MY VERSION OF EVENTS....

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...