Graham Vick
As the opera world mourns Graham Vick, one of its most talented, innovative and inspiring directors, conductor Alpesh Chauhan remembers his friend and mentor in the company of Richard Bratby
Conductor Alpesh Chauhan pays his tribute to the beloved opera director, with Richard Bratby
Any opera company is a community. But few take that idea quite as far as Birmingham Opera Company (BOC), whose bold site-specific productions expand to embrace international artists, amateur performers and (more often than not) the entire city. It’s a team effort on the biggest and bravest of scales. Everyone is committed; everyone is vital. So how does a company like this react when, in one devastating, unthinkable instant, it loses one of its most inspirational members? BOC’S founder and artistic director Graham Vick had been preparing this summer’s production of Wagner’s Rhinegold for over two years. Rehearsals were just getting under way when news arrived that he had been hospitalised with complications arising from Covid-19. On 17 July, he died.
Two weeks later, on 30 July, Rhinegold opened, directed by Vick’s long-term Birmingham collaborator Richard Willacy. But as the company’s music director Alpesh Chauhan explains, that was never a foregone conclusion.
‘It was devastating for all of us,’ he tells me. ‘We knew he was ill, of course, but we were also sure he would come back. But then it got more serious. And then at the end, after he passed, we gathered everyone in the company and said, “Look, we can’t make you sing after this news. Let’s have a chat.” We all sat round in a circle outside the rehearsal venue on a very sunny day – the day after the news – and Richard said, “We’re just going to open the floor to you guys. We know that it’s fresh, but what but do you all think? We’re not going to make any decisions.”
‘I really respected that, because this is a company of friends. Graham brought me in.
He’s known Richard for ages: they were almost like brothers. The singers – he’s responsible for many of their careers. The lighting designer and the project manager were all people who’d been collaborating with him for 40-odd years. And everyone echoed the same sentiment, because we all knew exactly what Graham would have said: “This is not about me. This is about what we do, and the role of this company. We’re here for the
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Vick inspired BOC to do things that international opera houses dismissed as unfeasible
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people of Birmingham – to keep giving them this stuff”. Yes, he’s passed away – but to think that Graham would have wanted us to stop is just…’
Chauhan falters. He can’t find a word for it, and anyone who has ever attended a BOC production will have felt the same way. Vick was a force of nature. Under his artistic leadership BOC did things that international opera houses dismissed as unfeasible, under conditions in which conventional wisdom insisted that any opera was impossible: marshalling a volunteer cast of hundreds in the first UK production of Verdi’s Othello to star a Black singer in the title role; rescuing Tippett’s The Ice Break from critical oblivion, and doing it in a derelict factory; and, of course, the 2012 world premiere of Stockhausen’s supposedly unperformable Mittwoch aus Licht, for which BOC persuaded the Civil Aviation Authority to close the airspace over the West Midlands so four musicians could play live from airborne helicopters. Two decades of eyeopening, life-enhancing achievement, all rooted in Vick’s determination to break opera out of what he called its ‘ghetto’ and make it as urgent and as inclusive as it deserves to be.
And now he’s gone, aged just 67. It’s still hard to process. ‘When I spoke to the orchestra in the first rehearsal, I got tearful,’ says Chauhan. Enlisting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as part of BOC’S extended artistic family was typical of Vick’s ambition for the company. He made no distinction between untrained community performers and a major professional orchestra – or indeed the worldclass cast, including the baritone Eric Greene and the mezzo Chrystal E Williams, that he recruited for Rhinegold. ‘When the volunteer performers joined us, they were crying as well,’ says Chauhan. ‘They aren’t professional musicians, but they’re people of the city whose lives have been touched by Graham, people who didn’t know classical music at all, and who have gone on to take part in these huge operas. You see that, and you realise that of course we have to go on.’
So Rhinegold went ahead, in a transformed Symphony Hall: as vast, as uncompromising and as electrifying as anything BOC has ever done. Amidst it all – and suddenly at the head of a company whose shared loss seemed only to heighten the intensity of their performances – Chauhan conducted his first ever Wagner opera. A debut Rhinegold is the sort of challenge that would make any young conductor apprehensive, even in ideal circumstances. But Vick was emphatically not the sort of opera director who expects his conductors to shut up and beat
time. Chauhan – who was appointed BOC’S music director in 2020 after stepping in, lastminute, to conduct their 2019 production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – is mourning both a friend and a mentor.
‘Graham knew that I was just starting out as an opera conductor, and he was in all of my music rehearsals for Lady Macbeth,’ he reflects. ‘We did it together. If there was an issue musically, or with a thread of the story, he always went back to the score, back to the music. If we had to change something in the libretto, he’d always know exactly what worked for a singer and what didn’t. He was completely inside the score. He never took over. He was always at the end of the phone for me: “Right, Alpesh, I’m here. What can I help you with?”. I realised, in a matter of days, that this was the most inspiring man I’d ever worked with.
‘And then straight away, after the last performance of Lady Macbeth – at the post-show party, in fact – he said “Wagner would be good for you. Have a think about Rhinegold.” I’ll always remember the phone call when he asked me to be music director, just over a year ago now. He said, “Look, I really want you to be MD, because I think that you really get what we do and because, being from Birmingham, it means more to you than it might do to other people.” He really gave me the best possible opportunity to do something that would work for me in my first year here. I just didn’t expect or want it to happen without him.’
Still, unimaginable as it would have seemed even two months ago, BOC has already staged the first production of its post-vick era. The show did go on, and of course the show will go on – though the company will need to take time to come to terms with its loss. (There’s little time to grieve when you’re about to put a substantial slice of the Ring cycle on stage.) ‘Once the final performance of Rhinegold is over, I think it will really hit us that Graham has gone,’ says Chauhan.
And then? If Vick’s sudden death has demonstrated one thing, it’s that BOC has the imagination and the artistic strength in depth to take his vision forward on its own terms. Rhinegold was never intended as part of a full Ring cycle – Vick liked to defy expectations and his next BOC project was going to be another eye-opening, once-in-a-lifetime surprise.
There’s every reason to suppose that it will still be exactly that. Vick’s absolute dedication to creating opera with, and for, Birmingham’s wider community is the only indispensable ingredient, and he left plenty of that to go around.
‘Working with Graham, that passion was just so strong,’ says Chauhan. ‘He wanted people to come to the opera; for it to be live and visceral. Of course, we can build concert halls, get governments on side, go to receptions, all those things. But the work that Graham did was unique. He bypassed all of that: he went into communities that never had any involvement with opera and drew them in to experience all that hope, all that life, all that vitality, all that excitement. And OK, maybe there’s a little more noise in the audience, but who cares? Those people came back, and they keep coming back, and then when Graham passed away they cried, because he was a vital part of the Birmingham community. It’s been really tough, but at the same time, we all know that we have a duty here – to keep that alive.’