 production First performance: 14 January 2000

Cio Cio San: Lada Biriucov/Rosalind Sutherland Suzuki: Jane Irwin Pinkerton: Julian Gavin/ David Maxwell Anderson Sharpless: Steven Page Kate Pinkerton: Antonia Sotgiu

Stephen Barlow

Dalia Ibelhauptaite

Oleg Cheintsis

Falstaff

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1997 production First performance: 28 January 2000

Falstaff: Conal Coad Alice Ford: Josephine Barstow Nannetta: Thora Einarsdottir Meg Page: Yvonne Howard Mistress Quickly: Frances McCafferty Fenton: Wynne Evans Ford: Brent Ellis

Steven Sloane/ Lionel Friend

Original Director: Matthew Warchus Revival Director: Caroline Giles

Laura Hopkins

La Gioconda

Amilcare Ponchielli

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 29 April 2000

La Gioconda: Claire Rutter Laura: Katja Lytting La Cieca: Gillian Knight Enzo: David Maxwell Anderson Barnaba: Jonathan Summers

Oliver von Dohnányi

Philip Prowse

Philip Prowse

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

1999/2000. Title

Composer

Production details

409

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Radamisto

George Frideric Handel

New production First performance: 13 May 2000

Polissena: Helen Williams Tigrane: Emma Bell Radamisto: David Walker Zenobia: Alice Coote Fraarte: Elizabeth McCormack Tiridate: Michael John Pearson Farasmane: Bruce Budd

Harry Bicket

Tim Hopkins

Charles Edwards

Orpheus in the Underworld

Jacques Offenbach

Revival of 1992 production First performance: 19 May 2000

Eurydice: Yvonne Barclay Diana: Katrina Murphy Public Opinion: Frances McCafferty Orpheus: Jamie MacDougall Pluto: Nicholas Sears Jupiter: Eric Roberts

Wyn Davies

Martin Duncan

Tim Hatley

2000/2001 Title Genoveva

Composer Robert Schumann

Production details New production First performance: 31 August 2000

Cast Genoveva: Patricia Schuman Margaretha: Sally Burgess Golo: Paul Nilon Siegfried: Christopher Purves Drago: Clive Bayley Hidulfus: Keith Latham

Conductor Steven Sloane/ James Holmes

Director David Pountney

Designer Set Designer: Ralph Koltai Costume Designer: Sue Willmington

410

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2000/2001. Title

Composer

(Continued )

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1996 production First performance: 21 September 2000 (Autumn) 17 January 2001 (Winter)

Susanna: Colette Delahunt Countess Almaviva: Majella Cullagh/Simone Sauphanor (Autumn) Majella Cullagh (Winter) Cherubino: Emer McGilloway Figaro: James Rutherford (Autumn) Christopher Purves (Winter) Count Almaviva: Roderick Williams/ Stephan Loges (Autumn) Roderick Williams (Winter)

Roderick Brydon (Autumn) Stephen Clarke (Winter)

Caroline Gawn

Alice Purcell

La rondine

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1994 production First performance: 4 October 2000

Magda: Janis Kelly Ruggero: Jorge Antonio Pita Lisette: Mary Hegarty Prunier: Wynne Evans Rambaldo: Jonathan Best

Dietfried Bernet

Original Director: Francesca Zambello Revival Director: Peter Relton

Bruno Schwengl

The Elixir of Love

Gaetano Donizetti

New production First performance: 21 December 2000

Adina: Mary Hegarty Giannetta: Anna-Clare Monk Nemorino: Paul Nilon Belcore: Richard Whitehouse Dulcamara: Christopher Purves

David Parry/ Dominic Wheeler

Daniel Slater

Robert Innes Hopkins

Pelléas and Mélisande

Claude Debussy

Revival of 1995 production First performance: 10 January 2001

Mélisande: Joan Rodgers Geneviève: Frances McCafferty Pelléas: William Dazeley Golaud: Robert Hayward Arkel: Clive Bayley

Paul Daniel/ James Holmes

Richard Jones

Set Designer: Antony McDonald Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand

Tristan und Isolde

Richard Wagner

First performance: 27 January 2001

Isolde: Susan Bullock Tristan: Mark Lundberg Brangäne: Anne-Marie Owens Kurwenal: John Wegner King Marke: Donald McIntyre

Steven Sloane

Keith Warner

Keith Warner Associate Designer/ Costumes: Elaine Robertson

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2000/2001. Title

411

(Continued )

Composer

Production details

Eugene Onegin

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Revival of 1998 production First performance: 14 April 2001

Tatyana: Giselle Allen Olga: Cécile van de Sant Lensky: Iain Paton Onegin: William Dazeley/Richard Whitehouse Gremin: Vladimiras Prudnikovas

Richard Farnes

Dalia Ibelhauptaite

Set Designer: Giles Cadle Costume Designer: Sue Willmington

Paradise Moscow

Dmitry Shostakovich

New production First performance: 3 May 2001

Lidochka: Janie Dee Lusya: Rachel Taylor Masha: Gillian Kirkpatrick Vava: Margaret Preece Boris: Loren Geeting Sasha: Daniel Broad Sergei: Alan Oke Baburov: Steven Beard Drebednyov: Richard Angas Barabashkin: Campbell Morrison

Steven Sloane/ James Holmes

David Pountney Choreographer: Craig Revel Horwood

Robert Innes Hopkins

First performance: 17 May 2001

Anne Dawson, Jill-Maria Marsden, Linda Hibberd, Philip Sheffield, Richard Jackson, Yaron Windmüller

Steven Sloane

Director, Scenic Design, Original Film: Tim Hopkins Dramaturg: Meredith Oakes

Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell

The Forest Murmurs

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

2001/2002 Title

Composer

The Cunning Little Vixen

Leoš Janáček

Production details New production First performance: 14 September 2001

Cast Vixen: Janis Kelly Fox: Giselle Allen Forester: Christopher Purves Schoolmaster: Nigel Robson Parson: Richard Angas/Michael John Pearson

Conductor Steven Sloane

Director Annabel Arden

Designer Richard Hudson

412

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2001/2002. Production details

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 27 September 2001 (Autumn) 25 January 2002 (Winter)

Mimì: Mary Plazas (Autumn) Barbara Haveman (Winter) Musetta: Christine Buffle (Autumn) Giselle Allen (Winter) Rodolfo: Harrie van der Plas (Autumn) Peter Auty (Winter) Marcello: William Dazeley (Autumn) Mark Stone (Winter)

Steven Sloane (Autumn) Dietfried Bernet (Winter)

Original Director: Phyllida Lloyd Revival Director: Daniel Slater (Autumn) Kate Saxon (Winter)

Anthony Ward

Gloriana

Benjamin Britten

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 13 December 2001

Queen Elizabeth I: Josephine Barstow Essex: Thomas Randle Countess of Essex: Ruth Peel Penelope, Lady Rich: Susannah Glanville Cecil: Eric Roberts Mountjoy: Karl Daymond Raleigh: Mark Beesley

Richard Farnes

Phyllida Lloyd

Anthony Ward

Albert Herring

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 9 February 2002

Lady Billows: Josephine Barstow Florence Pike: Susan Bickley Miss Wordsworth: Elena Ferrari Mr Gedge: Eric Roberts Mr Upfold: John Graham-Hall Superintendent Budd: Jeremy White Sid: Richard Whitehouse Albert Herring: Iain Paton Nancy: Heather Shipp Mrs Herring: Ethna Robinson

James Holmes

Phyllida Lloyd

Scott Pask

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2001/2002.

413

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Sweeney Todd

Stephen Sondheim

Revival of 1997 production First performance: 25 April 2002

Sweeney Todd: Steven Page Mrs Lovett: Beverley Klein

James Holmes

David McVicar

Set Designer: Michael Vale Costume Designer: Kevin Knight

L’enfant et les sortilèges

Maurice Ravel

New production First performance: 24 May 2002 (double bill with Petrushka)

The Child (L‘enfant): Claire Wild

Emmanuel Plasson

Amir Hosseinpour and Nigel Lowery

Nigel Lowery

Petrushka

Igor Stravinsky

New production First performance: 24 May 2002 (double bill with L‘enfant et les sortilèges)

Emmanuel Plasson

Amir Hosseinpour and Nigel Lowery

Nigel Lowery

Oedipus Rex

Igor Stravinsky

First performance: 25 May 2002

Steven Sloane

Charles Edwards

Charles Edwards

Oedipus: Stuart Skelton Jocasta: Natascha Petrinsky Creon: Ashley Holland Tiresias: Jeremy White

Conductor

Director

Designer

2002/2003 Title Tosca

Composer Giacomo Puccini

Production details New production First performance: 13 September 2002 (Autumn) 1 February 2003 (Winter)

Cast

Conductor

Tosca: Nina Pavlovski (Autumn) Susannah Glanville (Winter) Cavaradossi: Rafael Rojas (Autumn) Ian Storey (Winter) Scarpia: Robert McFarland (Autumn) Matthew Best (Winter)

Steven Sloane (Autumn) Richard Farnes (Winter)

Director Christopher Alden

Designer Set Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Jon Morrell

414

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2002/2003. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

° Jenufa

Leoš Janáček

Revival of 1995 production First performance: 27 September 2002

° Giselle Allen Jenufa: Kostelnička Buryjovka: Josephine Barstow Grandmother Buryjovka: Pauline Tinsley Laca: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Števa: Kevin Anderson

Elgar Howarth

Tom Cairns

Tom Cairns

Der Rosenkavalier

Richard Strauss

New production First performance: 12 October 2002

Feldmarschallin: Janis Kelly Octavian: Deanne Meek Ochs: Conal Coad Sophie von Faninal: Marie Arnet Herr von Faninal: Christopher Purves

Dietfried Bernet

David McVicar

David McVicar Associate Designer — Sets: Michael Vale Costume Designer: Tanya McCallin

The Secret Marriage

Domenico Cimarosa

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 9 January 2003

Carolina: Mary Nelson Elisetta: Natasha Jouhl Fidalma: Louise Mott Paolino: Wynne Evans Geronimo: Henry Waddington Count Robinson: Richard Morrison

Wyn Davies

Original Director: Jonathan Miller Revival Director: Mark Tinkler

Set Designer: John Conklin Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell

Idomeneo

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 24 January 2003

Idomeneo: Paul Nilon Idamante: Paula Hoffman Ilia: Natasha Marsh Elettra: Janis Kelly Arbace: Ryland Davies

David Parry

Tim Albery

Dany Lyne

Julietta

Bohuslav Martinu°

Revival of 1997 production First performance: 27 March 2003

Mischa: Paul Nilon Julietta: Rebecca Caine Other Roles: Richard Angas, Jonathan Best, Adrian Clarke, Frances McCafferty, Alan Oke, Debra Stuart

Martin André

David Pountney

Set Designer: Stefanos Lazaridis Costume Designer: MarieJeanne Lecca

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2002/2003. Title

Composer

Production details

415

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer Set Designer: Jean Kalman Costume Designer: Tom Pye

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 17 April 2003

Tamino: Philippe Do Pamina: Thora Einarsdottir/Lisa Gustafsson Papageno: Matthew Sharp Queen of the Night: Helen Williams Sarastro: Mark Coles

William Lacey

Tim Supple

La damnation de Faust

Hector Berlioz

First performance: 6 May 2003

Faust: Stephen O’Mara Méphistophélès: Alastair Miles Marguérite: Lilli Paasikivi

Frederic Chaslin

Matthias Janser

Conductor

Director

2003/2004 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Designer

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1999 production First performance: 18 September 2003

Violetta Valéry: Janis Kelly/Linda Richardson/Anne-Sophie Duprels Flora Bervoix: Sarah Pring Alfredo Germont: Tom Randle Giorgio Germont: Robert McFarland

Mark Shanahan

Annabel Arden Associate Director and Choreographer: Leah Hausman

Nicky Gillibrand Lighting Designer: Paule Constable

Rusalka

Antonín Dvořák

New production First performance: 4 October 2003

Rusalka: Giselle Allen Prince: Stuart Skelton/David Maxwell Anderson Foreign Princess: Susannah Glanville Water Sprite: Richard Angas Ježibaba: Susan Bickley

Sebastian LangLessing/Martin Pickard

Olivia Fuchs Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Niki Turner Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

416

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2003/2004. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Manon

Jules Massenet

New production First performance: 16 October 2003

Manon Lescaut: Malin Byström Chevalier des Grieux: Julian Gavin Lescaut: William Dazeley Count des Grieux: Jonathan Best

Grant Llewelyn/ Alistair Dawes

Daniel Slater Choreographer: Lynne Hockney

Set and Costume Designer: Francis O’Connor Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini

Revival of 1986 production First performance: 9 January 2004

Figaro: Garry Magee Rosina: Deanne Meek Count Almaviva: Nicholas Sales Bartolo: Eric Roberts Don Basilio: Richard Angas/Mark Ashmore Berta: Carole Wilson

Wyn Davies/ Martin Fitzpatrick

Giles Havergal

Set and Costume Designer: Russell Craig

The Bartered Bride

Bedřich Smetana

Revival of 1998 production First performance: 23 January 2004

Mařenka: Giselle Allen Jenik: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Kecal: Jeremy White Esmeralda: Claire Wilde Vašek: Iain Paton Ludmila: Carole Wilson Krušina: Glenville Hargreaves Háta: Heather Fryer Micha: Richard Angas/Galloway Bell

Martyn Brabbins

Daniel Slater Choreographer: Vanessa Gray

Robert Innes Hopkins Lighting Designer: Simon Mills

La traviata

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1999 production First performance: 4 February 2004

Violetta Valéry: Anne-Sophie Duprels Alfredo Germont: Peter Auty Giorgio Germont: Robert Poulton

Richard Farnes

Annabel Arden Associate Director and Choreographer: Leah Hausman

Nicky Gillibrand Lighting Designer: Paule Constable

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2003/2004. Title

Composer

Production details

417

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Dwarf

Alexander Zemlinsky

New production First performance: 13 April 2004

Donna Clara: Stefanie Krahnenfeld Ghita: Majella Cullagh The Dwarf: Paul Nilon Don Estoban: Graeme Broadbent

David Parry

David Pountney

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Marie-Jeanne Lecca Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

La vida breve

Manuel de Falla

New production First performance: 13 April 2004

Worker: Richard Coxon Grandmother: Susan Gorton Salud: Mary Plazas

Martin André

Christopher Alden Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Sue Wilmington Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Il tabarro

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 21 April 2004

Giorgetta: Nina Pavlovski La frugalo: Anne-Marie Owens Luigi: Leonardo Capalbo Michele: Jonathan Summers

Martin André

David Pountney

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Tom Pye Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Love’s Luggage Lost

Gioachino Rossini

New production First performance: 21 April 2004

Don Parmenione: Mark Stone Martino: Adrian Clarke Count Alberto: Iain Paton Don Eusebio: Nicholas Sharratt Ernestina: Kim-Marie Woodhouse Berenice: Majella Cullagh

David Parry

Christopher Alden Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Tom Pye Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Francesca da Rimini

Sergei Rachmaninov

New production First performance: 7 May 2004

Francesca: Nina Pavlovski Paolo/Dante: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Malatesta/Ghost of Virgil: Jonathan Summers

Martin André

David Pountney

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Sue Willmington Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

418

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2003/2004. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Pagliacci

Ruggero Leoncavallo

New production First performance: 7 May 2004

Canio: Geraint Dodd Nedda: Majella Cullagh Tonio: Jonathan Summers Beppe: Iain Paton Silvio: Mark Stone

David Parry/ Stuart Stratford

Christopher Alden Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Sue Willmington Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Djamileh

Georges Bizet

New production First performance: 14 May 2004

Haroun: Paul Nilon Splendiano: Mark Stone Djamileh: Patricia Bardon

David Parry

Christopher Alden Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costumes Designer: Sue Willmington Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

The Seven Deadly Sins

Kurt Weill

New production First performance: 14 May 2004

Anna I: Rebecca Caine Anna II: Beate Vollack Tenor I: Iain Paton Tenor II: Nicholas Sharratt Father: Adrian Clarke Mother: Graeme Broadbent

James Holmes

David Pountney Choreographer: Beate Vollack

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Marie-Jeanne Lecca Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

419

2004/2005 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Orfeo ed Euridice

Christoph Willibald Gluck

New production First performance: 1 September 2004

Orfeo: Daniel Taylor Euridice: Isabel Monar Amore: Claire Ormshaw

Nicholas Kok

Choreography/ Direction/Stage Design: Emio Greco/Pieter C. Scholten

Costume Designer: Clifford Portier Lighting Designer: Henk Danner Video Designer: Joost Rek

Manon Lescaut

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 23 September 2004

Manon Lescaut: Natalia Dercho Lescaut: Christopher Purves Chevalier des Grieux: Hugh Smith Geronte de Revoir: Brian Bannatyne-Scott Edmondo: Gordon Wilson

Richard Farnes

Daniel Slater

Set Designer: Robert Innes Hopkins Lighting Designer: Simon Mills

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 7 October 2004

Fiordiligi: Malin Byström Dorabella: Ann Taylor Despina: Claire Wild Ferrando: Iain Paton Guglielmo: Roderick Williams Don Alfonso: Peter Savidge

Yves Abel

Tim Albery

Tobias Hoheisel Lighting Designer: David Finn

One Touch of Venus

Kurt Weill

New production First performance: 4 December 2004 Also performed at Sadler’s Wells in Winter 2006

Venus: Karen Coker Molly: Christianne Tisdale Rodney Hatch: Loren Geeting Whitelaw Savory: Ron Li-Paz

James Holmes

Tim Albery

Set Designer: Antony McDonald Costume Designer: Emma Ryott

420

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2004/2005. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 15 January 2005

Don Giovanni: Roderick Williams Donna Anna: Susannah Glanville Don Ottavio: Iain Paton Donna Elvira: Giselle Allen Leporello: Andrew Foster-Williams/ Richard Burkhard Masetto: Wyn Pencarreg Commendatore: Gerard O’Connor

Richard Farnes/ Alistair Dawes

Olivia Fuchs

Niki Turner Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet Costume Designer: Emma Ryott

The Thieving Magpie

Gioachino Rossini

Revival of 1992 production First performance: 28 January 2005

Ninetta: Mary Hegarty Pippo: Anne-Marie Gibbons Gianetto: Ashley Catling Fernando: Jonathan Best Podesta: Robert Poulton

David Parry

Martin Duncan

Sue Blane Lighting Designer: Colin Smith

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

Béla Bartók

New semi-staged production First performance: 27 May 2005

Bluebeard: John Tomlinson Judith: Sally Burgess In Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham and Gateshead, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was preceded by a performance of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé; and in Birmingham by Wagner’s overture to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs — Soprano Amanda Roocroft.

Richard Farnes

Giles Havergal

Adam Wiltshire Lighting Designer: Paule Constable

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

421

2005/2006 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Nabucco

Giuseppe Verdi

Concert performance First performance: 15 September 2005

Nabucco: Alan Opie Abigaille: Claire Rutter Zaccaria: Alastair Miles Fenena: Jane Irwin Ismaele: Leonardo Capalbo Anna: Camilla Roberts

David Parry

Saul

George Frideric Handel

New semi-staged production First performance: 23 November 2005

Michal: Lucy Crowe Merab: Sarah Fox David: Tim Mead Jonathan: Mark Wilde Saul: Robert Hayward High Priest/Witch of Endor: Mark Le Brocq

Christian Curnyn

John Fulljames

Soutra Gilmour Lighting Designer: Charles Balfour

Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck

New semi-staged production First performance: 22 December 2005

Hansel: Julianne Young Gretel: Jeni Bern Gertrude: Sarah Pring Peter: Christopher Purves The Witch: Peter Hoare

Richard Farnes

John Fulljames

Soutra Gilmour Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

Salome

Richard Strauss

Concert performance First performance: 14 January 2006

Salome: Susan Bullock Herod: Peter Hoare Herodias: Anne-Marie Owens Jokanaan: Daniel Sumegi Narraboth: Leonardo Capalbo

Richard Farnes

422

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2005/2006. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Marriage of Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 1996 production First performance: 3 March 2006

Figaro: Wyn Pencarreg Susanna: Jeni Bern/Lucy Crowe Count Almaviva: Howard Reddy/ James McOran-Campbell Countess Almaviva: Linda Richardson Marcellina: Angela Hickey Cherubino: Julianne Young Dr Bartolo: Jonathan Best/David Woloszko Don Basilio: Harry Nicoll/Stephen Briggs

Christian Gansch/Martin Pickard

Caroline Gawn Choreographer: Linda Dobell

Alice Purcell Lighting Designer: Giuseppe di Iorio

La rondine

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1994 production First performance: 16 March 2006

Magda de Civry: Janis Kelly Ruggero Lastouc: Rafael Rojas Lisette: Gail Pearson Prunier: Alan Oke Rambaldo Fernandez: Peter Savidge/Jonathan Best

Richard Farnes/ Tecwyn Evans

Original Director: Francesca Zambello Revival Director: Peter Relton Choreographer: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Bruno Schwengl Lighting Designer: Colin Smith

Arms and the Cow

Kurt Weill

New production First performance: 30 March 2006

Juanita Sanchez: Mary Plazas/ Deborah Norman Juan Santos: Leonardo Capalbo Jones: Adrian Clarke President Mendez: Jeffrey Lawton Ximenes: Robert Burt General Garcia Conchas: Donald Maxwell Mother/Madame Odette: Beverley Klein Father/Ucquan Foreign Minister: Roderick Earle

James Holmes

David Pountney Choreographer: Craig Revel Horwood

Set and Costume Designer: Duncan Hayler Lighting Designer: Markus Holdermann

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

423

2006/2007 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 7 October 2006

Il Duca: Rafael Rojas Rigoletto: Alan Opie/Jonathan Summers Gilda: Henriette Bonde-Hansen Sparafucile: Brindley Sherratt Maddalena: Rebecca de Pont Davies

Martin André

Charles Edwards Associate Director and Movement Director: Leah Hausman

Set and Lighting Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Brigitte Reiffenstuel

Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 26 October 2006

Peter Grimes: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Ellen Orford: Giselle Allen Captain Balstrode: Christopher Purves Auntie: Yvonne Howard Niece 1: Amy Freston Niece 2: Claire Booth Bob Boles: Alan Oke Swallow: Richard Angas/Brian Bannatyne-Scott Mrs Sedley: Ethna Robinson Reverend Horace Adams: Nigel Robson/Stephen Briggs Ned Keene: Roderick Williams Hobson: Stephen Richardson/Paul Reeves

Richard Farnes/ James Holmes

Phyllida Lloyd Movement Director: Kate Flatt

Set and Costume Designer: Anthony Ward Lighting Designer: Paule Constable

La voix humaine

Francis Poulenc

New production First performance: 3 November 2006

The Woman: Joan Rodgers

Paul Watkins/ Martin Pickard

Deborah Warner

Set and Costume Designer: Tom Pye Lighting Designer: Jean Kalman Video Designer: Tom Pye, Joel Cahen

424

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2006/2007.

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 2003 production First performance: 12 January 2007

Tamino: Ed Lyon Papageno: Roderick Williams Queen of the Night: Penelope RandallDavis Monostatos: Andrew Clarke Pamina: Noriko Urata The Speaker: Keel Watson Priest: Charne Rochford Sarastro: Chester Patton Papagena: Fflur Wyn

Paul McGrath/ Martin Pickard

Tim Supple Movement Director: Yuki Ellias

Set and Lighting Designer: Jean Kalman Costume Designer: Tom Pye

The Elixir of Love

Gaetano Donizetti

Revival of 2001 production First performance: 26 January 2007

Adina: Anna Ryberg Nemorino: Andrew Kennedy Belcore: Riccardo Simonetti Dulcamara: Peter Savidge Giannetta: Susanna Andersson

Tecwyn Evans

Daniel Slater Choreographer: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Robert Innes Hopkins Lighting Designer: Simon Mills

Orfeo

Claudio Monteverdi

New production First performance: 16 February 2007

Orfeo: Paul Nilon Soprano: Amy Freston (La Musica) Celeste Lazarenko Mezzo Soprano: Anna Stéphany (Euridice/ Speranza); Ann Taylor (Proserpina/La Messagiera); Jessica Walker (Ninfa) Counter Tenor: James Laing Tenor: Ashley Catling (Apollo); Nicholas Sharratt Baritone: James McOran-Campbell; Damian Thantrey Bass: Graeme Broadbent (Caronte); Andrew Foster-Williams (Plutone)

Christopher Moulds

Christopher Alden Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Set Designer: Paul Steinberg Costume Designer: Doey Lüthi Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2006/2007.

425

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Katya Kabanova

Leoš Janáček

Revival of 1999 production First performance: 21 April 2007

Kabanicha: Sally Burgess Tichon: John Graham Hall/Clive Bayley Katya: Giselle Allen Varvara: Wendy Dawn Thompson Boris Grigoryevich: Peter Wedd Dikoy: Stephen Richardson Kudryash: Ashley Catling

Richard Farnes

Tim Albery

Set and Costume Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Lighting Designer: Peter Mumford

Dido and Aeneas

Henry Purcell

New production First performance: 5 May 2007

Dido: Susan Bickley Belinda: Amy Freston Sorceress: Clarissa Meek Aeneas: Adam Green Spirit: James Laing

Nicholas Kok

Aletta Collins (also Choreographer)

Les Noces

Igor Stravinsky

Soprano: Gweneth-Ann Jeffers Mezzo Soprano: Clarissa Meek Tenor: John Graham Hall Bass: Paul Reeves Bass: Anthony Cunningham

Nicholas Kok

Aletta Collins (also Choreographer)

Set Designer: Giles Cadle Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet Projection Designer: Lorna Heavey

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

Carried over from Autumn 2006 First performance: 12 May 2007

The Magic Flute

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Carried over from Winter 2007 First performance: 19 May 2007

426

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2007/2008 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

New production First performance: 15 September 2007

Cio-Cio-San: Anne Sophie Duprels Suzuki: Ann Taylor Lieutenant Pinkerton: Rafael Rojas Goro: Alasdair Elliot Sharpless: Peter Savidge

Wyn Davies/ Martin Pickard

Tim Albery Movement Director: Maxine Braham

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Ana Jebens Lighting Designer: Peter Mumford

Falstaff

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1997 production First performance: 29 September 2007

Sir John Falstaff: Robert Hayward Dr Caius: John Graham-Hall Bardolph: Keith Mills Pistol: Andrew Slater Mistress Alice Ford: Susannah Glanville Mistress Meg Page: Deanne Meek Mistress Quickly: Susan Bickley Nannetta: Valérie Condoluci Fenton: Ashley Catling Ford, Alice’s Husband: Olafur Sigurdarson

Richard Farnes/ Tecwyn Evans

Peter Relton Original Production: Matthew Warchus Choreographer: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Laura Hopkins Associate Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell Lighting Designer: Colin Smith

The Fortunes of King Croesus

Reinhard Keiser

New production First performance: 17 October 2007

Croesus: Paul Nilon Atis: Michael Maniaci Halimacus: Stephen Wallace Orsanes: William Dazeley Clerida: Fflur Wyn Eliates: Mark Le Brocq Elcius: John Graham-Hall The Queen of Media: Susan Lees Elmira: Gillian Keith Trigesta: Sarah Pring Cyrus: Henry Waddington A Persian Captain: Paul Gibson Solon: Eric Roberts

Harry Bicket

Tim Albery Choreographer: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Leslie Travers Lighting Designer: Thomas C. Hase

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2007/2008. Title

427

(Continued )

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck

Education Department small-scale new production First performance: 24 November 2007

Hansel: Sarah Cox Gretel: Fflur Wyn Mother/Witch: Gaynor Keeble Father: Wyn Pencarreg Sandman/Dew Fairy: Katherine Manley

Frederic Wake-Walker

Martin Pickard

Set and Costume Designer: Cordelia Chisholm Lighting Designer: Mark Doubleday

The Adventures of Pinocchio

Jonathan Dove

New production First performance: 21 December 2007

Pinocchio: Victoria Simmonds Geppetto: Jonathan Summers Cricket: Rebecca Bottone Fire-Eater, Ape-Judge, Big Green Fisherman, Ringmaster: Graeme Broadbent Cat: Mark Wilde Fox, Coachman: James Laing The Blue Fairy: Mary Plazas

David Parry/ Anthony Kraus

Martin Duncan Choreographer: Nick Winston

Set and Costume Designer: Francis O’Connor Lighting Designer: Davy Cunningham

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

Carried over from Autumn 2007

Peter Grimes

Benjamin Britten

Revival of 2006 production First performance: 17 January 2008

Peter Grimes: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Ellen Orford: Giselle Allen/Rachel Hynes Captain Balstrode: Christopher Purves/Jonathan Summers/Andrew Rupp Auntie: Yvonne Howard Niece 1: Amy Freston Niece 2: Claire Booth Bob Boles: Alan Oke Swallow: Richard Angas

Richard Farnes

Phyllida Lloyd Movement director: Kate Flatt

Set and Costume Designer: Anthony Ward Lighting Designer: Paule Constable

428

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2007/2008. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Mrs Sedley: Ethna Robinson Reverend Horace Adams: Nigel Robson Ned Keene: Roderick Williams/Paul Gibson Hobson: Stephen Richardson Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 23 April 2008

Macbeth: Robert Hayward Banquo: Ernesto Morillo Hoyt Lady Macbeth: Antonia Cifrone/Yvonne Howard Macduff: Peter Auty Malcolm: Peter Wedd

Richard Farnes/ Martin Pickard

Tim Albery Movement director: Maxine Braham

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Brigitte Reiffenstuel Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 3 May 2008

Oberon: James Laing Tytania: Jeni Bern Helena: Elizabeth Atherton Hermia: Frances Bourne Lysander: Peter Wedd Demetrius: Mark Stone/Stephan Loges Theseus: Peter Savidge Hippolyta: Yvonne Howard/Gaynor Keeble Bottom: Henry Waddington Quince: Richard Burkhard Flute: Colin Judson Snug: Sion Goronwy Snout: Nicholas Sharratt Starveling: Geoffrey Dolton Puck or Robin Goodfellow: Daniel Abelson/Tom Walker

Stuart Stratford

Martin Duncan Choreographer: Ben Wright

Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Ashley Martin-Davis Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2007/2008. Title Roméo et Juliette

Composer Charles Gounod

Production details New production First performance: 17 May 2008

429

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Capulet: Peter Savidge Juliette: Bernarda Bobro Tybalt: Peter Wedd Gregorio: Richard Burkhard Gertrude: Yvonne Howard/Gaynor Keeble Roméo: Leonardo Capalbo Benvolio: Nicholas Sharratt Stéphano: Frances Bourne

Martin André/Peter Selwyn

Director John Fulljames Choreographer: Ben Wright

Designer Set Designer: Johan Engels Costume Designer: Adam Wiltshire Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

2008/2009 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 2002 production First performance: 26 September 2008

Floria Tosca: Takesha Meshé Kizart Mario Cavaradossi: Rafael Rojas Baron Scarpia: Robert Hayward Cesare Angelotti: Graeme Broadbent

Andrea Licata/ Martin Pickard

Christopher Alden Associate Director: Rob Kearley

Set and Lighting Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Jon Morrell

Of Thee I Sing

George Gershwin

New production First performance: 4 October 2008

John P. Wintergreen: William Dazeley Mary Turner: Bibi Heal Diana Devereaux: Heather Shipp

Mark W. Dorrell

Caroline Gawn Choreographer: Caroline Pope

Set Designer: Tim Hopkins Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Wolfgang Göbbel

430

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2008/2009. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Alexander Throttlebottom: Steven Beard Louis Lippman: Nicholas Sharratt I Capuleti e i Montecchi

Vincenzo Bellini

New production First performance: 21 October 2008

Giulietta: Marie Arnet Romeo: Sarah Connolly Tebaldo: Edgaras Montvidas Capellio: Nikolay Didenko Lorenzo: Henry Waddington

Manlio Benzi

Elektra

Richard Strauss

Concert performance First performance: 11 December 2008

Elektra: Susan Bullock Chrysothemis: Alwyn Mellor Klytemnestra: Rebecca de Pont Davies Orestes: Robert Bork Aegisthus: Peter Hoare

Richard Farnes

Skin Deep

David Sawer

New production First performance: 16 January 2009

Dr Needlemeier: Geoffrey Dolton Lania: Janis Kelly Donna: Heather Shipp Elsa: Amy Freston Robert: Andrew Tortise Luke Pollock: Mark Stone/Riccardo Simonetti Susannah Dangerfield: Gwendoline Christie

Richard Farnes

Orpha Phelan Choreographer: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Leslie Travers Lighting Designer: Chris Davey

Richard Jones Movement Director: Linda Dobell

Set and Costume Designer: Stewart Laing Lighting Designer: Mimi Jordan Sherrin

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2008/2009. Title

Composer

431

(Continued )

Production details

Cast General Adam Snookfield: Richard Suart Trixie Flynn: Jeni Bern Mary Wintergreen: Bibi Heal/Rebecca Moon John P. Wintergreen: William Dazeley Alexander Throttlebottom: Steven Beard Kruger: Richard Burkhard President of the Union League Club: Richard Suart

Wyn Davies/ Jonathan Gill

Caroline Gawn Choreographer: Caroline Pope

Set Designer/Film Maker: Tim Hopkins Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Wolfgang Göbbel

Lidochka: Summer Strallen Boris: Eaton James Sasha: Grant Doyle Masha: Bibi Heal Drebyednyetsov: Richard Angas Vava: Margaret Preece

James Holmes Associate Director: Caroline Clegg

David Pountney Choreographer: Craig Revel Horwood

Set and Costume Designer: Robert Innes Hopkins Lighting Designer: Fabrice Kebour

Let ‘em Eat Cake

George Gershwin

New production First performance: 29 January 2009

Of Thee I Sing

George Gershwin

Carried over from Autumn 2008 First performance: 12 February 2009

Tosca

Giacomo Puccini

Carried over from Autumn 2008 First performance: 5 February 2009

Paradise Moscow

Dmitry Shostakovich

Revival of 2001 production First performance: 18 April 2009

Conductor

Director

Designer

432

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2008/2009. Title

Composer

Production details

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Lusya: Claire Pascoe Sergei: Philip O’Brien Barabashkin: Richard Suart/Peter Bodenham Baburov: Steven Beard Don Carlos

Giuseppe Verdi

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 2 May 2009

Philip II: Brindley Sherratt/Alastair Miles Don Carlos: Julian Gavin Elisabeth: Janice Watson/Susannah Glanville Rodrigo Marquis of Posa: William Dazeley Princess Eboli: Jane Dutton The Grand Inquisitor: Clive Bayley

Richard Farnes

Tim Albery

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Nicky Gillibrand Associate Costume Designer: Stephen Rodwell Lighting Designer: Charles Edwards

The Abduction from the Seraglio

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 20 May 2009

Constanze: Kate Valentine Belmonte: Allan Clayton/ Joshua Ellicott Blonde: Elena Xanthoudakis Pedrillo: Nicholas Sharratt Osmin: Clive Bayley Pasha Selim: Martin Hyder

Rory Macdonald/ Justin Doyle

Tim Hopkins Movement Director: Caroline Pope

Set Designer: Tim Hopkins Costume Designer: Gideon Davey Lighting Designer: Zerlina Hughes Video Consultant: Simon Carter

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

433

2009/2010 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Revival of 2004 production First performance: 11 September 2009

Fiordiligi: Elizabeth Atherton Dorabella: Victoria Simmonds Ferrando: Allan Clayton/ Robert Murray Guglielmo: Quirijn de Lang/Jacques Imbrailo Despina: Amy Freston Don Alfonso: Geoffrey Dolton

Andrew Parrott/ Justin Doyle

Tim Albery

Set and Costume Designer: Tobias Hoheisel Lighting Designer: David Finn

Werther

Jules Massenet

New production First performance: 26 September 2009

Werther: Paul Nilon Charlotte: Alice Coote/Ann Taylor Sophie: Pauline Courtin Albert: Peter Savidge Le Bailli: Donald Maxwell

Richard Farnes

Tom Cairns

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Amy Roberts Lighting Designer: Charles Balfour

The Adventures of Mr Brouček

Leoš Janáček

New production First performance: 10 October 2009

Matěj Brouček: John Graham-Hall Mazal: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Sacristan: Jonathan Best Málinka: Anne Sophie Duprels Würfl: Donald Maxwell Apprentice Waiter: Claire Wild Mr Brouček’s Housekeeper: Frances McCafferty

Martin André

John Fulljames Choreographer: Ben Wright

Alex Lowde Lighting Designer: Lucy Carter Video Designer: Finn Ross

434

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2009/2010. Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

(Continued ) Conductor

Director

Designer

Swanhunter

Jonathan Dove

Education Department smallscale new production First performance: 13 November 2009

Lemminkäinen: Andrew Rees Lemminkäinen’s Mother: Yvonne Howard Swan: Elizabeth Cragg Louhi: Frances Bourne Dog/Soppi-Hat: Nicholas Sharratt Dog/Death/Smith: Graeme Broadbent

Stuart Stratford

Clare Whistler

Dody Nash

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 1993 production First performance: 15 January 2010

Rodolfo: Bülent Bezdüz Marcello: Marcin Bronikowski Colline: Frédéric Bourreau Schaunard: Quirijn de Lang Mimì: Anne Sophie Duprels Musetta: Sarah Fox

Richard Farnes/ Geoffrey Paterson

Original Director: Phyllida Lloyd Revival Director: Peter Relton Choreographer: Quinny Sacks

Anthony Ward Original Lighting Designer: Rick Fisher

Ruddigore

Arthur Sullivan

New production First performance: 30 January 2010

Rose Maybud: Amy Freston/Rebecca Moon Zorah: Gillene Herbert Dame Hannah: Anne-Marie Owens Robin Oakapple/Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd: Grant Doyle Old Adam Goodheart: Richard Angas Richard Dauntless: Hal Cazalet Mad Margaret: Heather Shipp

John Wilson/ Anthony Kraus

Jo Davies Choreographer: Kay Shepherd

Set Designer: Richard Hudson Costume: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Anna Watson Illusionist: Paul Kieve

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2009/2010. Title

Composer

Production details

435

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Sir Despard Murgatroyd: Richard Burkhard Sir Roderic Murgatroyd: Steven Page Così fan tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Carried over from Autumn 2009 First performance: 9 February 2010

La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini

Carried over from Winter 2010 First performance: 4 May 2010

Rusalka

Antonín Dvořák

Revival of 2003 production First performance: 22 May 2010

Rusalka: Giselle Allen Prince: Richard Berkeley-Steele Foreign Princess: Susannah Glanville Water Sprite: Richard Angas Ježibaba: Anne-Marie Owens

Oliver von Dohnányi

Olivia Fuchs Associate Director: Luise Napier Choreographer: Claire Glaskin

Niki Turner Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet Original

Mary Stuart

Gaetano Donizetti

New production First performance: 4 June 2010

Mary Stuart: Sarah Connolly Queen Elizabeth: Antonia Cifrone Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester: Bülent Bezdüz Sir William Cecil: David Kempster George Talbot: Frédéric Bourreau Hannah Kennedy: Michelle Walton

Guido Johannes Rumstadt

Antony McDonald Movement director: Lucy Burge

Antony McDonald Lighting Designer: Lucy Carter

436

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2010/2011 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Adventures of Pinocchio

Jonathan Dove

Revival of 2007 production First performance: 16 September 2010

Pinocchio: Victoria Simmonds/Karina Lucas Geppetto: Jonathan Summers Cricket/Parrot: Rebecca Bottone Fire-Eater, Ape-Judge, Big Green Fisherman, Ringmaster, Farmer: Graeme Broadbent/Stephen Richardson Cat: Mark Wilde Fox, Coachman: James Laing The Blue Fairy: Mary Plazas/Fflur Wyn Pigeon, Snail: Carole Wilson

David Parry/ Robert Houssart

Martin Duncan Choreographer: Nick Winston

Set and Costume Designer: Francis O’Connor Lighting Designer: Davy Cunningham

The Turn of the Screw

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 2 October 2010

Prologue/Peter Quint: Benjamin Hulett The Governess: Elizabeth Atherton Mrs Grose: Yvonne Howard Miss Jessel: Giselle Allen Flora: Fflur Wyn Miles: James Micklethwaite

Richard Farnes

Alessandro Talevi

Madeleine Boyd Lighting Designer: Matthew Haskins

The Merry Widow

Franz Léhar

New production First performance: 16 October 2010

Hanna Glawari: Stephanie Corley Count Danilo Danilovitch: William Dazeley Baron Mirko Zeta: Geoffrey Dolton Valencienne Zeta: Amy Freston Camille de Rosillon: Allan Clayton/ Nicholas Sharratt

Wyn Davies/ Andrea Quinn

Giles Havergal Choreographer and Movement Director: Stuart Hopps

Leslie Travers Lighting Designer: Oliver Fenwick

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2010/2011.

437

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Carmen

Georges Bizet

New production First performance: 17 January 2011

Carmen: Heather Shipp José: Peter Auty Micaela: Anne Sophie Duprels Zuniga: Keel Watson Frasquita: Claire Wild Mercedes: Annie Gill Escamillo: Kostas Smoriginas

The Portrait

Mieczysław Weinberg

New production First performance: 2 February 2011

Fidelio

Ludwig van Beethoven

New production First performance: 14 April 2011

Conductor

Director

Designer

Andreas Delfs

Daniel Kramer Choreographer: Lucy Burge Fight Director: Ran Arthur Braun

Set Designer: Soutra Gilmour Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Charles Balfour

Chartkov: Paul Nilon Nikita: Richard Burkhard Professor of Fine Arts, Journalist, Art Dealer, Landlady, Earl: Peter Savidge Lamplighter, Noble Gentleman: Nicholas Sharratt 3rd Seller, Dignitary: Jonathan Best Policeman, General: Richard Angas Female Seller, Lady: Helen Field 1st Seller, 1st Waiter, Turk: Mark Le Brocq 2nd Seller, 2nd Waiter, Cavalry Officer: Christopher Steele Noblewoman: Carole Wilson Liza Katherine: Broderick

Rossen Gergov

David Pountney

Set and Costume Designer: Dan Potra Lighting Designer: Linus Fellbom

Leonore: Emma Bell Florestan: Steven Harrison Rocco: Jeremy White Jaquino: Joshua Ellicot Marzelline: Fflur Wyn Don Pizarro: Andrew Foster Williams Don Fernando: Robert Winslade Anderson

Sir Richard Armstrong/ Peter Selwyn

Tim Albery

Set and Costume Designer: Stewart Laing Lighting Designer: Peter Mumford

438

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2010/2011.

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

From the House of the Dead

Leoš Janáček

New production First performance: 5 May 2011

Filka Morozov (Luka): Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Goryanchikov: Roderick Williams Big Prisoner: Ronald Samm Little Prisoner: James Creswell Elderly Prisoner: Peter Bodenham Skuratov: Alan Oke Alyeya: Claire Wild Shapkin: Mark Le Brocq Shishkov: Robert Hayward Young Prisoner: Adrian Dwyer Chekunov: David Kempster

Richard Farnes

Das Rheingold

Richard Wagner

New production, staged concert performance First performance: 18 June 2011

Wotan: Michael Druiett Fricka: Yvonne Howard Freia: Giselle Allen/Lee Bisset Donner: Derek Welton Froh: Peter Wedd Loge: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke Erda: Andrea Baker Fasolt: James Creswell/Brindley Sherratt Fafner: Gregory Frank Alberich: Nicholas Folwell/Peter Sidhom Mime: Richard Roberts Woglinde: Jeni Bern Wellgunde: Jennifer Johnston Flosshilde: Sarah Castle

Richard Farnes

Director

Designer

John Fulljames Movement Director: Philippe Giraudeau

Set and Costume Designer: Dick Bird Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet Projection Designer: Mick McNicholas

Peter Mumford

Lighting and Video Designer: Peter Mumford

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

439

2011/2012 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

Revival of 2007 production First performance: 17 September 2011

Cio-Cio-San: Anne Sophie Duprels Suzuki: Ann Taylor Lieutenant Pinkerton: Noah Stewart Goro: Daniel Norman Sharpless: Peter Savidge

Daniele Rustioni/Robert Houssart

Tim Albery Movement Director: Maxine Braham

Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Costume Designer: Ana Jebens Lighting Designer: Peter Mumford

Ruddigore

Arthur Sullivan

Revival of 2010 production First performance: 30 September 2011

Rose Maybud: Amy Freston/ Rebecca Moon Zorah: Gillene Herbert Dame Hannah: Anne-Marie Owens/Claire Pascoe Robin Oakapple/Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd: Grant Doyle Old Adam Goodheart: Richard Angas Richard Dauntless: Hal Cazalet Mad Margaret: Heather Shipp Sir Despard Murgatroyd: Richard Burkhard Sir Roderic Murgatroyd: Steven Page

John Wilson/ Timothy Henty

Jo Davies Choreographer: Kay Shepherd

Set Designer: Richard Hudson Associate Set Designer: Mauricio Elorriaga Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Anna Watson Illusionist: Paul Kieve

The Queen of Spades

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

New production First performance: 20 October 2011

Herman: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts Count Tomsky: Jonathan Summers Prince Yeletsky: William Dazeley Lisa his Fiancée: Orla Boylan The Countess Dame: Josephine Barstow Pauline: Alexandra Sherman Lisa’s Governess: Fiona Kimm

Richard Farnes

Neil Bartlett Movement Director: Leah Hausman

Set and Costume Designer: Kandis Cook Lighting Designer: Chris Davey

440

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2011/2012.

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Giulio Cesare

George Frideric Handel

New production First performance: 14 January 2012

Giulio Cesare: Pamela Helen Stephen Curio: Dean Robinson Cornelia: Ann Taylor Sesto: Kathryn Rudge Cleopatra: Sarah Tynan Tolomeo: James Laing Achilla: Jonathan Best/James Oldfield Nireno: Andrew Radley

Robert Howarth

Tim Albery Fight Director: John Waller

Set and Costume Designer: Leslie Travers Lighting Designer: Thomas C Hase

Norma

Vincenzo Bellini

New production First performance: 28 January 2012

Norma: Annemarie Kremer Adalgisa: Keri Alkema Pollione: Luis Chapa Oroveso: James Creswell Clotilde: Gweneth-Ann Jeffers Flavio: Daniel Norman

Oliver von Dohnányi

Christopher Alden

Set Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Sue Willmington Lighting Designer: Adam Silverman

Madama Butterfly

Giacomo Puccini

Carried over from Autumn 2011 First performance: 5 February 2012

Carousel

Richard Rodgers

New production First performance: 2 May 2012 Revived for London run August 2012

Julie Jordan: Gillene Herbert/ Katherine Manley Billy Bigelow: Eric Greene/Keith Higham/Michael Todd Simpson Mrs Mullin: Candida Benson Nettie Fowler: Elena Ferrari/ Yvonne Howard Carrie Pipperidge: Claire Boulter/Sarah Tynan Enoch Snow: Joseph Shovelton/Philip Lee Jigger Craigin: Michael Rouse

James Holmes/ Jonathan Gill

Jo Davies Choreographer: Kay Shepherd Choreographer (Ballet): Kim Brandstrup

Set and Costume Designer: Anthony Ward Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet Video Designer: Andrzej Goulding

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2011/2012. Title

Composer

Production details

441

(Continued )

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Starkeeper/Dr Seldon: John Woodvine/Peter Bodenham Louise: Alex Newton/Beverley Grant Ruddigore

Arthur Sullivan

Carried over from Autumn 2011 First performance: 31 May 2012

Die Walküre

Richard Wagner

New production, staged concert performance First performance: 16 June 2012

Siegmund: Erik Nelson Werner Sieglinde: Alwyn Mellor Hunding: Clive Bayley Wotan: Béla Perencz Brünnhilde: Annalena Persson Fricka: Katarin a Karnéus Gerhilde: Miriam Murphy Helmwige: Katherine Broderick Waltraute: Jennifer Johnston Schwertleite: Emma Carrington Ortlinde: Meeta Raval Siegrune: Madeleine Shaw Grimgerde: Antonia Sotgiu Rossweise: Catherine Hopper

Richard Farnes

Peter Mumford

Lighting/Projection Designer: Peter Mumford

442

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2012/2013 Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The Makropulos Case

Leoš Janáček

New production First performance: 11 August 2012

Emilia Marty (E. M.): Ylva Kihlberg Dr Kolenatý: James Creswell Vítek: Mark Le Brocq Kristina: Stephanie Corley Albert Gregor: Paul Nilon Baron Jaroslav Prus: Robert Hayward Janek Prus: Adrian Dwyer Count Hauk-Šendorf: Nigel Robson

Richard Farnes

Tom Cairns

Set and Costume Designer: Hildegard Bechtler Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 28 September 2012

Leporello: Alastair Miles/Matthew Hargreaves Donna Anna: Meeta Raval Don Giovanni: William Dazeley Il Commendatore: Michael Druiett Don Ottavio: Christopher Turner Donna Elvira: Elizabeth Atherton/ Maribeth Diggle Zerlina: Claire Wild Masetto: Oliver Dunn

Tobias Ringborg/ Anthony Kraus

Alessandro Talevi Choreographer: Victoria Newlyn

Set and Costume Designer: Madeleine Boyd Lighting Designer: Matthew Haskins

Faust

Charles Gounod

New production First performance: 13 October 2012

Faust: Peter Auty Méphistophélès: James Creswell Wagner: Paul Gibson Valentin: Marcin Bronikowski Siébel: Robert Anthony Gardiner Marguerite: Juanita Lascarro Marthe: Sarah Pring

Stuart Stratford

Ran Arthur Braun/ Rob Kearley

Set and Visual Designer: Ran Arthur Braun Costume Designer: Sue Willmington Lighting Designer: Davy Cunningham Video Artist: Lillevan

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2012/2013.

443

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

Otello

Giuseppe Verdi

New production First performance: 16 January 2013

Cassio: Michael Wade Lee Iago: David Kempster Roderigo: Christopher Turner Otello: Ronald Samm Desdemona: Elena Kelessidi Emilia: Ann Taylor Montano: Dean Robinson Lodovico: Henry Waddington

Richard Farnes

Tim Albery Choreographer: Laïla Diallo

Set and Costume Designer: Leslie Travers Lighting Designer: Thomas C Hase

La clemenza di Tito

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

New production First performance: 31 January 2013

Tito: Paul Nilon Vitellia: Annemarie Kremer Sesto: Helen Lepalaan Annio: Kathryn Rudge Servilia: Fflur Wyn Publio: Henry Waddington

Douglas Boyd/Justin Doyle

John Fulljames Movement Director: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Conor Murphy Lighting Designer: Bruno Poet Projection Designer: Finn Ross

La voix humaine

Francis Poulenc

New production First performance: 14 February 2013 (double bill with Dido and Aeneas)

Elle: Lesley Garrett

Wyn Davies

Director and Choreographer: Aletta Collins

Set Designer: Giles Cadle Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Andreas Fuchs

Dido and Aeneas

Henry Purcell

New production First performance: 14 February 2013 (double bill with La voix humaine)

Dido: Pamela Helen Stephen Belinda: Amy Freston Sorceress: Heather Shipp/Emma Carrington Aeneas: Phillip Rhodes Spirit: Jake Arditti Sailor: Nicholas Watts

Wyn Davies

Director and Choreographer: Aletta Collins

Set Designer: Giles Cadle Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Lighting Designer: Andreas Fuchs

444

OPERA NORTH: HISTORICAL AND DRAMATURGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON OPERA STUDIES

2012/2013.

(Continued )

Title

Composer

Production details

Cast

Conductor

Director

Designer

The FireworkMaker’s Daughter

David Bruce

Education Department small-scale new production (touring) First performance: 23 March 2013

Lila: Mary Bevan Hamlet: James Laing Chulak: Amar Muchhala Lalchand: Wyn Pencarreg Rambashi: Andrew Slater

Geoffrey Paterson

John Fulljames Choreographer: Victoria Newlyn

Set and Costume Designer: Dick Bird Puppet Direction: Steve Tiplady, Sally Todd — Indefinite Articles Lighting Designer: Guy Hoare

Joshua

George Frideric Handel

New production First performance: 30 April 2013

Joshua: Daniel Norman Caleb: Henry Waddington Achsah: Fflur Wyn Othniel: Jake Arditti

Stephen Layton/ Anthony Kraus

Charles Edwards

Set and Lighting Designer: Charles Edwards Costume Designer: Gabrielle Dalton Projection Designer: Andrzej Goulding

Albert Herring

Benjamin Britten

New production First performance: 15 May 2013

Lady Billows: Josephine Barstow Florence Pike: Elizabeth Sikora Miss Wordsworth: Mary Hegarty Mr Gedge: William Dazeley Mr Upfold: Joseph Shovelton Superintendent Budd: Graeme Danby Sid: Marc Callahan Albert Herring: Alexander Sprague Nancy: Katie Bray Mrs Herring: Fiona Kimm

Justin Doyle

Giles Havergal Movement Director: Tim Claydon

Set and Costume Designer: Leslie Travers Lighting Designer: John Bishop

Kara McKechnie

Chronology of Opera North Productions 1978 2013

2012/2013. Title

Composer

Production details

Siegfried

Richard Wagner

New production, staged concert performance First performance: 15 June 2013

445

(Continued )

Cast Mime: Richard Roberts Siegfried: Mati Turi Wanderer: Michael Druiett Alberich: Jo Pohlheim Fafner: Mats Almgren Woodbird: Fflur Wyn Erda: Ceri Williams Brünnhilde: Annalena Persson

Conductor Richard Farnes

Director Peter Mumford Associate Director: Joe Austin

Designer Lighting and Projection Designer: Peter Mumford

INDEX

The Abduction from the Seraglio (W.A. Mozart), 69, 179, 376, 432 The Adventures of Mr Brouček (Leos Janáček), 181, 323, 433 The Adventures of Pinocchio (Jonathan Dove), 171, 185, 427 AGMA (Association of Greater Manchester Authorities), 88 Aida (Giuseppe Verdi), 63, 65, 77, 120, 373, 381, 402 Albert Herring (Benjamin Britten), 141, 164, 198, 200, 311, 315, 347, 348, 412, 444 Albery, Tim, 59, 61, 62, 63, 67, 72, 87, 95, 112, 119, 128, 130, 147, 148, 155, 156, 167, 169, 170, 173, 179, 180, 189, 193, 197, 236 Alcina (George Frideric Handel), 55 Aldeburgh Festival, 348 Alden, Christopher, 145, 152, 154, 166, 175, 193, 236, 306, 413, 417, 418, 424, 429, 440 Alden, David, 47, 365 Alhambra Theatre (Bradford), 161 Alkema, Keri, 193, 440 Allen, Giselle, 146, 150, 157, 164, 168, 234, 411, 412, 414, 415, 416, 420, 423, 425, 427, 435, 436, 438 Allen, Mary, 117 Almgren, Mats, 151, 200, 445

Almodovar, Pedro, 307 Alston, Richard, 68, 376 Alvarez, Eduardo, 49 Amaze Me!, 140, 144 Angas, Richard, 76, 138, 149, 150, 308, 309, 345, 403, 406, 411, 414, 415, 416, 423, 427, 434, 435, 437, 439 Anderson, Donald Maxwell, 107 d'Andrade, Francesco, 248 Apollo Leisure, 88, 92, 127 Arabella (Richard Strauss), 127, 406 Arblaster, Anthony, 125, 127, 131, 133, 139 Arden, Annabel, 103, 118, 128, 129, 140, 394, 395, 401, 403, 407, 411, 415, 416 Arditti, Jake, 198, 443, 444 Ariane and Bluebeard (Paul Dukas), 85, 88 Arlen, Stephen, 143 Arms and the Cow (Kurt Weill), 161, 162, 422 Armstrong, Sir Richard, 189, 437 Armstrong, Sheila, 33, 354 Arnet, Marie, 146, 414, 430 Arthur, Michael, 162 Arts Council, 5, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 37, 41, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105, 108, 111, 117, 120, 123, 126, 135, 136, 137

Arts Council England (ACE), 8, 104, 142, 215, 228, 229 Ashley, Tim, 176, 179, 180, 190 Atha, Councillor Bernard, 74, 90, 138, 157 Atherton, Elizabeth, 180, 185, 197, 238, 245, 270, 428, 433, 436, 442 Atkinson, Paul, 215, 218, 237, 263, 269 Attila (Giuseppe Verdi), 63, 83, 85, 86, 112, 385 Auden, W.H., 18 Audi, Pierre, 83, 383 Auty, Peter, 188, 197, 412, 416, 428, 437, 442 Ayckbourn, Alan, 83 Baa-Baa Black Sheep (Michael Berkeley), 95, 99, 393 Bailey, Norman, 43, 359, 363, 391, 399, 402, 404 Baird, Kenneth, 78, 103 Baker, Janet, 107 Ballet Rambert, 66, 68, 376 The Barber of Seville (Giacchino Rossini), 134, 360, 375, 383, 403, 416 Bardon, Patricia, 71, 377, 386, 389, 393, 418 Barham, Edmund, 106, 377, 378, 382, 385, 386, 391, 395, 402 Barstow, Dame Josephine, 71, 86, 101, 110, 111, 114, 115, 132, 146, 192, 193, 199, 230, 312, 313, 314, 315, 377, 385, 393, 396, 398, 399, 401, 402, 406, 408, 412, 414, 439, 444

448

The Bartered Bride (Bedřich Smetana), 41, 42, 123, 134, 367, 416 Bartlett, Neil, 184, 192, 439 Bartok, Béla, 108, 420 Bausch, Pina, 48 Bayley, Clive, 123, 132, 180, 196, 384, 388, 393, 396, 397, 398, 399, 401, 403, 405, 407, 409, 410, 425, 432, 441 Baylis, Lilian, 16, 17, 18, 26 Bazalgette, Sir Peter, 348, 349 BBC, 19, 32, 76, 99, 101, 123, 154, 162, 169, 174, 191, 286, 311 Beached (Harvey Brough), 190 Beatrice and Benedict (Hector Berlioz), 47, 50, 66, 365 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 79 Beard, Steven, 175, 404, 411, 430, 431, 432 Bechtler, Hildegard, 95, 97, 130, 147, 167, 169, 180, 330, 391, 392, 401, 405, 407, 425, 426, 432, 433, 439, 442 Beckett, Samuel, 121, 254 Bedford, Steuart, 121, 360, 403 Behrndt, Synne, 218 Bell, Emma, 1 Belloc, Hilaire, 189 La Belle Hélène (Jacques Offenbach), 116 Belshazzar's Feast (George Frideric Handel), 198 Bennett, Richard Rodney, 37, 356 Berkeley, Michael, 93, 95, 99, 100, 393 Bernet, Diefried, 146, 396, 410, 412, 414 Berlioz, Hector, 47, 67, 71, 77, 86, 116, 144, 149, 365, 374, 377, 415 Bern, Jeni, 160, 162, 174, 337, 421, 422, 428, 431, 438 Besch, Anthony, 39, 354, 357, 359, 360, 364, 369

INDEX

Best, Jonathan, 130, 132, 181, 193, 384, 388, 394, 395, 402, 403, 406, 407, 410, 414, 416, 420, 422, 433, 437, 440 Bestel, Lucas von, 170 Beverley, Michael, 107, 123, 126, 162, 184 Bicket, Harry, 106, 118, 132, 170, 395, 401, 409, 426 Bickley, Susan, 168, 169, 412, 415, 425, 426 Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten), 83, 95, 134, 311, 391 Birmingham City Opera, 74 Birmingham Royal Ballet, 131 Birtwistle, Harrison, 93, 99 Bjørnson's, Maria, 63, 355, 358, 360, 361, 363, 365, 367, 371, 372, 374 Blair, Tony, 119 Blane, Sue, 76, 366, 372, 380, 389, 390, 392, 399, 406, 420 Blight, David, 100, 393 Blyth, Alan, 32 Bobro, Bernarda, 174, 429 Bochumer Symphoniker, 136 La Bohème (Giacomo Puccini), 33, 48, 96, 100, 102, 125, 140, 188, 347, 353, 359, 365, 375, 380, 391, 392, 398, 412, 434, 435 Boito, Arrigo, 117 Bonner, Jane, 5, 47, 62, 71, 104, 144, 301 Boris Godunov (Modest Mussorgsky), 63, 74, 75, 78, 85, 93, 382, 389 Born, Georgina, 6 Borodin, Alexander, 45, 46, 364 Bourne, Matthew, 94, 391 Boyd, Madeleine, 185, 189, 436, 442 Boylan, Orla, 192, 439 Boyle, Baron Edward, 30 Boyle, Grant, 183 Brabbins, Martyn, 147, 416

Bradbury, Ernest, 24, 32, 37, 38 Brandstrup, Kim, 194, 440 Braun, Ran Arthur, 197, 437, 442 Bray, Katie, 199, 444 Brecht, Bertolt, 56 Brecknock, John, 47, 360, 363, 364, 365 Bregenz Festival, 161, 180, 186 Brenton, Howard, 104 Bristol Old Vic, 44n7 Britten, Benjamin, 18, 79, 83, 100, 101, 131, 159, 164, 171, 173, 198, 230, 311, 315, 323, 354, 362, 382, 391, 393, 401, 406, 407, 412, 423, 427, 428, 436, 444 Broadbent, Graham, 96 Broderick, Katherine, 189, 339, 437, 441 Brodrick, Cuthbert, 333 Brook, Peter, 132 Brothers Quay, 76, 301, 380, 392 Brotherston, Lez, 84, 381, 384, 388, 389, 395 Brough, Harvey, 190 Buchan, Cynthia, 49, 366, 371, 377 Büchner, Georg, 97 Buckler, Jane, 159 Bullock, Matthew, 90 Bullock, Susan, 136, 161, 176, 410, 421, 430 Burgess, Sally, 55, 56, 65, 71, 72, 82, 106, 132, 140, 157, 356, 359, 360, 370, 373, 377, 381, 383, 384, 386, 391, 395, 402, 405, 409, 420, 425 Burkhard, Richard, 182, 260, 420, 428, 429, 431, 435, 437, 439 Burns, Elizabeth, 232, 233 Butlin, Roger, 49, 364, 367 Byrne, John, 121, 132, 158, 164 Byström, Malin, 150, 416, 419 Cadle, Giles, 198, 204, 411, 425, 443 Callahan, Mark, 199, 444

Kara McKechnie

Caine, Rebecca, 110, 121, 305, 394, 397, 403, 404, 414, 418 Cairns, Tom, 62, 67, 72, 83, 86, 95, 110, 180, 372, 374, 377, 382, 383, 384, 386, 387, 398, 414, 433, 442 Calix, Mira, 177 Cammarano, Salvatore, 112 Canning, Hugh, 107, 109, 125, 130, 148, 162, 163, 164, 165, 188, 190 Capablo, Leonardo, 159 Capriccio (Richard Strauss), 91 The Capture of Troy (Hector Berlioz), 67, 71, 72 I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Vincenzo Bellini), 176, 430 Caritas (Robert Saxton), 90, 91, 388 Carmen (Georges Bizet), 41, 42, 71, 79, 93, 125, 154, 188, 189, 190, 323, 356, 361, 377, 386, 405, 437 Carousel (Rodgers & Hammerstein), 112, 194, 195, 196, 220, 239, 274, 275, 347, 440 Carriageworks Theatre (Leeds), 160 Carrington, Emma, 189, 339, 441, 443 Carsen, Robert, 49, 368 Castle, Sarah, 337, 438 Caurier, Patrice, 131, 407 Cautionary Tales! (Erollyn Wallen), 189 Cavalleria Rusticana (Pietro Mascagni), 152 Cazalet, Hal, 182, 434, 439 Čech, Svatopluk, 181 CEMA (Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), 18, 19 Cendrillon (Jules Massenet), 150 Chapa, Luis, 277, 440 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 107, 133 Cheltenham Festival, 91, 99, 108 Chemnitz Opera (Germany), 171 Chiari, Pietro, 300

Index

Chibnall, Christine, 49 50, 67, 74, 85, 96, 100, 101, 105, 128, 130, 152, 153, 170 A Child of our Time (Michael Tippett), 65 Chitty, Alison, 95, 377, 381, 390 Chorus of Opera North, 1, 42, 50, 77, 80, 132, 248, 262, 273, 274, 277, 282, 298, 306, 350 Christiansen, Rupert, 97, 103, 112, 118, 127, 145, 148, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 164, 170, 174, 175, 178, 181, 185, 189, 338 Ciesinski, Kristine, 67, 68, 77, 374, 381 Cifrone, Antonia, 173, 184, 428, 435 Clancy, Deirdre, 78, 367, 374, 377, 382, 385, 386, 389 Clark, Andrew, 130, 164, 173, 179, 189, 424 Clayton, Allan, 180, 432, 433, 436 Clegg, Caroline, 179, 431 Clements, Andrew, 71, 72, 98, 155, 181, 192 La Clemenza di Tito (W.A. Mozart), 197, 276, 443 Cleobury, Nicholas, 49, 368 Cobain, Kurt, 166 Cockroft, Robert, 42, 43, 56, 65 Cocteau, Jean, 69 Coker, Karen, 156, 419 Coleman, Basil, 38, 43, 77, 355 Coles, Mark, 214, 415 Coliseum (home of English National Opera), 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 38, 61 Collette, 144 Collins, Aletta, 168, 198, 425, 443 Company (Stephen Sondheim), 112 Connolly, Sarah, 184, 430, 435 Cons, Emma (Lilian Baylis's aunt), 17 Conservative Party, 35, 57 Constable, Paule, 129, 315, 415, 416, 420, 423, 427 Cook, Kandis, 192, 399, 439

449

Coote, Alice, 103, 118, 132, 181, 399, 400, 401, 403, 404, 409, 433 Copley, John, 31, 38, 41, 46, 68, 353, 355, 356, 358, 359, 361, 364, 368 Corley, Stephanie, 186, 273, 332, 436, 442 Corson, George, 176 Così fan tutte (W.A. Mozart), 43, 85, 119, 120, 155, 156, 158, 180, 182, 363, 366, 385, 402, 403, 419, 433, 435 Count Ory (Giacchino Rossini), 39, 357 Cox, John, 39, 373 Craig, Russell, 78, 363, 366, 368, 369, 371, 375, 382, 383, 385, 389, 396, 403, 416 Cresswell, James, 197, 262 Cross, Joan, 18, 20 Crufts, John, 23 Culagh, Majella, 306 Cullis, Rita, 107, 119, 372, 373, 396, 401, 402 The Cunning Little Vixen (Leos Janáček), 140, 323, 331, 367 DALTA (Dramatic and Lyric Theatres Association), 22 Dalton, Gabrielle, 189, 198, 425, 429, 431, 434, 437, 439, 443, 444 The Damnation of Faust (Hector Berlioz), 83, 144 Daniel, Paul, 69, 78, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 93, 95, 100, 101, 105, 107, 108, 112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 142, 151, 383, 384, 385, 386, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 406, 410 Daphne (Richard Strauss), 66, 69, 127, 376 DARE Partnership (with University of Leeds), 10 Davies, Eirian, 91, 375, 388 Davies, Jo, 182, 194, 434, 439, 440 Davies, Wyn, 113, 169, 367, 383, 390, 392, 398, 404, 409, 414, 416, 426, 431, 436, 443

450

Day, Sally, 68, 77, 358, 364, 375, 381 Dazeley, William, 96, 100, 104, 109, 119, 151, 170, 175, 179, 193, 196, 199, 238, 241, 247, 250, 255, 298, 389, 390, 393, 394, 397, 399, 402, 404, 410, 411, 412, 416, 426, 429, 431, 432, 436, 439, 442, 444 Deane, Basil, 43 Death in Venice (Benjamin Britten), 200, 309 Debussy, Claude, 85, 108, 109, 150, 397, 410 Dee, Janie, 138, 411 Delacroix, Eugène, 77 de Lang, Quirijn, 180, 433, 434 Delius, Frederick, 35, 37, 39, 77, 357, 368 Dent, Edward, 20, 70 Diaghilev, Sergei, 140 Dido and Aeneas (Henry Purcell), 31, 33, 168, 197, 353, 425, 443 Djamileh (Georges Bizet), 153, 154, 306, 418 Dobson, Helen, 128 Dohnányi, Oliver von, 110, 123, 151, 189, 194, 386, 391, 397, 405, 408, 435, 440 Dolton, Geoffrey, 112, 178, 180, 189, 366, 381, 384, 386, 388, 393, 398, 428, 430, 433, 436 Don, Robin, 68, 353, 355, 359, 363, 364, 368, 375 Don Carlos (Giuseppe Verdi), 95, 122, 179, 391, 405, 432 Don Giovanni (W.A. Mozart), 3, 39, 61, 63, 87, 90, 128, 130, 156, 179, 194, 196, 220, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 257, 276, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 304, 346, 360, 365, 374, 386, 387, 407, 420, 442 Don Pasquale (Gaetano Donizetti), 134, 383 Doran, Sean, 143, 160 Dorrell, Mark W, 175, 429

INDEX

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 323 Downes, Edward, 39 Doyle, Justin, 199, 432, 433, 443, 444 The Dream of Gerontius (Edward Elgar), 79 Dreyer, Martin, 43, 48, 61, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76, 84, 91, 92, 96, 111, 132, 144, 149, 156, 157, 166, 173, 175, 178, 199 Druiett, Michael, 199, 234, 250, 298, 438, 442, 445 Duchess of York, 73 The Duenna (Roberto Gerhard), 94, 390, 399 Duffy, Carol Ann, 148 Dukas, Paul, 85, 88, 108, 384 Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Béla Bartok), 157, 162, 420 Duke of York, 137 Duncan, Martin, 83, 92, 94, 124, 171, 173, 185, 383, 384, 389, 390, 391, 397, 405, 406, 409, 420, 422, 427, 428, 436 Dunn, Clive, 33, 442 Duprels, Anne Sophie, 149, 170, 181, 188, 415, 416, 426, 433, 434, 437, 439 The Dwarf (Alexander Zemlinsky), 153, 304, 417 Dyer, Chris, 95, 391 Edinburgh Festival, 56, 76, 93, 104, 155, 220, 278 Edmonton Opera, 105 Edwards, Charles, 95, 106, 122, 144, 164, 193, 198, 395, 398, 404, 409, 413, 423, 429, 440, 444 Edwards, Sian, 114 Eight Little Greats, 152, 153, 154, 165, 304 Eliot, T.S., 56 Elder, Mark, 58, 176 Elektra (Richard Strauss), 116, 120, 176, 430 Elgar, Edward, 79

Elizabeth and Essex (Lytton Strachey), 101 The Elixir of Love (Gaetano Donizetti), 66, 135, 163, 358, 365, 410, 424 Ellis, Brent, 71, 367, 377, 408 Emerald Publishing, 11 L'enfant et les sortilèges (Maurice Ravel), 143, 144, 413 Engels, Johann, 153, 173, 174, 417, 418, 428, 429 English Festival Ballet, 21 English Music Theatre, 26, 28 English National Opera (ENO), 2, 9, 16, 17 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 36, 37, 38, 43, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57 58, 70, 76, 77, 78, 108, 117, 119, 120, 123, 134, 141, 143, 147, 149, 154, 160, 188, 301 English National Opera North (ENON), 9, 16, 19, 22 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 311 English Northern Philharmonia (ENP), 9, 30, 34, 140 English Opera Group, 18 English Touring Opera, 29n4, 54n10 Epstein, Matthew, 90 Ernani (Giuseppe Verdi), 112 L'etoile (Emanuel Chabrier), 89, 93, 96, 102, 104, 105, 387, 394 Eugene Onegin (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky), 49, 100, 120, 122, 367, 404 Evans, Anne, 91 Everitt, Anthony, 84, 88, 96, 103 Eyre, Richard, 117, 119 Eyre, Ronald, 80, 81, 382 Fairley, Andrew, 5, 35, 114 Falstaff (Giuseppe Verdi), 117, 118, 124, 131, 134, 170, 401, 408, 426

Kara McKechnie

La fanciulla del west (Giacomo Puccini), 372 Fanning, David, 120 Farnes, Richard, 7, 101, 114, 120, 122, 124, 129, 145, 148, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 173, 176, 178, 179, 181, 185, 190, 193, 196, 197, 199, 200, 228, 229, 279, 324, 333, 335, 336, 342, 348, 349, 395, 399, 404, 405, 407, 411, 412, 413, 416, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 425, 426, 427, 428, 430, 432, 433, 434, 436, 438, 439, 441, 442, 443, 445 Faust (Gounod), 61, 63, 83, 101, 144, 149, 197, 200, 220, 236, 347, 374, 386, 442 La Fenice (Venice), 133 Fenouillat, Christian, 132, 407 Ferguson, Robert, 30, 353, 354, 355, 356, 358, 359, 360, 361, 363 Der Ferne Klang (Franz Schreker), 89, 91, 93 Festival Theatre (Edinburgh), 224, 278 Festspielhaus (Bayreuth), 180, 335 Fidelio (Ludwig van Beethoven), 1, 73, 188, 189, 190, 278, 323, 379, 437 Field, Helen, 69, 103, 361, 367, 370, 372, 376, 377, 381, 386, 387, 394, 437 Field, Tony, 23 Fielding, David, 119, 365, 402 Finnie, Linda, 110, 373, 396, 397 La Finta Giardiniera (W.A. Mozart), 60, 90 The Fireworkmaker's Daughter (David Bruce), 59 Flanders Opera (Antwerp), 93 Flowers, Kate, 51, 356, 359, 363, 365, 369, 373, 385, 387, 394 The Flying Dutchman (Wagner), 31, 38, 43, 56, 77, 182, 355, 363, 381 Follies (Stephen Sondheim), 112 Folwell, Nicholas, 63, 370, 374, 395, 438 The Forest Murmurs, 137, 411 Forey, Christophe, 132

Index

Fortner, Wolfgang, 124 The Fortunes of King Croesus (Reinhard Keiser), 170, 426 Foster, Sir Norman, 158 Foster-Williams, Andrew, 157, 420, 424, 437 France, Jennifer, 319 Francesca da Rimini (Sergei Rachmaninov), 153, 305, 417 Franklin, Peter, 91 Frayling, Sir Christopher, 157 Freeman, David, 56, 68, 69, 96, 375, 380 Der Freischütz (Carl Maria von Weber), 66, 182, 360, 365 Freston, Amy, 180, 182, 186, 423, 424, 425, 427, 430, 433, 434, 436, 439, 443 Freud, Lucian, 308 Friedrich, Caspar David, 189 Friends of Opera North, 25, 106, 124, 132, 140, 165, 224, 275 From the House of the Dead (Leos Janáček), 190, 236, 256, 323 332 Fuchs, Olivia, 149, 156, 184, 415, 420 Fulljames, John, 159, 160, 174, 181, 197, 421, 429, 433, 438, 443, 444 Furtado, Pia, 189 Future Fund, 184, 185 Gann, David, 77, 95, 376, 378, 380, 381 Garfield Henry, Antoni, 125, 405 Gardiner, John Eliot, 73 Gardner, Lyn, 191 Garrett, Lesley, 48, 198, 363, 364, 443 Gavin, Julian, 122, 150, 179, 398, 404, 405, 408, 416, 432 Gawain's Journey (Harrison Birtwistle), 93 Gawn, Caroline, 95, 112, 122, 135, 162, 175, 390, 398, 399, 400, 404, 410, 422, 429, 431

451

Geertz, Clifford, 346 Geeting, Loren, 138, 411, 419 Geliot, Michael, 41, 358, 361, 365 Genoveva (Robert Schumann), 133, 134, 135, 409 Gerhard, Roberto, 94, 390, 399 Gershwin, George, 81, 82, 107, 122 123, 175, 179, 404, 429, 431 Gershwin, Ira, 175 Gheeraerts, Marcus, 312 Giacosa, Giacomo, 68 Gianni Schicchi (Giacomo Puccini), 83, 383, 384 Gibault, Claire, 119, 120, 402 Gibson, Alexander, 26 Gilbert, W.S., 24, 175, 182, 251, 272 Gilbert, Susie, 2, 8, 17n1, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 32, 53, 58, 143 Gill, Peter, 70, 95, 377, 381 Gillibrand, Nikki, 122 Gilmour, Soutra, 188 189, 421, 437 La Gioconda (Amilcare Poncchielli), 93, 97, 132, 391, 408 Giraudeau, Philippe, 327, 438 The Girl I Left Behind Me, 59n12, 184 Giulio Cesare (George Frideric Handel), 193, 236, 440 Glanville, Susannah, 119, 127, 147, 157, 398, 399, 401, 402, 404, 405, 406, 412, 413, 415, 420, 426, 432, 435 Glass, Philip, 171 Glimmerglass Opera (Cooperstown, US), 155 Gloria a pigtale (H.K. Gruber), 111 Gloriana (Benjamin Britten), 101, 106, 108, 114, 118, 128, 140, 151, 164, 230, 311, 313, 314, 315, 393, 401, 406, 412 The Glory of the Garden, 22, 53, 57, 61 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 83, 116, 367, 384, 400, 419

452

Glyndebourne Festival, 82, 92 Glyndebourne Touring Opera, 40, 128 Götterdämmerung (Richard Wagner) Göttingen Handel Festival, 133 Gogol, Nikolai, 188, 307 The Golden Cockerel (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), 63, 372 Goldoni, Carlo, 300 Goodman, Lord, 24 Gorbachev, Michail, 82 Gowrie, Earl of (Grey Ruthven or Grey Gowrie), 52n8 Gozzi, Carlo, 300 Graham, Colin, 25, 34, 48, 354, 356, 364, 366, 376 Graham-Hall, John, 170, 181, 366, 412, 426, 433 Gray, Dominic, 115, 135, 177 Greater London Council, 49 Greco, Emio, 155, 419 Greed, David, 29, 114, 142 Green, Ric, 5, 27, 49, 50, 57, 58, 84, 105, 133, 134, 171, 176 Greene, Eric, 194, 440 Greer, Germaine, 169 Griffiths, Paul, 86, 90, 385, 388 Groves, Charles, 25 Gruber, H.K., 111 Gubbay, Raymond, 153, 154 Gunnell, John, 65 Gunter, John, 71, 361, 366, 374, 377, 385, 386 Guthrie, Robin, 60 Guthrie, Tyrone, 18, 20 Hall, Lee, 190, 191 Hall, Peter, 52 Hallé Orchestra, 141, 167 Halle Handel Festival, 56 Hamlet (Ambroise Thomas), 110, 397

INDEX

Hansel and Gretel (Engelbert Humperdinck), 33, 41, 135, 160, 177, 354, 356, 361, 421, 427 Harewood, George, 7th Earl of Harewood (see also George Lascelles and Lord Harewood), 5, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 45, 51, 58, 61, 75, 77, 78, 90, 96, 101, 105, 110, 124, 132, 161, 163, 191, 192, 200 Harewood, Patricia, Countess of Harewood (see also Lady Harewood), 26, 29, 110 Hargreaves, Brigadier Kenneth, 28 Harling, Stuart, 36, 353, 354, 355, 357, 359, 364 Harris, Margaret, 33, 353, 355, 359, 365, 367 Harvey, Jonathan, 99 Haskins, Matthew, 185, 436, 442 Hassall, Christopher, 107 Hatley, Tim, 92, 390, 397, 401, 405, 409 Havergal, Giles, 157, 186, 199, 375, 383, 403, 416, 420, 436, 444 Hayes, Malcolm, 70, 71, 86, 96 Hayward, Robert, 87, 96, 97, 109, 127, 132, 159, 170, 173, 175, 325, 326, 377, 383, 385, 386, 387, 390, 391, 392, 397, 401, 406, 410, 426, 428, 429, 438, 442 Heal, Bibi, 175, 429, 431 Hegarty, Mary, 84, 136, 199, 384, 385, 387, 388, 393, 394, 400, 404, 406, 410, 420, 444 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 137 Heimat (Edgar Reitz), 180 Herbert, Gillene, 194, 274, 434, 439, 440 Herbort, Heinz-Josef, 7, 8 Herfurthner, Rudolf, 111 Herz, Joachim, 49, 367 L'heure Espagnole (Maurice Ravel), 83 Hewitt, Peter, 126, 127 Heyworth, Peter, 86 Hickling, Alfred, 104, 148, 150, 156, 164, 170, 173, 175, 179, 182, 184, 186

Hickox, Richard, 107, 108, 364, 396 Higgins, Charlotte, 154, 177, 393, 404 Hirst, Damien, 309, 310 Hockney, David, 74 Hodgkin, Howard, 68, 69, 376 Hogan, David, 105 Hogan, Kelly Cae, 105 Holberg, Ludvig, 84 Holden, Amanda, 68, 111, 156 Holden, Anthony, 146, 151 Holley, Louise, 153 Holt, Simon, 124, 405 Hooper, Catherine, 339, 441 Horwood, Craig Revel, 138, 411, 422, 431 Howard, Keith, 171, 175, 224 Howard, Yvonne, 234, 396, 401, 408, 423, 427, 428, 434, 438, 440 Howard Assembly Room, 9, 27, 35, 57, 59n12, 88, 137, 167, 173, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182, 184, 189, 196, 198, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 266, 272, 280, 347, 348 Howarth, Elgar, 38, 119, 120, 357, 362, 369, 375, 378, 381, 384, 385, 388, 391, 406 Howarth, Judith, 107, 381, 383, 396 Hollmann, Hans, 49 Holloway, Robin, 91, 105 Holmes, James, 111, 121, 128, 156, 161, 179, 401, 402, 403, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 418, 419, 422, 423, 431, 440 Hopkins, Laura, 117, 401, 408, 426 Hopkins, Tim, 116, 132, 137, 175, 179, 301, 386, 400, 409, 411, 429, 431, 432 Hopper, Edward, 156 Hosseinpour, Amir, 144, 413 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 69, 90, 111, 119, 124 Huddersfield Town Hall, 79

Kara McKechnie

Hudson, Richard, 140, 182, 381, 411, 434, 439 Huffstodt, Karen, 86, 385 Hunt, Michael, 68, 107, 376 Hutchinson, Lord, 22 Iannuci, Armando, 177 Ibelhauptaite, Dalia, 116, 122, 400, 404, 408, 411 Idomeneo (W.A. Mozart), 144, 147, 414 Illica, Luigi, 68 In Harmony, 198, 228, 229, 230, 335, 348, 349 The Invisible City of Kitej’ (Nikolai RimskyKorsakov), 76 Iphigénie in Aulide (Christoph Willibald von Gluck), 116 Irwin, Jane, 159, 408, 421 Israeli Opera (Tel Aviv), 77 Janáček, Leos, 181, 323, 358, 365, 367, 378, 398, 407, 414, 433 Jacobs, Arthur, 38, 41, 78 Jarman, Richard, 17, 20, 28, 90 Jeffes, Peter, 76, 354, 368, 372, 376, 380 Jenkins, Hugh (Lord Jenkins of Putney), 52n8 Jenůfa (Leos Janáček), 39, 110 111, 144, 146, 168 Jerusalem (Giuseppe Verdi), 83, 383 The Jewel Box (Paul Griffiths/ W.A. Mozart), 86, 90, 92, 385 Joan of Arc (Giuseppe Verdi), 122, 404 Johannsson, Kristian, 46, 364, 367 Johnson, Mary Jane, 63, 372, 379, 382 Johnston, David, 124 Johnston, Jennifer, 337, 339, 438, 441 Jonas, Peter, 58, 70, 90 Jones, Richard, 63, 71, 76, 78, 108, 109, 177, 178, 300, 301, 372, 377, 380, 381, 386, 392, 397, 410, 430 Jonny Strikes Up (Ernst Krenek), 55, 91

Index

Josey, Christopher, 132, 407 Joshua (George Frideric Handel), 198, 257, 444 Judge, Ian, 63, 71, 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 93, 107, 374, 377, 379, 382, 383, 385, 386, 389, 396 Julietta (Bohuslav Martinů), 120 121, 126, 131, 134, 144, 157, 302 303, 307, 403, 414 Julius Caesar (George Frideric Handel), 55 Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling), 96, 100 Kabale und Liebe (Schiller), 112 Kalman, Jean, 148, 165, 415, 423, 424 Karneus, Katarina, 196 Katya Kabanova (Leos Janáček), 47, 128, 130, 167, 304, 323, 329, 365, 378, 407 Kaut-Howson, Helena, 84, 384, 388, 390, 399 Kearley, Robert, 197, 429, 442 Kellessidi, Elena, 197 Kelly, Janis, 129, 132, 140, 146, 149, 178, 387, 390, 392, 399, 400, 407, 410, 411, 414, 415, 422, 430 Kempster, David, 197, 435, 438, 443 Kennedy, Andrew, 166, 424 Kennedy, Michael, 39, 69, 85, 90, 101, 107, 118, 121, 161, 167, 168 Kent Opera, 86, 99 Kern, Jerome, 82, 383 Keynes, John Maynard, 18 Kihlberg, Ylva, 329, 331, 332, 442 Killik, Ian, 29, 30, 119 Kim, Ettore, 106, 395 Kimm, Fiona, 100, 199, 356, 362, 367, 393, 405, 439, 444 King Priam (Michael Tippett), 86, 87, 92, 93, 107, 116, 134, 386 Kipling, Rudyard, 96, 99, 100 Kirk, Nicky, 227n2 Kirklees Concert Season, 167

453

Kitchen, Linda, 104, 371, 382, 383, 385, 390, 394, 395, 399, 402 Kizart, Takesha Meshé, 175, 429 Klein, Beverley, 121, 403, 413, 422 Klein, Suzy, 286 Knight, Gillian, 94, 130, 356, 361, 390, 407, 408 Kok, Nicholas, 155, 168, 169, 419, 425 Koltai, Ralph, 133, 419 Komische Oper Berlin, 56 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 120 Kramer, Daniel, 188, 189, 437 Kraus, Anthony, 189, 427, 434, 442, 444 Kraus, Otakar, 39 Kremer, Annemarie, 193, 197, 262, 277, 350, 440, 443 Krenek, Ernst, 55, 91, 369 Kudriavchenko, Katerina, 106, 395 Kupfer, Harry, 56, 69 Labour Party, 119 Ladders and Snakes, 93 Laing, James, 168, 174, 193, 424, 425, 427, 428, 436, 440, 444 Laing, Stewart, 112, 177, 398, 430, 437 Lancaster, Roger, 64 65 Larner, Gerald, 37, 86 Lascarro, Juanita, 197, 442 Lascelles, George (see Harewood, Lord) Lasdun, Denys, 19 Latham, Keith, 119, 122, 140, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 380, 381, 382, 383, 389, 391, 402, 404, 407, 409 Laughlin, Roy, 96, 111, 360, 361, 364, 379, 382, 383, 386, 388, 390, 391, 394, 395, 396 Lawlor, Thomas, 42, 354, 356, 357, 358, 361, 362, 367, 373, 378 Lawrence Batley Theatre (Huddersfield), 111

454

Lawton, Jeffrey, 119, 379, 381, 389, 392, 402, 422 Lazaridis, Stefanos, 38, 42, 47, 48, 68, 73, 120, 303, 356, 357, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 376, 378, 403, 414 LeBrocq, Mark, 189 Lecca, Marie-Jeanne, 120, 153, 303, 403, 414, 417, 418 Leeds Arena, 160 Leeds City Art Gallery, 160 Leeds City Council (also Leeds Council), 26, 27, 34, 57, 74, 82, 104, 136, 138, 147, 157, 164, 169, 176, 185, 188 Leeds City Library, 35 Leeds City Museum, 160 Leeds City Varieties, 35, 131, 132, 164, 169 Leeds Grand Theatre, 9, 16, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 42, 47, 49, 57, 58, 91, 93, 113, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 134, 136, 138, 146, 147, 151, 157, 159, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 176, 185, 190, 198, 220, 223, 224, 225, 264, 275, 278, 285, 287, 288, 311, 333, 347 Leeds International Concert Season, 167, 333 Leeds Playhouse (see also West Yorkshire Playhouse), 44 Leeds Town Hall, 73, 79, 84, 135, 136, 144, 147, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 190, 191, 195, 198, 199, 220, 224, 333, 336, 340 Leeks, Stuart, 5, 31, 47, 71, 76, 78, 92, 95, 111, 124, 128, 140, 353 Lehar, Franz, 356, 358, 378, 436 Leiser, Moshe, 131, 407 Lepalaan, Helen, 197, 443 Lerner, Alan Jay, 112 Let ‘Em Eat Cake (George Gershwin), 175, 431 Levant, Inga, 106, 188, 395

INDEX

Libby, Patrick, 30, 31, 39, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361, 364 Licata, Andrea, 175, 429 Liliom (Ferenc Molnar), 194 Linacre, Sir Gordon, 30, 37, 45, 57, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 90, 123, 163 Lincolnshire & Humberside Arts Association, 64n3 Lindenberger, Herbert, 6, 7 Linley, Richard, 94 Livingstone, Laureen, 36, 356, 357, 361 Llewellyn, Grant, 151 Lloyd, Phyllida, 90, 93, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 114, 125, 128, 140, 141, 164, 182, 230, 311, 315, 387, 391, 392, 393, 394, 398, 399, 401, 405, 406, 412, 423, 427, 434 Lloyd-Roberts, Jeffrey, 164, 181, 192, 321, 322, 324, 406, 414, 416, 417, 423, 427, 433, 438, 439 Lloyd-Webber, Julian, 228n3 London Palladium, 81, 88 Lowde, Alex, 181, 433 Lowenthal, David, 15 Lowery, Nigel, 71, 116, 144, 377, 386, 400, 413 Lloyd-Jones, Carol, 25, 29 Lloyd-Jones, David, 5, 20, 21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 35, 37, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 91, 93, 94, 103, 132, 141, 300, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 372, 373, 374, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 386, 391, 394 Lloyd-Webber, Julian, 228n3 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 141 Loppert, Max, 67, 77, 78, 82, 85, 95, 116, 118 Lorimer, Malcolm, 100

The Love for Three Oranges (Sergej Prokofiev), 69, 72, 73, 76, 77n15, 79, 82, 100, 300 302, 307 The Love of Don Perlimpin for Belisa in the Garden (Gabriel Garcia Lorca), 124 Love Life (Kurt Weill), 107, 112, 161, 398 Love's Luggage Lost (Giacchino Rossini), 153, 306, 417 The Lowry (Salford), 128, 132, 147, 158, 165, 224 Luce, Richard, 64 Lucia di Lammermoor (Gaetano Donizetti), 77, 380 Luisa Miller (Giuseppe Verdi), 112, 122, 134, 398 Lumley, Joanna, 249 Lyceum Theatre (Sheffield), 87, 157 Macbeth (Giuseppe Verdi), 41, 70, 71, 83, 111, 173, 361, 377, 428 Macdonald, Hugh, 67 Mackerras, Sir Charles, 25, 110, 323 MacNeil, Ian, 115, 399 Madama Butterfly (Giacomo Puccini), 8, 46, 56, 68, 93, 116, 122, 169, 170, 192, 364, 368, 375, 400, 426, 427, 440 Maddocks, Fiona, 121, 124, 136, 140, 141 Maderna, Bruno, 124 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 85, 108 Magee, Garry, 130, 403, 407, 416 Magee, Patrick, 38 The Magic Flute (W.A.Mozart), 33, 54, 56, 61, 103, 106, 144, 148, 165, 179, 214, 360, 369, 371, 394, 395, 403, 415, 425 The Maid of Orleans (Friedrich von Schiller), 122 The Makropulos Case (Leos Janáček), 190, 194, 196, 220, 236, 271, 278, 323, 329, 331, 332 Malouf, David, 99

Kara McKechnie

Les Mamelles de Tiresias (Francis Poulenc), 31, 33, 353, 359 Manchester City Council, 40, 92, 178 Manchester International Festival, 178 Manchester Opera House, 27, 33, 96 Manchester Palace Theatre, 40 Maniaci, Michael, 170, 426 Manon (Jules Massenet), 72, 78, 150, 155, 381, 416 Manon Lescaut (Giacomo Puccini), 43, 155, 362, 416, 419 Mantle, Richard, 5, 57, 59, 64, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 123, 124, 126, 130, 137, 138, 147, 157, 158, 159, 165, 191, 192, 328, 348 Marchant, Graham, 28, 29, 30, 34, 40, 41, 45, 47, 126, 178 Marenzi, Angelo, 51, 369 Maria Stuarda (Gaetano Donizetti), 184 Marinsky Theatre (St Petersburg), 93 Marks, Denis, 90 The Marriage of Figaro (W.A. Mozart), 20, 48, 70, 79, 114, 161, 162, 184, 355, 364, 377, 381, 390, 399 Marschner, Heinrich, 137 Martin, Adrian, 36, 356, 357, 360, 366, 370, 372, 375, 380, 381, 383 Martin, Peter, 215, 216, 218 I Masnadieri (Giuseppe Verdi), 122 Mason, Patrick, 85, 383, 384, 388, 389, 390 Mason, Benedict, 93, 104, 394 Mason, Ruth, 137 Masquerade (Carl Nielsen), 79, 80, 83, 84, 384, 388 Masterson, Valerie, 77, 374, 380 Maxwell, Donald, 61, 77, 107, 124, 181, 371, 372, 377, 379, 381, 382, 405, 422, 433

Index

McAuley, Gay, 2, 7, 227, 265, 281, 283 McBurney, Gerard, 138 McCafferty, Frances, 117, 118, 397, 401, 403, 405, 408, 409, 410, 414, 433 McCarthy, Michael, 73, 379 McDonald, Antony, 62, 63, 67, 108, 184, 372, 374, 397, 410, 419, 435 McDonald, Tom, 45, 78, 90 McFadden, Claron, 132, 407 McFarland, Robert, 145, 413, 415 McKellen, Ian, 28 29 McKenzie, Jane Leslie, 96, 102 McMaster, Brian, 24, 45, 64 McVicar, David, 100, 101, 110, 121, 129, 130, 146, 393, 397, 403, 404, 407, 413, 414 Medcalf, Stephen, 77, 381 Medea (Luigi Cherubini), 114, 115, 399 Meek, Deanne, 146, 414, 416, 426 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Richard Wagner), 132 Mellor, Alwyn, 122, 123, 176, 196, 404, 405, 430, 441 Mellor, David, 87, 94 The House of the Dead (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), 323 Mercer, William, 321 Mérimée, Prosper, 125 The Merry Widow (Franz Lehar), 186, 187, 236, 238 273, 358, 378, 436 The Merry Wives of Windsor (William Shakespeare), 117 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 300, 309 Michaels-Moore, Anthony, 95, 110, 375, 377, 381, 384, 391, 397 Middleton, Alasdair, 171, 181 The Midsummer Marriage (Michael Tippett), 59, 61, 62, 65, 86, 134

455

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Benjamin Britten), 43, 131, 173, 174, 200, 362, 407, 428 The Mikado (Gilbert & Sullivan), 182, 373 Milhaud, Darius, 144 Miller, Jonathan, 56, 147, 182, 395, 414 Milnes, Rodney, 38, 39, 41, 49, 63, 68, 73, 83, 90, 93, 95, 106, 123, 129, 146, 175 Miles, Alastair, 159, 196, 238, 241, 247, 250, 255, 405, 415, 421, 432, 442 The Mines of Sulphur (Richard Rodney Bennett), 37, 38, 356 Minnesota Opera, 108, 134 Mitchell, Katie, 188 Monar, Isabel, 155, 406, 419 La Monnaie (De Munt, Brussels), 34 Monteverdi, Claudio, 401, 424 Moore, Jonathan, 100, 393 Morley College, 17 Monelle, Raymond, 155 Morrison, Richard, 171, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 197, 414 Mountford, Veronica, 28 Muir, Huntley, 104, 394 Murger, Henri, 68 Murphy, Miriam, 339, 443 Mumford, Peter, 62, 67, 73, 129, 199, 279, 334, 379, 425, 426, 427, 438, 438, 439, 441, 445 Munich Biennale, 104, 124 Murphy, Conor, 197, 443 Murphy, Suzanne, 61, 364, 365, 371 Murray, Ann, 73, 353, 433 Music Theatre Wales, 29n4 Nabucco (Giuseppe Verdi), 38, 43, 83, 122, 159, 357, 363, 369, 421 Nash, Councillor Elizabeth, 45, 66, 74 National Theatre, 2, 15, 18, 19, 50, 52

456

Negrin, Francesco, 86, 384, 385, 388, 406 Netherlands Opera, 63, 83 Netherton, Derek, 185 Neudecker, Mariele, 145 Neveux, Georges, 303 New Theatre Hull, 48 New York City Opera, 155 Newton, Alex, 195, 441 Nielsen, Carl, 79, 83, 384, 388 The Nightingale's to Blame (Simon Holt), 124, 405 Nilon, Paul, 72, 84, 119, 121, 133, 136, 147, 166, 170, 181, 188, 197, 259, 260, 302, 303, 304, 307, 308, 310, 378, 382, 384, 385, 387, 388, 394, 395, 401, 402, 403, 404, 409, 410, 414, 417, 418, 424, 426, 433, 437, 442, 443 Nissen, Pippa, 145 Les Noces (Igor Stravinksy), 33, 168, 425 Norma (Vincenzo Bellini), 66, 68, 193, 236, 237, 257, 261, 262, 263, 277, 349, 350, 375, 440 Norman, Daniel, 198, 439, 440, 444 Northern Ballet, 29n4 Northern Sinfonia, 22, 30, 141, 194 Novello, Ivor, 161 Oakes, Meredith, 137, 411 Obama, Barack, 176 Oberto (Giuseppe Verdi), 107, 396 O'Connor, Francis, 150, 171, 416, 420, 427, 436 O'Keefe, Georgia, 156 Oedipus Rex (Igor Stravinsky), 33, 66, 68, 76, 144, 359, 376, 413 Of Thee I Sing (George Gershwin), 122, 175, 180, 404, 429, 431 Offenbach, Jacques, 361, 364, 390, 409 Oida, Yoshi, 200

INDEX

Oke, Alan, 112, 130, 324, 325, 373, 380, 385, 387, 390, 394, 397, 398, 403, 407, 411, 414, 422, 423, 427, 438 Old Vic, 17 18, 44n7 Old Vic Shakespeare company, 17 O'Neill, Dennis, 61, 371, 377 One Touch of Venus (Kurt Weill), 156, 157, 161, 419 Oosterhoff, Hedda-Maria, 310 Opera80, 53, 54n10 Opera Award, 88, 194 Opéra du Rhin (Strasbourg), 134 Opera Europa, 137 Opera Factory, 68, 69, 78, 116 Opera for All, 54n10 Opera North Education, 9, 74, 159, 167, 190, 198, 199, 219, 228, 275 Opera North Projects, 9, 59, 135, 137, 140, 159, 184, 219, 224, 347 Opie, Alan, 159, 164, 396, 398, 421, 423 Orchestra of Opera North, 9, 29, 140, 142, 155, 159, 160, 163, 176, 196, 199, 200, 224, 333, 342 Orfeo ed Euridice (C.W. von Gluck), 155, 419 Ormshaw, Claire, 155, 419 L'Orfeo (Claudio Monteverdi), 135, 165, 166 Orff, Carl, 181 Orpheus in the Underworld (Jacques Offenbach), 33, 92, 95, 108, 132, 361, 390, 409 Osůd (Leos Janáček), 323 Otello (Giuseppe Verdi), 163, 197, 443 Owen Wingrave (Benjamin Britten), 311 Owen, Idlis, 26 Owen Lewis, David, 76 Owens, Anne-Marie, 119, 182, 384, 402, 410, 417, 421, 434, 435, 439

Page, Steven, 121, 182, 403, 408, 413, 435, 439 Pagliacci (Ruggero Leoncavallo), 51, 152, 153, 304, 306, 369, 418 Pagneux, Monika, 140 Palmer, Felicity, 56, 360, 367, 370 Palmer, Peter, 91 Palumbo, Peter, 72, 82 Paradise Moscow (Dimitri Shostakovich), 138, 139, 152, 179, 180, 411, 431 Parry, David, 33, 39, 135, 147, 152, 159, 171, 354, 356, 410, 414, 417, 418, 420, 421, 427, 436 The Passenger (Mieczyslaw Weinberg), 186, 307 Paton, Iain, 123, 157, 403, 405, 411, 412, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420 Paul Bunyan (Benjamin Britten), 311 Pavlovski, Nina, 145, 305, 413, 417 Payne, Nicholas, 5, 22, 23, 24, 27, 45, 47, 50, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66, 74, 78, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 122, 137, 142 Payne, Patricia, 76, 361, 371, 380, 392 The Pearl Fishers (Georges Bizet), 72, 73, 77, 108, 110, 396 Pears, Peter, 18 Pelléas et Melisande (Claude Debussy), 85 Perencz, Béla, 196, 341, 441 Persson, Annalena, 196, 199, 200, 341, 342, 441, 445 Peter Grimes (Benjamin Britten), 18, 34, 80, 157, 164, 165, 167, 173, 192, 200, 311, 315, 316, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 354, 423, 427 Petrushka (Igor Stravinsky), 144, 413 Pfaffinger, Gertrude, 194 Phelan, Orpha, 176 Phillips, Richard, 176, 430 Philogene, Ruby, 125, 405

Kara McKechnie

Phipps, Jack, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 34, 37, 45, 52, 54, 81 Picard, Anna, 148, 168 Pick-Hironimi, Monika, 68 Pickard, Martin, 81, 122, 192, 385, 387, 391, 392, 396, 400, 401, 403, 404, 405, 407, 415, 422, 423, 424, 426, 427, 428, 429 The Pied Piper (Kate Pearson), 159 Pimlott, Stephen, 33, 38, 39, 42, 46, 47, 353, 355, 357, 358, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 371 Playing Away (Benedict Mason), 103, 104, 394 Plaza Cinema, 27 Plazas, Mary, 171, 306, 307, 390, 395, 412, 417, 422, 427, 436 Pohlheim, Jo, 199, 445 Porgy & Bess (George Gershwin), 82 Porter, Andrew, 95, 101, 116, 179 Porter, Cole, 156 The Portrait (Mieczyslaw Weinberg), 188, 192, 236, 259, 260, 269, 307 310, 323, 437 Poulton, Robert, 76, 380, 416, 420 Pountney, David, 40, 42, 47, 49, 58, 63, 87, 104, 110, 133, 134, 138, 152, 153, 161, 186, 188, 237, 303, 304, 305, 307, 309, 358, 360, 365, 367, 372, 394, 403, 409, 411, 414, 417, 418, 422, 431, 437 Potra, Dan, 307, 309, 437 Potts, Ken, 26 Powell, Claire, 30, 47, 354, 365, 391, 395, 399 Prague Opera, 133 Pratley, David, 52, 59 Prévost, Abbé, 150 Priestley Report, 52 Primadonna (Rufus Wainwright), 178 Prince Igor (Alexander Borodin), 45 46, 364

Index

Princes Theatre (now Shaftesbury Theatre), 18 Pring, Katherine, 32, 353 The Protagonist (Kurt Weill), 153 Prowse, Philip, 56, 63, 69, 77, 83, 85, 93, 100, 120, 122, 367, 368, 370, 373, 376, 381, 384, 385, 391, 393, 396, 398, 402, 404, 408 Pryce-Jones, John, 30, 31, 45, 71, 355, 356, 358, 360, 361, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 376, 377, 389 Puccini, Giacomo, 353, 355, 359, 362, 364, 365, 367, 368, 372, 375, 379, 380, 382, 389, 391, 392, 394, 396, 398, 400, 410, 412, 413, 417, 419, 422, 426, 427, 429, 431, 434, 435, 440 Pugh, Hilary, 51, 66, 70 Pulcinella (Igor Stravinsky), 66, 68, 376 Purcell, Henry, 353, 425, 443 I Puritani (Vincenzo Bellini), 61, 371 Purves, Christopher, 133, 400, 406, 409, 410, 411, 414, 419, 421, 423, 427 Pushkin, Alexander, 94, 192 Py, Gilbert, 32, 353, 364 Pye, Tom, 165, 415, 417, 423, 424 Pygmalion (G.B. Shaw), 156 The Queen of Spades (Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky), 163, 192, 439 Racine, Jean, 116 Radamisto (George Frideric Handel), 132, 409 The Rake's Progress (Igor Stravinsky), 61, 373 Rambert Dance Company, 29, 376 Randle, Thomas, 114, 129, 147, 393, 399, 401, 406, 412 Raval, Meeta, 196, 339, 441, 442 Ravel, Maurice, 383, 413 Rawnsley, John, 30, 41, 353, 355, 361

457

Il re pastore (W.A. Mozart), 393, 404 Rebecca (Wilfred Joseph), 48, 366, 378 Rees-Mogg, William, 44, 53, 54, 64, 74 Rejisopera (Netherlands), 144 The Reluctant King (Emanuel Chabrier), 105 Remedios, Alberto, 33 Remedios, Ramon, 33, 354 The Return of Ulysses (Claudio Monteverdi), 118, 401 Das Rheingold (Richard Wagner), 190, 191, 233, 234, 236, 336, 337, 438 Rhymes, Rupert, 24, 25, 26, 27 Richardson, Linda, 162, 415, 422 Richardson, Matthew, 85, 378, 385 Rieti, Vittorio, 124 Rigoletto (Giuseppe Verdi), 164, 355, 361, 389, 390, 423, 425 The Ring (also The Ring of the Nibelung), 342, 347 Risi, Clemens, 6, 218 Ritchie, Ian, 92, 95, 100, 105 Rittner, Luke, 44, 52, 53, 54, 64, 72, 74 RNCM (Royal Northern College of Music), 72, 78 Roberts, Joy, 30, 353, 354, 355, 356 Roberts, Mike, 43 Robeson, Paul, 81 Robinson, Kenneth, 26 Robson, Nigel, 118, 147, 382, 391, 396, 401, 411, 423, 428, 442 Rodgers, Joan, 94, 101, 109, 110, 165, 380, 391, 393, 397, 410, 423 Rodwell, Stephen, 137, 378, 380, 389, 395, 396, 411, 414, 426, 432 Rogers, Richard, 199 Rojas, Rafael, 145, 175, 413, 422, 423, 426, 429 Roméo et Juliette (Charles Gounod), 174, 429

458

La Rondine (Giacomo Puccini), 103, 135, 161, 162, 394, 410, 422 Der Rosenkavalier (Richard Strauss), 38, 144, 146, 356, 414 Rosenthal, Daniel, 2, 15 Rossini, Gioachino, 357, 360, 364, 375, 383, 389, 403, 406, 416, 417, 420 Royal Ballet, 17, 131 Royal Festival Hall (South Bank), 79 Royal Hall (Nottingham), 23, 224 Royal Opera, Covent Garden (ROH), 17, 18, 19, 64, 85, 101, 113, 119, 176 Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, 22 Royal Philharmonic Society, 88, 151, 167 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 52, 81, 115, 132 Royal Victoria Hall (later Old Vic), 17 Rozario, Patricia, 124, 367, 405 Ruddigore (Gilbert & Sullivan), 12, 182, 183, 194, 272, 276, 291, 345, 434, 439, 441 Rudge, Kathryn, 193, 197, 440, 443 Rumstad, Guido Johannes, 184, 435 Rushton, Julian, 68, 83, 94, 108, 110, 116, 122 Russell, Ken, 56 Rutter, Claire, 159, 408, 421 Ryberg, Anna, 166, 424 Sadler's Wells Ballett, 17 Sadler's Wells Opera, 16, 19, 20, 21, 25 The Sage (Gateshead), 158, 190, 224, 333 Said, Edward, 179, 306 Salome (Richard Strauss), 28, 56, 120, 160 161, 367, 421 Salts Mill, 72, 74 Sams, Jeremy, 105, 161, 395 Samm, Ronald, 197, 438, 443 Samson et Dalila (Saint-Saëns), 31, 32, 33, 34, 364

INDEX

Sardou, Victorien, 175 Satie, Eric, 144 Saul (George Frideric Handel), 159, 198, 421 Savidge, Peter, 63, 122, 156, 166, 259, 308, 309, 368, 370, 373, 374, 375, 377, 378, 380, 381, 382, 386, 394, 398, 400, 404, 419, 422, 424, 426, 428, 429, 433, 437, 439 Sawer, David, 177, 430 Saxton, Robert, 90, 388 La Scala (Milan), 95 Scarfe, Dougie, 137, 167 Scarman, Lord, 28 Schiller, Friedrich von, 95 Schindler, Alma (later Alma Mahler-Werfel), 304 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von, 137 Schmidt, Harald, 286 Schneider-Siemssen, Günter, 63, 372 Scholten, Peter C., 155, 419 Schönberg, Arnold, 144 Schouwburg in Rotterdam, 86 Schreker, Franz, 91, 389 Schuman, Patricia, 133, 409 Schumann, Robert, 133, 409 Scottish Arts Council, 57, 147 Scottish Chamber Orchestra, 92, 105 Scottish Opera, 16 17, 20, 26, 34, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 52n8, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 80, 82, 85, 90, 95, 98, 105, 111, 127, 133, 134, 144, 146, 147, 160, 163, 189, 348 Seckerson, Edward, 98, 121 Selway, Emma, 119, 402 Serban, Andrei, 49, 61, 68, 366, 371, 375 The Seven Deadly Sins (Kurt Weill), 153, 161, 305, 418 Shakespeare on Broadway, 131 Sharkey, Nicola, 104 Sharp, Matthew, 148, 229, 415

Sharratt, Nicholas, 180, 417, 418, 424, 428, 429, 430, 432, 434, 436, 437 Shaw, Madeleine, 339, 441 Shaw, Sir Roy, 44 Shepherd, Kay, 194, 434, 439, 440 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 94 Sherratt, Brindley, 179, 423, 432, 438 Shipp, Heather, 12, 175, 178, 188, 412, 429, 430, 434, 437, 439, 443 Shore, Andrew, 76, 83, 87, 98, 117, 118, 132, 372, 380, 383, 384, 386, 389, 390, 392, 395, 401 Shovelton, Joe, 199, 440, 444 Show Boat (Jerome Kern), 81, 82, 88, 93, 383 Siegfried (Richard Wagner), 63, 137, 160, 199, 200, 340, 341, 342, 445 Silver, Jonathan, 74 Simmonds, Victoria, 171, 180, 185, 282, 427, 433, 436 Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, 228n3 Simonetti, Riccardo, 166, 244, 430 Sinclair, Andrew, 16, 22, 23, 33, 44, 52, 53, 57 El Sistema, 198, 228 Skelton, Stuart, 151, 413, 415 Skin Deep (David Sawer), 177, 178, 179, 180, 430 Slevogt, Max, 248 Sloane, Steven, 120, 122, 136, 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 404, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413 Smith, Chris, 119 Smith, Martin, 142, 160 Smoriginas, Kostas, 188, 437 The Soldiers (Bernd Alois Zimmermann), 69 Solera, Temistocle, 122 Something Wonderful, 140 Sondheim, Stephen, 403, 413 The Sorrows of Young Werther (J.W. von Goethe), 180

Kara McKechnie

Sotgiu, Antonia, 339, 408, 441 Sparling, Peter, 30 Sprague, Alexander, 199, 444 St Nicholas (Benjamin Britten), 159 Stephen, Pamela Helen, 86, 89, 193, 198, 385, 387, 388, 390, 394, 440, 443 States, Bert O., 299 300 Stiffelio (Giuseppe Verdi), 112 Stirling, Angus, 26 Strachey, Lytton, 101 Strallen, Summer, 179, 431 Stratford, Stuart, 174, 418, 428, 434, 442 Strauss, Richard, 66, 127, 151, 176, 356, 367, 373, 376, 406, 414, 420, 421, 430 Stuttgart Opera, 83, 149, 286 Suart, Richard, 138, 431, 432 Sue, Chen, 116, 400 Sullivan, Arthur, 370, 373, 434, 439, 441 Sullivan, Gillian, 48, 365, 366, 369, 370 Summers, Jonathan, 164, 171, 178, 193, 304, 305, 364, 367, 369, 370, 408, 417, 418, 423, 427, 436, 439 Supple, Tim, 148, 415, 424 Sutcliffe, Tom, 71, 72, 107, 108 Swanhunter (Jonathan Dove), 59n12, 181, 182, 434 Swan Lake (Piotr IllyichTchaikovsky), 94 Sweeney Todd (Stephen Sondheim), 121, 126, 144, 403, 4115 Symonette, Lys, 161 Symphony Hall (Birmingham), 141 Il tabarro (Giuseppe Verdi), 304, 305, 417 The Tales of Hoffman (Jacques Offenbach), 39, 309 Talevi, Alessandro, 185, 196, 243, 436, 442 Tamburlaine (Georg Frideric Handel), 55, 56, 100, 370, 393

Index

Tanner, Michael, 160, 161, 173, 190, 196, 305, 306 Tannhäuser, 92, 119, 402 Tapp, Anthony, 78 Taylor, Ann, 193, 387, 390, 399, 400, 403, 406, 407, 419, 424, 426, 433, 439, 440, 443 Taylor, Daniel, 155, 419 Taylor, Roger, 29, 50 Taylor, Russell Willis, 141 Telegraph & Argus (Bradford), 28, 34 Thatcher, Margaret, 35 Theater im Pfalzbau (Ludwigshafen), 122 Theatre Awards UK, 194 Théâtre de Complicité, 103 Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris), 195 Theatre Royal (Newcastle), 60, 146, 224 Theatre Royal (Nottingham), 23 Theatre Royal (Richmond), 79 Theorin, Iréne, 151 Thompson, Mark, 382 Thorndike, Sybil, 17 The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill), 161, 368, 370 Tieck, Ludwig, 137 Tierney, Vivian, 98, 130, 392 Timms, Clive, 29, 30, 31, 78, 79, 353, 354, 355, 356, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 373, 374, 375, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 384 Tinkler, Mark, 147, 395, 406, 414 Tinsley, Pauline, 43, 76, 110, 146, 363, 380, 398, 414 Tippett, Michael, 63, 372, 386 Tomlinson, John, 63, 75, 78, 83, 85, 86, 91, 93, 95, 107, 132, 157, 192, 374, 382, 385, 389, 391, 420

459

Tosca (Giacomo Puccini), 25, 73, 144, 145, 146, 175, 355, 359, 367, 379, 382, 396, 413, 429, 431 Touring, 19, 20, 33, 185 Toye, Wendy, 33, 354, 356, 358, 361 Trace (installation), 227 Tracey, Edmund, 28 Transfigured Night (Arnold Schönberg), 144 Tranter, John, 30, 354, 357, 359, 360, 363, 365, 367, 370, 373, 374, 376, 381 Transformation Project, 126, 138, 146, 147, 162, 163, 164, 167, 173, 176 Tristan und Isolde (Richard Wagner), 135, 136, 151, 333, 410 Troilus and Cressida (William Walton), 107, 144, 147, 396 Troilus and Crisedye (Geoffrey Chaucer), 107 The Trojans at Carthage (Hector Berlioz), 67, 70, 71, 72 Trouble in Tahiti (Bernstein), 112 Il trovatore (Giuseppe Verdi), 7, 49, 106, 366, 371, 395 Tucker, Norman, 143 Tunnard, Violet, 83 Turi, Mati, 199, 342, 445 The Turn of the Screw (Benjamin Britten), 59, 185, 196, 236, 237, 264, 265, 270, 436 Turner, Cathy, 218 Turner, Christopher, 245, 442, 443 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 17, 131 Tynan, Sarah, 440 Ultz, 91, 380, 389 United Visual Artists, 177 University of Leeds, 10, 162, 165, 166, 175, 216, 224

460

Valentine, Kate, 180 Vambery, Robert, 161 Van Allan, Richard, 95, 386, 391, 394, 399 Vaughan, Elizabeth, 41, 46, 355, 358, 359, 361, 364, 369 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 192 Verdi, Giuseppe, 355, 357, 358, 361, 363, 366, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 376, 377, 383, 384, 385, 389, 390, 391, 394, 395, 396, 398, 401, 402, 404, 405, 407, 408, 416, 421, 423, 425, 426, 428, 432, 443 Vick, Graham, 47, 49, 56, 61, 69, 73, 74, 95, 151, 363, 365, 366, 367, 369, 371, 376, 378, 385, 391 Victoria & Albert Museum (Theatre Collections), 5 La Vida Breve (Manuel de Falla), 154, 169, 306 A Village Romeo and Juliet (Frederick Delius), 35, 36, 37, 39, 49, 357 Violanta (Erich Wolfgang Korngold), 120 La Voix Humaine (Francis Poulenc), 33, 165, 197, 198 Volksoper (Vienna), 161 Vollack, Beate, 305, 418 Waddington, Henry, 170, 198, 414, 426, 428, 430, 443, 444 Wagner, Richard, 355, 363, 370, 381, 402, 410, 438, 441, 445 Wainwright, Rufus, 178 Wakefield Theatre Royal, 64, 91 Walker, David, 132, 355, 356, 358, 409 Walker, Jessica, 184, 424 Die Walküre (Richard Wagner), 92, 151, 194, 195, 199, 220, 236, 265 267, 279, 286, 338, 339, 341, 441

INDEX

Walsh, David, 61, 364, 371 Walsh, Rebecca, 198 Walton, William, 107 108, 396 War and Peace (Sergei Prokofiev), 25 Warchus, Matthew, 107, 108, 117, 170, 396, 401, 408, 426 Warhol, Andy, 166, 309 Warne-Holland, Malcolm, 128 Warner, Keith, 136, 286, 333, 410 War Requiem (Benjamin Britten), 79 Ward, Anthony, 90, 96, 101, 194, 311, 315, 387, 391, 392, 393, 394, 398, 401, 406, 412, 423, 427, 434, 440 Warhol, Andy, 166, 309 Warner, Deborah, 93, 97, 117, 165, 392, 401, 423 Watson, Anna, 182, 434, 439 Watson, James, 176 Watson, Janice, 179, 432 Watt-Smith, Ian, 31, 353, 362 Weber, Carl-Maria von, 360, 365 Weill, Kurt, 107, 112, 161, 303, 368, 370, 385, 398, 418, 419, 422 Weinberg, Mieczyslaw, 186, 188, 307, 437 Weir, Judith, 99 Weissenstein, Rudi, 198 Welsh National Opera (WNO), 2, 16, 17, 20, 43, 44n7, 45, 49, 53, 56, 61, 64, 67, 68, 71, 77, 82, 85, 90, 100, 110, 112, 117, 127, 133, 139, 163, 215 Werner Nelson, Erik, 195 Werther (Jules Massenet), 43, 150, 180, 181, 363, 371, 433 Wesker, Arnold, 90 West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein), 72, 74 West Yorkshire Metropolitan County Council (WYMCC), 34, 64 West Yorkshire Playhouse, 104, 107, 144

Wheeler, Dominic, 130, 403, 407 Wheeler, Hugh, 121 White, Michael, 119 Wilcox, Michael, 105 Wild, Claire, 143, 156, 245, 248, 413, 416, 419, 433, 437, 438, 442 Wilde, Oscar, 304 Williams, Ceri, 200, 445 Williams, Helen, 214, 407, 409, 415 Williams, Roderick, 130, 157, 400, 403, 410, 419, 420, 423, 424, 428, 438 Wilmington, Sue, 417 Wilson, Carole, 260, 405, 406, 416, 438, 437 Wilson, John, 182, 434, 439 Windmill Primary School, 198, 228, 229, 348 Winter, Louise, 83, 370, 378, 383 Winterhalter, Franz Xaver, 77 Winterreise (Franz Schubert), 145 Whistler, Clare, 182, 434 Woodvine, John, 194, 441 Wozzeck (Alban Berg), 97, 116, 391, 401 Woyzeck (Georg Büchner), 97 Wyn, Fflur, 198, 200, 424, 426, 427, 436, 437, 443, 444, 445 Xanthoudakis, Elena, 180, 432 Yolande (Piotr IllyichTchaikovsky), 93 94, 95, 391 Yorkshire Arts Association, 25, 26, 60, 64 Yorkshire Post, 24, 32, 56, 57, 65, 78, 105, 151, 163 Young, Julianne, 160, 421, 422 Young Vic, 148 Zambello, Francesca, 103, 394, 410, 422 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 417