The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Down in town but up in the country
Facing a dearth of money and an excess of mockery, opera sought new audiences at manors and multiplexes
It’s been a tough time for opera. Austerity has hit hard and taken its toll, but the genre has proved surprisingly resilient and resourceful in its response. Ironically, the more cushioned subsidised sector seems to have felt the pinch worse than the freewheelers – English National Opera, for example, remains hobbled by a white elephant of a theatre and trapped in a vicious spiral of poor management and diminishing productivity, even with a million quid or so doled out monthly by the taxpayer. Pessimists might also claim that audiences have been increasingly exasperated and alienated by needlessly provocative productions, and that opera’s broader public image as something for toffs and seniors is no better than it was.
Yet the overall trends are more complex. Consider for instance, the huge success of HD transmissions to cinemas. If one takes attendance at these showings into account, then my guess is that more people are seeing opera than ever before. This remarkable phenomenon has widened opera’s social and geographical reach and circumvented the problem of prohibitive ticket prices. But – and there are big buts – the expense of the technology involved means that providers such as the Met, Covent Garden and Glyndebourne don’t as yet make any significant profit from the broadcasts, and the virtual reality of the big screen makes the authentically live experience offered to the regions by Opera North, Welsh National Opera and English Touring Opera less appealing, leaving their economic viability on even shakier foundations.
Cliff-edge financial accounts cause Arts Council England to regard opera with increased scepticism. For the percentage of a straitened budget it consumes relative to the amount of social engagement it generates, it is not considered good value and the Treasury’s eyebrows are raised by some of the relevant economic
against it, opera still excites passionate commitment on both sides of the footlights, and throughout the past decade much brilliant young talent has entered the business – step forward Allan Clayton, Lucy Crowe, Sophie and Mary Bevan, Iestyn Davies, Elizabeth Llewellyn, Jennifer France, Soraya Mafi, Natalya Romaniw, David Butt Philip, Nicky Spence, Sam Furness and Elgan Llŷr Thomas, among others. And that’s just singers: there are too many comparably gifted composers, conductors, directors, and designers to list as well. Surely we have no need to fear for opera’s future when it is constantly being recharged and revivified with such an electrifying force of youth.
What were the moments that came to symbolise the really significant trends in classical music in the past decade? One came in July 2015 when Chineke!, the first BAME-majority orchestra in Europe, made its debut on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in front of a deliriously happy audience. Another was the announcement in the same year by Classic FM that 22 of its top 100 “classical” pieces were by – shock horror – film composers. Then there was the launching of the 2019 Proms by a female conductor. And the unveiling earlier this year of a new finale for Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony – made by a mobile phone.
All these show an artistic form in profound flux, buffeted by technological and historical forces. But if I had to choose one single moment that revealed the deep underlying trend of the decade, it would be something much more recent – the decision in October of the most venerable record label in classical music, Deutsche Grammophon, to celebrate its 120th anniversary not in Berlin, the city where it is based, but in Beijing. The DG CEO’s handshake with Long Yu, China’s answer to Herbert von Karajan, marked the passing of an era. The Old World was ceding its dominance to the rising power. Every few months a new concert hall opens in China, and Western orchestras are queuing up to perform.
China’s dominance is partly a matter of economic muscle and sheer numbers – right now there are 100 million Chinese children studying the piano. But it’s also a matter of attitude. They seize hold of the music with a passion that the West can only marvel at, because for them embracing classical music is part of the great adventure of becoming modern. It betokens an enticing future, when
Chinese musicians will be accepted on equal terms with the best of the West.
Here, by contrast, classical music seems to be in the midst of a huge and disconcerting transformation, accompanied by anxious selfreflection. The question “What is classical music?” until recently had a simple answer. It was the procession of pieces great or not-so-great, composed in an intelligible narrative by composers working in a shared language handed down from one generation to the next. Of course the tradition changed, and its boundaries were fuzzy, but you knew where you were.
Some would ask – what has changed? Aren’t we about to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday with a vast jamboree of performances and recordings? Don’t Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Mozart et al dominate the concert hall as they always did? Yes, but that impression of comforting familiarity is the rigid carapace on something which underneath has been shifting over the past decade. The death of Claudio Abbado in 2014 felt like more than the loss of a great conductor; it was the passing of an age in which the grand maestro – white, male, steeped in tradition – held sway.
In their place there’s a new generation of conductors who are often neither male nor white, and whose loyalties are more complicated. The same is true of composers, singers and instrumentalists. Sure, they