British opera has a fight on its hands

By Nicholas KENYON

In a year when our major opera companies fought tirelessly to withstand the impact of cuts to their funding from Arts Council England, the quality and variety of work they produced was, under the circumstances, astounding.

The primary victim was English National Opera, originally ordered to relocate from London or lose all its public funding; skilful lobbying ensured that it managed to restore at least some of its activity at the Coliseum. Earlier this month, it unveiled an outline scheme to move its base to Manchester by 2029, although the details remain to be negotiated, including how substantial a season it can continue to mount in London.

In 2023, ENO produced work that ranged from the superlative (a revival of David Alden’s creepy production of Britten’s Peter Grimes) to the controversial (Marina Abramović’s self-indulgent 7 Deaths of Maria Callas), but it had to embark on a process of reductions to staff across the organisation, including its orchestra and chorus, which led to the resignation of music director Martyn Brabbins.

ENO’s survival against the odds masked the damaging reductions to other companies, notably Welsh National Opera, which did not fight back effectively against the cuts to its touring in England; and Glyndebourne, which cancelled its touring programme for 2023, replaced by a short home season in the autumn. Of the publicly funded companies, Opera North survived reasonably intact to celebrate the three-decade reign of its general director, Richard Mantle, who retired this month.

Of all the operas I saw during the year, three new pieces stood out for their power: though utterly different, all were vividly staged and performed. Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, at the Royal Opera House, was a searing reflection on a mass shooting, set to dreamlike, eloquent music that felt all the more poignant when the ailing composer died in June. On a different planet of sardonic satire, Jonathan Dove’s Itch, at Opera Holland Park, took a popular children’s book by Simon Mayo and turned it into a witty reflection on climate change and other contemporary woes, sharply plotted and sung. First seen at Aix-en-Provence, George Benjamin’s eloquent vision in the beautifully scored chamber opera Picture a Day Like This came to the Linbury Theatre. Other significant new works included Sarah Angliss’s Giant, at Aldeburgh, and Bushra El-Turk’s Woman at Point Zero, at the Linbury.

Both London houses embarked on new stagings of Wagner’s massive Ring cycle, always regarded as a peak of any company’s output. ENO’s, originally planned as a collaboration with the New York Met, may have stalled for lack of resources after this year’s Das Rheingold. Covent Garden blasted off at full strength with a Rheingold from today’s most in-demand opera director, Barrie Kosky, boldly conducted by Antonio Pappano in his last Royal Opera season before he moves to lead the LSO. Meanwhile, among the plucky country-house companies, Longborough Festival Opera concluded its Ring cycle with an extremely effective small-scale Götterdämmerung, and promises a full cycle next year. Grange Park Opera contributed to the Wagner-fest with a heartfelt Tristan und Isolde, effectively based on early visual designs, conducted by Stephen Barlow.

However, it was Kosky who provided the stand-out production of the year in his deeply affecting staging for Glyndebourne of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, about a company of nuns caught up in revolutionary France, who pay with their lives – superbly sung by a cast led by Sally Matthews, and conducted by Robin Ticciati, who had to survive a Just Stop Oil protest in one performance (ironic for an opera company that installed its own wind turbine a decade ago).

A successful BBC Proms season took the Poulenc to the Albert Hall, and gave the UK premiere of the 97-year-old Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s opera based on Beckett’s Endgame. Best of the new productions from around the UK was Scottish Opera’s outstanding staging of Puccini’s three one-act operas Il trittico, directed with typical professionalism and flair by David McVicar.

Our leading companies once again produced thrilling spectacle – but is anyone thinking of the future?

In the earlier part of the repertory, now an essential element in all opera-house programmes, the leaders were Mozart’s youthful Mitridate, at Garsington, Gluck’s Orfeo paired with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, at the Grange Festival, in Hampshire, and David Pountney’s ingenious reworking of myriad scenes by Purcell to create his ecoopera Masque of Might, for Opera North. This managed to be both innovative and sustainable, part of a “green” season using recycled sets, costumes and props. English Touring Opera’s Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi was, alas, less striking.

For all the hits, there were inevitable misses, and I hope never to see again Glyndebourne’s messy Don Giovanni or Holland Park’s fauxglitzy La Bohème, and most of all, Welsh National Opera’s badly translated and amateurishly staged The Magic Flute.

As pre-pandemic levels of audience attendance and enthusiasm return, opera must, like every other art form, adjust. There should be new small-scale work, new patterns of touring, different offers for new audiences. But this all needs to be conceived within a new strategic policy; so far, the Arts Council has lamentably failed to discuss or develop one. Above all, there needs to be a realisation that some of the most thrilling musical and dramatic experiences are offered by large-scale opera – and that needs committed funding and sustained support.

Dialogues des Carmélites

Glyndebourne

Barrie Kosky’s staging of Poulenc’s tale of nuns caught in the turbulence of revolutionary France was intensely moving.

It barely feels like an exaggeration to suggest that classical music is under siege. Hardly a month has gone by this year without news of yet another cut or closure. In March, the BBC set the ball rolling (or, indeed, swinging), with its announcement that the BBC Singers, one of the world’s great choirs, were to be disbanded just as they were gearing up for their centenary in 2024. Less dramatic but no less damaging was the threatened cut of 20 per cent of the players at the BBC’s English orchestras.

There was a huge wave of protest, including a moving display of support from European choirs, and a letter from America’s most distinguished living composer, John Adams. It suggested that listeners around the world understand the importance of the BBC as a musical patron, even if the BBC does not. Steadfast only in its indecisiveness, the BBC then backtracked, promising to work with the Musicians’ Union to find a different solution to both issues. Rumour has it the BBC Singers will be saved with the help of private money, though nine months on, there’s still no certainty.

It proved that if people care enough, the indifference and outright hostility of the organisations charged with fostering classical music can sometimes be overcome. But not always: the excellent contemporary music group Psappha, the Leeds Lieder Festival and the esteemed chamber orchestra Britten Sinfonia all lost their grants from Arts Council England. Psappha folded soon after. Britten Sinfonia is fighting for its life, as is Leeds Lieder. The wonderful Lammermuir Festival of top-rank chamber music lost its grant from Creative Scotland.

Not every casualty was the result of cuts. A remorseless rise in costs forced Northern Ballet to disband its touring orchestra in favour of recorded music, while longstanding funding issues led to the cancellation of the summer school and festival at Dartington, in Devon, which has attracted luminaries such as Igor Stravinsky and Nadia Boulanger during its 75-year history.

Less visible but no less important is the apparently terminal decline in the uptake of music GCSEs and A-levels, the sidelining of classical music in universities in favour of pop and music tech, and the scarcity of music lessons for the less well-off. Kathryn McDowell, managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra, warned in June that classical music risks losing out on “talent”, as a musical education increasingly becomes the preserve of “those who attended an elite private school”. The closure of the music department at Oxford Brookes University, where Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood was once a student, is the latest victim of a slow fade-out of the subject from higher education.

But beyond the state and subsidised sectors, there was some cause for optimism. Consider Apple, which at the beginning of the year launched Apple Music Classical, a bespoke streaming app that takes the genre seriously by treating a symphony as a symphony – and not as a “song” – and offers intelligent accompanying background information. That’s not the action of a company which thinks the art form is dying.

A different sort of evidence of classical music’s continuing appeal is the success of the feature films Tár, which traced the stunning ascent and awful fall of a fictional power-mad conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, and Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s glorious study of the American conductor Leonard Bernstein.

LSO and BBC Singers

Royal Albert Hall, London The BBC Singers responded to the threat of disbandment with a heart-stopping rendition of Poulenc’s Figure Humaine. Simon Rattle and the LSO matched it in the same Prom with a sublime performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Academy of Ancient Music

Royal Albert Hall, London

In the Proms performance of Handel’s Samson, Allan Clayton was tremendous as the hero. But Brindley Sherratt as the Philistine Harapha was so splendidly villainous, he almost stole the show.

RSNO and Edinburgh Festival Chorus

Usher Hall, Edinburgh Chinese composer Tan Dun proved his skills as a conductor are second to none by shaping his own epic Buddha Passion with consummate skill.

Christine Rice, Kate Royal and Julius Drake

Leeds Lieder

The contrast between mezzo Christine Rice’s wry, worldly wisdom, and soprano Kate Royal’s desperate yearning in Kurt Weill’s Youkali – joined by pianist Julius Drake – brought a special magic to Weill’s Nanna’s Lied.

This tells us that the fascination with big personalities, and the combination of egotism and selfsacrifice needed to achieve greatness in classical music, hasn’t diminished. Some may decry this as the reduction of a noble art form to personality cults, but wasn’t it ever thus? The success of Handel’s operas owed as much to the star soprano or castrato as to the composer’s sublime music.

Talking of big personalities, Daniel Barenboim continued to conduct throughout the year, despite suffering from a serious neurological condition. Another famously prickly figure, John Eliot Gardiner, chose to retreat from public view after losing his temper and allegedly punching a singer after a performance.

An older musician who enjoyed an Indian summer in 2023 is onetime “experimental” composer Gavin Bryars. In his 80th birthday year, he refused to simply bask in the cult status of his 1970s classics, such as The Sinking of the Titanic, and toured a programme of recent, beautifully euphonious and not at all experimental pieces with his eponymous group, which will finish with a retrospective concert at London’s Barbican next Tuesday.

Ends

Shah used his family’s arrival from India in the 1960s as a microcosm for multicultural Britain, in an award-winning, star-making, tear-jerking hour, back in London from Jan 22.

Ahir Shah

Lorna Rose Treen

Skin Pigeon

A girl guide staging a bloody revolution and a film-noir femme fatale are among the (many) hilarious characters in Treen’s supremely silly debut.

Andrew O’Neill

Geburah

A mix of Izzard-ish surrealism, “arise, comrades!” politics and good old-fashioned nonsense. No hour this year packed in more belly-laughs.

Julia Masli

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

In the underground hit of the Fringe (which comes to London from Jan 30) a clown solves the whole audience’s problems, one hapless volunteer at a time.

Ikechukwu Ufomadu

Amusements

With his smart tuxedo and smooth 1960s TV-anchor delivery, US absurdist Ufomadu seemed a man out of time in his classy UK debut.

banging nonsense. You didn’t have to agree with O’Neill’s proposed solution to the nation’s woes (bloody regicide, via occult heavy-metal ritual) to find plenty of food for thought amid the madness.

Most of these names will be new to many readers. As for the big tours in pricier venues: some were surprisingly good (McIntyre, Russell Howard), some disappointing (Jack Whitehall), some dismal (Ricky Gervais), but by and large they were – like Mike Birbiglia in his West End show about learning to swim – gently treading water, going through the motions. Sometimes, too much success can kill innovation.

It’s a grim irony that the biggest comedy story of the year came from a TV documentary: the Russell Brand investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches sparked a discussion about toxic behaviour in the comedy scene of Brand’s 2000s heyday, and whether much has changed since then. Countless comics were approached, but only one – Daniel Sloss – agreed to speak on the record about Brand (who denies the claims). If there’s a culture of silence, there are complex reasons for that, as lawyer-turned-comedian Alice Fraser wrote in The Telegraph. Her own show, Twist, highlighted how touring can put female stand-ups in positions of danger. It’s been a good year for audiences, but until this industry becomes safer for its acts, comedians won’t have much to laugh about.

Irealise the irony that the imminence of the season of goodwill should coincide with a rare excursion by this column into serious ill-will. However, a recent glance at the so-called “special stamps” – they are increasingly about as special as a bag of cold chips – issued in 2023 by Royal Mail filled me with rage.

What were called “commemorative stamps” used to celebrate significant anniversaries in our history and important aspects of our culture, such as great buildings, composers, writers, landscapes, industries and, perhaps above all, great people. Now, they increasingly portray cheap contemporary fads and fashions, some with not even a tenuous connection to British culture or history. They have for the most part ceased to be educational and become simply a means for Royal Mail, which we know is in desperate straits financially – it posted an operating loss of £1 billion last spring – to siphon money from the parents of children who see these trashy products advertised and, because of their connection with something they enjoy, lobby to be bought them.

In 2023, Royal Mail had a whopping 15 special issues (it is a miracle it stopped there, I suppose). Some were traditional – the King’s Coronation, and the legend of Robin Hood, for example. Some commemorated important anniversaries – the centenary of the Flying Scotsman and the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush. Two reflected British nature: one, a set of flowers; the other, examples of river wildlife; and there were the Christmas stamps. But of those 15 issues, more than half reflected contemporary interests that would not have come anywhere near a “special” stamp a generation ago.

One can decide for oneself in what degree the other eight reflect anything enduringly significant about Britain: Iron Maiden, X-Men, Blackadder, Warhammer, Terry Pratchett, Paddington, Shirley Bassey, Harry Potter. It is not as if there was a shortage of serious anniversaries: the centenary of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, for example; or the 75th anniversaries of the NHS, and of the Berlin Airlift. Today, December 16, is the 250th anniversary of the Boston

Tea Party. It is also 250 years since Captain Cook became the first person to sail south of the Antarctic Circle. It was the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death – yes, I know he wasn’t British, but neither are X-Men, an invention of the American Marvel comics. If Royal Mail seeks things that attract the young, why did it miss the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death? And, given anything goes, how did we avoid stamps commemorating the centenary of the foundation of the Disney studios? Perhaps the franchise holders were charging too much.

I have searched the internet in vain for news of what delights we can expect next year: Barbie must surely be due a stamp set, or Lego, or any other children’s toy one cares to mention: or yet more Harry Potter, Star

Wars or Marvel superheroes, all of whom have had several outings. There will doubtless be nods to serious matters, to avoid complete scandal: 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the births of Winston Churchill, Ernest Shackleton and Gustav Holst, so perhaps if someone realises Churchill was actually of more significance than a Marvel superhero, or Holst of perhaps even more musical heft than Shirley Bassey, they might even be commemorated. Nato will be 75 years old; it will also be 75 years since the publication of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; Wilkie Collins was born 200 years ago, the same year the National Gallery was opened to the public, and the predecessor organisation of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was formed (the RNLI itself followed in October 1924). Frankly, it would be shameful for Royal Mail to ignore any of them.

The King personally approved the dignified, straightforward design of the definitive stamps that have for the past few months borne his image. It is in keeping with his strong aesthetic sense and his idea of tradition: His Majesty understands that Britain, however much it may have changed, remains an old country with deep roots and a substantial population who have a clear idea of their own history and culture. If Royal Mail is to be allowed to keep its adjective, His Majesty should not hesitate to summon the chief executive and tell him the carrier needs to buck up its ideas of how it reflects the country it purports to serve.

His great-grandfather, King George V, perhaps Britain’s greatest ever stamp collector, understood the aesthetic and civilising importance of the little labels that bore his image. He would turn in his grave at today’s trash, and our present King should intervene without hesitation.