MY VERSION OF EVENTS....

The eulogy I just about managed to deliver today as we bid farewell to our mother. ---- Before I begin I would like, on behalf of our family, to thank you all for coming today to celebrate Mum's life. I would especially like to thank James and Sarah for organising the music for us today and especially all of my friends and colleagues from Opera Holland Park for giving your time to bring your talent and kindness to honour our mother. We are extremely grateful. ------- I want to speak to you today mum. I haven't really been able to for so long and I want everybody here to listen to what I have to say because there are things that we maybe should have said to you before, but didn't. Lidia Volpe, nee Perillo, you were mother to Lou, Matteo, Sergio and me. You were grandmother to Matthew, Leanora, Marcella, Gianluca, Fiora, Jack and Lily. You were aunty to countless others and a surrogate mother to many, many more. Here with us today are the children of your dear friend ...

A radical plan for opera and the arts What we do is plan just one performance of any opera or play. Perhaps two, just to be safe. We would save a fortune in performance costs. We then film and record it in HD super surround sound and maybe, just maybe, in 3D! We charge people something like a tenner per month to subscribe to a streaming service. They can watch it at home on telly, on their phone, their iPad, their Kindle. Wherever, whenever they like, just as iTunes Match says. Just think of the millions who'll take this up in order to discover opera and theatre; one minute Justin Bieber, the next, Coriolanus or Gawain. They wouldn't have to leave home. They'd love it. Now here's where it gets really clever. We don't make these recordings in a studio but in a theatre! Then we charge people a premium - like, a really big amount of money - to be AT the recording. People will love to tell their friends that "they were there when..." The tickets woul...

You have to admire Jose Mourinho's chutzpah (liberally laced with narcissism). He returns in triumph to Stamford Bridge, spends a season waxing lyrical about his relationship with the fans, gathers a team that is being hailed already as one of the best ever in the Premiership (it isn't, by the way) and then takes an almighty swipe at Chelsea fans in a fashion that is guaranteed to get them hot under the collar. After the hard fought win against QPHa Ha on Saturday, Jose went on the offensive; the floodlights man was targeted and then so were the fans. We were too quiet apparently - I was there and I can't say the noise levels were any different from normal; we got loud when we attacked, sat grumbling when we didn't, started whining when our small neighbours scored and then we went mad when Hazard scored the winner. The only thing with the potential to have changed that would have been Rio Ferdinand's appearance. T'was ever thus, so one has to wonder what Jos...

When we started Opera Holland Park in 1996, one of our primary aims (and in this we were not alone) was to feature the concept of "accessibility" at the heart of the company. In so many respects this concept becomes ever harder to maintain because, well, things don't get cheaper to provide and audiences are ever more demanding. And when a major newspaper reviews a show, the critic doesn't instinctively consider the cost of our tickets. It is further complicated by the great differences in opinion vis a vis what "accessibility" actually means. In our case, we have fallen back on the fact that we provide 1500 free tickets and a few thousand at £15 and nobody in their right mind would argue against the idea that these seats are very appealing. But after that, you pay £50 and more which in comparative terms is reasonable but in real terms is still pricey. Factor in the economic situation and our core audiences (who are not all wealthy) have to start mak...

It took us a while, but we finally announced the 2015 Investec Opera Holland Park season back in September. We were still dismantling the theatre from the last one and it is now a rush, believe it or not, to be ready for the summer. The autumn is filled with drawing up strategies, doing the budgets and yes, getting the money; lots of generous collars get felt. The 2015 line-up is a corker for sure. Il trittico represents the big challenge (I bet you thought it would be Aida huh?) because of the difficulties in sustaining a three hour evening featuring three very different pieces. Having Anne Sophie Duprels in two of them will help and knowing our 2012 Schicchi is a lovely production does too. As much as I love GS, I am thrilled by the prospect of Il tabarro and Suor Angelica, the latter opera's final half being profoundly moving. There is no question that Aida is something of a mountain for any opera company to climb but Verdi did give us some intimacy to work with too and...

A (very slightly) edited version of the talk I gave at the recent - and very interesting - OBERTO conference at Oxford Brookes University. The day was full of far more interesting and scholarly papers than mine; I was just the end-of-the-day entertainment! Reassessing audiences and the "not for us debate" I tend to approach opera from an instinctive point of view. Instinct is really something people like me have almost always  survived on. I read a piece recently in which Kasper Holten, asked whether he was making the right decisions on repertoire, said that in the end, we can really only act on our instinct and our taste. After all, whilst scientific approaches to marketing and running our businesses has a place, if that was the only answer we would all surely be millionaires. So, often, instinct is our greatest tool. And after 25 years of doing this and meeting thousands of opera goers, instinct and experience is something I need to pay attention to. Right now, my instinct ...

Throughout this summer, there have been many debates and flare-ups in the press and on social media surrounding opera. The controversies and resulting soul-searching and argument fluctuated wildly between those who felt a sense of doom and gloom and those eager to be optimistic - sometimes, in my view, with a touch of delusion - about the future and what was good about the developments occurring in the industry. It was interesting, then, to attend the OBERTO conference at Oxford Brookes University yesterday, where an impressive collection of academics and opera professionals delivered papers on a variety of issues and subjects based around the issue of accessibility, access and the age old matter of opera's reputation. You can be sure that the word "elitism" came up quite a bit. Throughout the day, the well constructed programme tried to encapsulate and rationalise the varying pillars of the operatic firmament that occupy all of us ceaselessly. These included crossove...

Having posted a piece that was kind to critics and thus risking opprobrium from all quarters, I suppose I ought to be wary of writing a piece that is sympathetic to the current opera demon, Peter Gelb.  Let us be clear, I don't know what the detailed financial situation at the Met is, I don't know how its budgets are split and allocated, I don't know how much they spend on sets and productions. I just read selective figures used negatively and that is always something we should be wary of.  What Gelb and the Met are going through is probably entirely unique in the opera world given the scale of economics involved and the accusations of mismanagement that are being thrown around are hard to reconcile with some of the realities; it is certainly true, for example, that Gelb has taken the Met's turnover from $222 million to over $300 million in eight years which doesn't immediately suggest mismanagement, but that is as glib and superficial an analysis as anything else I...

Some of you may wish to look away now; I may say nice things about critics. It may not have escaped your attention that I was at Oxford University this week to see my daughter graduate: anybody who has read of my school experiences will know quite how far she has fallen from the tree in achieving what she has. I am obviously as proud as punch. The ceremony - in Latin - was in a place that had me thinking a bit more about the role of the theatre in our lives. The Sheldonian is a magnificent 17th century building, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and has been the venue for the university's graduation ceremonies for nearly four centuries; the history is soaked into the walls. What kept going through my mind as I sat in that place, where tens of thousands of young people have emerged from years of learning (apart from quite how dreadfully I treated my own education) is how everything we are as a nation, as a species even, is related to the arts, culture and learning. And then fo...

I have been doing a lot of moaning recently (I hear you groan). The world of opera has been busily peeing on its own shoes for the past few months and I have found cause to groan variously about social media, sexing up and the objectification of singers, booing, the obsession with digital, body-shaming and whether or not the art form is a class-based private members club.  We spend too much time talking about opera and not just "doing" opera. We seem to be the pariah art form, frightening to, and caricatured by, the narrow-minded, ill-informed media to which our response is often to become strident, cocksure and full of braggadocio, but we still anxiously check ourselves in the mirror, only to dissolve into self-doubt again. Frankly, we are all over the place,  focused on new audiences but not necessarily concerning ourselves with the audience we already have. The latter is occupying me more right now; the changing behaviour and conservatism of existing opera audiences in the...

It has been what you might call a compact weekend of openings at OHP. On Saturday, framed by the weather in a way only the British will really understand, we opened the revival of Will Todd's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in the afternoon and Norma in the evening.  A heatwave is upon us but the dire warnings from the Met office were reassuringly and familiarly wrong and the day was a glorious one - so Alice stayed in her usual home on the Yucca Lawn. In the evening a much grander affair in the form of Bellini's High Priestess wove its magic through the warm and heavy night air. I had a more  personal interest than usual in the show since my five year old daughter Fiora is in it; the party afterwards was quickly and almost entirely dedicated, at her insistence, to her and her friend Davina, also in the production as one of Norma's two children. Nobody in attendance had any choice in the matter and if you think stage-generated adrenalin in singers is a thing to behol...

Yesterday, as the sun blazed, was a good day. More importantly, I heard a blisteringly good sitzprobe of Adriana Lecouvreur .   Yesterday was a feast. I was like a kid in a sweetshop and it was entertaining to see the reaction of people who were in the theatre but who did not know Adriana , including more than one "it's my new favourite opera!". We of course did Adriana before in 2002 so we think we know it - and obviously, we do - but age and experience makes you listen differently and to hear the fluidity of the narrative music, the orchestral colours, the new interpretations of these particular singers and the very length, breadth and depth of the score is still - always - a revelation. Outside the theatre, in the park, whose users we provide regular "free" concerts for during rehearsals and performances, people stopped, gathered, listened and chatted excitedly about this "gorgeous music", as if in shock that they had never heard something so sumpt...

During the months of recent self-examination by the opera world and its constant battles with itself and others, it has been easy to forget about the art itself. I do think that in the operatic firmament, there is a great deal wrong (about which, more soon, elsewhere) and at times it can feel quite apocalyptic but there goes along with that a feeling that whatever "problems" exist, they are temporary, cyclical. I suppose we should know relatively soon towards what fate we are all striding, at turns bellicose and defiant, or anxious, self-regarding, timid and supplicant to the great combined Gods of digital and one dimensional new-audience gratification. Paddy Power should open a book. But what has certainly struck me recently after watching several rehearsals and performances is just how unchanged the art form is on a very simple level. After 25 years of doing it, I am aware that opera is just the same, provokes the same emotions, the same concerns, the same cynical examin...

Some of you may know that at OHP, James has become our resident mixologist, inventing along with his wife Angela, cocktails for each opera. Members of the tasting panel (me and a couple of members of the team) have to go through an arduous process of trying out different iterations of each creation before we give it the rubber stamp....ahem So it is with some pleasure that we learn James has arranged for one of his inspirational figures, Tony Conigliaro to do something similar in the theatre on 30th July. The copy below is hot off the press and hasn't gone on our website yet, so consider this a sneak preview, you lucky people. What's not to like? Very special and very exclusive. Don't miss it. Cocktails and Opera! Opera Holland Park is proud to announce a spectacular evening of world-class mixology and glorious opera.   No list of London's best cocktail bars is complete without mention of Tony Conigliaro. An expert alchemist and award-winning barman, his inventive drink...

I see there has been more booing at The ROH production of Maria Stuarda .   I always wonder why it is that audiences boo.  Opera audiences can get extremely cross about interpretations of their favourite operas, especially the classics. I don't really want to address why they do that - a whole other discussion is need for that - but am more concerned with the need, the irresistible urge even, to be outraged by a director's interpretation and to give voice to that frustration. Personally, I think diminutive, faux-polite applause is far more withering an expression of opinion. Booing is of course our favourite expression of disgust or disapproval. The pantomime booing of Scarpia or any other "bad guy" during curtain calls, followed quickly by the rise in amplitude of applause as a sort of "nah, we were only joking, you were great" is standard practice now it seems, so booing isn't always angry. Having said that, I don't think I have ever heard a chorus...

Someone recently asked me why there was such a big deal about us doing our first Britten opera and it is true that much has been made of our first foray into Britten's repertoire, both by the critical press as well as ourselves.  It may seem odd that an opera company should approach a particular composer with trepidation ("opera company produces an opera shocker") but it isn't terribly surprising. Despite our reputation for lunacies and a long list of scarcely heard of Italian composers we do in fact have quite a wide repertory history that includes Janacek, Tchaikovsky, Menotti, some French romantics and Beethoven. But certain composers we have always been wary of; like the first, hesitant, almost-did-it-that-time attempt  to jump off top diving board at the swimming baths. Strauss is one, Wagner is most certainly another and so is (was) Britten.  Yes, there are question marks about the economics of a composer who will never sell as well as Puccini in a house like ou...

If the persistent talk of arts cuts has done anything, it has prompted a running discussion on what the arts and culture actually mean to this country.  It is hardly surprising that among professional politicians, the debate is generally split along party lines but even there, some have crossed the floor to argue that it is not as simple as slashing the budget for the arts and expecting the wider public to quietly acquiesce. The Culture Secretary and his shadow recently gave similar speeches expounding the value of the arts and education but each featured stereotyping, both laced their words with powerful economic threat. The problem is that whenever we discuss the finances of the arts budget and the consequent cuts, we are offered one dimensional either-or scenarios; "I would rather money was spent on saving lives" or, from the arts side, "we spend billions on Trident", and so the public is easily manipulated. Governments, of any colour, are given to extrem...