MY VERSION OF EVENTS....

I'm prepared to accept that I am anti-social. I don't much like people around me, close to me, and certainly not in significant numbers. By significant, I mean greater than five. This may strike you as odd if you have seen me at OHP surrounded by patrons, fulsomely socialising, but please be assured, as the saying goes, I'm drowning, not waving. But it's work. It's habitual and it's just what I do, an act I have perfected over decades and there is a kind if silent terror bubbling away beneath, even when I'm telling everybody to piss-off. It's a terror - or perhaps a profound discomfort - that rises in crowds and situations you might find normal.  I furiously ask myself 'what the bloody hell are these people doing HERE?'. So it is with something akin to frantic haste that I retire to sunnier climates once the season is done, to find some peace, tranquility and a calm space into which I breathe a desperate sigh of relief. This year, one w...

Where do you feel at home? Is it the house in which you live? The city in which you live? The town in which you grew up? A country in which you spent your formative years? Where your friends are, or your work? Could it be a country that you have never lived in? And just what does 'feeling at home' mean anyway? I've been wrestling with this whole idea for at least two years; I had always kind of wondered about it, argued about it with friends and family, but in truth, I have never really felt fully at home in the UK, despite my upbringing there. It isn't a conscious, nationalist thing whereby I have a forced, manufactured connection to the country of my parents' birth (Italy) but is more a visceral, emotional sympathy with all things associated with the place. 'At home' is literally how I feel when I arrive there. In fact, the whole matter is becoming obsessive and I have even written a couple of chapters of a potential book. Right now I am in Sicily, an ...

Myself, Rob, Adam and Harry from the "Footy to Verdi' film will be joining 21 other singers from diverse backgrounds to lead the singing of Abide with Me at the Emirates FA Cup Final on 27th May. The choir has been put together by tenor Sean Ruane's  CHANT Productions on behalf of The FA Collective singing is something we have all done at one time or another in our lives: at school, church, weddings, funerals, during the national anthem and, of course, at football matches. Hymns have a special place in the hearts of any nation, perhaps because of religion or just national pride. How many of us name 'Jerusalem' as their school hymn? Indeed, so prevalent is that piece in our society, so all encompassing is it's role as the country's favourite,  I even know a Scottish church in London where it is permitted to be sung at weddings. Sport and singing are intertwined and have been for many years. Football and rugby fans know this better than most,  a...

Since the Brexit vote, and especially since the recent Autumn statement, there has been something familiar nagging at me; the remarkable refusal of Brexiters to accept or acknowledge the facts set out by the government and in the OBR's forecasts. It reminds me of something, a feeling I have had before. I know that the expression post-truth annoys a lot of people, but it is a thing, it really exists. People, for whatever reason can knowingly refuse to accept bare facts when it suits them. It isn't a new phenomenon at all. I am bound to say, moreover, that I have tended to experience it in a malign sense, when the things people want to believe are unconscionable or driven by prejudice of one kind or another. Last night I remembered where it was that I had last seen the phenomenon and it was an experience that left me astonished at the time, but which also provoked in me a genuine disgust for my fellow citizens. I am afraid it is an unpleasant parallel scenario, but it was pro...

I am currently in Italy, high in the Picentino, lapping up the sunshine and whatever sauce is left on my plate (yesterday's lunchtime Pasta Amatriciana would have been swabbed up with whole loaves of bread had there been enough of it) but I still find myself drawn to Twitter and the world outside. And it isn't only to post pictures to make you all jealous either; I read an excellent piece by John Allison this morning ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opera/what-to-see/warning-this-opera-may-cause-offence/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter ) in which he spoke about the recent trend for warning patrons about the content of productions. I have to say, we have only ever done this when we have had concerns about participants in our free tickets for young people - as much for the sensibilities of their parents as for the children. Despite John's argument, when a character has his throat cut and there is arterial spurt splattering the walls, an 8 year old could easily find...

Football parlance is never far from the surface at OHP. "It is the hope that kills you" is one cliche that comes easily to most football fans; it means that it is often better to have no hopes or dreams for your team so that they can't ultimately be dashed. As we went into October of 2015 as an independent company, I suppose that expression came to mind more often than any other. We have hopes and aspirations for the company - not, it is true, based entirely on speculation, since we have been at it for a while - but there always exists the question, even for manifest optimists like us, that what you predict will happen may not come to pass. I think it was the author Terry Pratchett who said that opera was just hundreds of things NOT going wrong, and he was pretty much on the money. The most profoundly appealing aspect of opera is that it is indeed a human product and humans are properly dodgy beings, but this is also what makes it so terrifying. And this applies t...

It has been an interesting couple of days on twitter; I have had two prolonged discussions with people who are evidently committed opera goers, but who both appeared to harbour quite virulent belief in the idea that opera is elitist. Both conversations revealed that whilst the general population is polarised on the matter of 'high' arts, those already converted appear to be divided within it. The first conversation centred around our free ticket schemes. A critic had mentioned meeting two boys at a performance of Fledermaus who were on the scheme. Both, she said, appeared fully engaged and had told her they would definitely be coming back. A twitterer doubted that such schemes were useful (although we did end up discussing subsidy and who was paying for such free tickets). When we set the scheme up many years ago, the idea was simple; the best way to encourage life-long interest in opera is to give young people (from the age of 7 in our case) the chance to experience it, a...