WNO 24/25 Season : The cuts bite

[Ein Heldenleben]

https://wno.org.uk/news/our-2024-2025-season?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_cam paign=MKTG2425Announcement&utm_content=version_A

Not their fault but :
this must be their thinnest offering in recent memory. It strikes me that the London based Royal Opera House is moving towards an operatic monopoly - usually defined by economists as happening when one company has 30 per cent of the market.

[mopsus]

I see Bristol has just two performances of Rigoletto and that's it. Contrary to what the website currently implies Il Trittico is getting three performances in Wales, not just one in Oxford!

[Ein Heldenleben]

I see Bristol has just two performances of Rigoletto and that's it. Contrary to what the website currently implies Il Trittico is getting three performances in Wales, not just one in Oxford!

This spring Plymouth is just getting the Night At The Opera highlights show. I see they are doing a film version of the same.

[french frank]

I see Bristol has just two performances of Rigoletto and that's it.

I (heroically!) keep up my monthly DD to WNO, but sadly haven't attended a single performance in recent years. Bristol has seldom got the most interesting productions.

[Serial_Apologist]

I (heroically!) keep up my monthly DD to WNO, but sadly haven't attended a single performance in recent years. Bristol has seldom got the most interesting productions.

What a shame! I happily remember seeing The Death of a Salesman there, with incidental music by Andy Sheppard, and catching Andy in conversation with Arthur Miller, who was well chuffed with the whole production. It must've been sometime around 1992.

[mopsus]

I (heroically!) keep up my monthly DD to WNO, but sadly haven't attended a single performance in recent years. Bristol has seldom got the most interesting productions.

I have enjoyed some of their recent Janáček productions, but have had to go to Cardiff for them.

[Simon B]

https://wno.org.uk/news/our-2024-2025-season?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&amp ;utm_cam paign=MKTG2425Announcement&utm_content=version _A

Not their fault but :
this must be their thinnest offering in recent memory. It strikes me that the London based Royal Opera House is moving towards an operatic monopoly - usually defined by economists as happening when one company has 30 per cent of the market.

Concur on all points. Regrettably, it's no surprise. They are basically trying to do something with almost nothing.

It is easily the thinnest season I can ever recall in terms of both number of productions and actual performances (excluding 2020 etc, obviously).

What choice do they have? They have been adept for a long time at achieving quite a lot with limited resources. It's only a few years ago they were putting on the likes of Khovanshchina and less well-known Verdi plus the usual bums-on-seats stuff all in the same season, regularly. Every so often they would pull off something memorable despite rarely being in a position to get A-list singers or do lavish productions. Die Meistersinger, Prokofiev's War and Peace and more recently The Makropulos Affair come to mind.

Latterly they seem to have been working their way through works with a cut down orchestra (beyond the obvious Mozarts etc) - Ainadamar, Candide, Death in Venice. If you look at the orchestra list, it speaks for itself. There are now around 40 members including no harp, tuba/cimbasso, timps/percussion, only a few cellos and basses etc.

Candide was tremendous, though only performed a few times at a few venues which must make it difficult to amortise the costs. Il Trittico coming up in summer 24 is a bold move in context - presumably blowing much of the budget for 23/24 for just a few performances in Cardiff. It looks like they're taking parts of this forward to tour, but only as either a concert performance or stagings of the better known two of the three.

Essentially, they are still there but it's like watching something quietly vanishing towards a point. What else can they do when each performance mounted probably loses more money, and there's less and less of it available?

It's already reached a point where in terms of permanently established companies with a resident orchestra there's Covent Garden and... intermittent signs of life elsewhere. ENO as we knew it is clearly history. Opera North is retreating in the same way as WNO albeit more slowly, starting from a better place and with less funding starvation because politics. Scottish Opera has existed in a twilight zone for years. None of this is to denigrate what they are able to do - of which I continue to partake when things of interest to me are put on. However, an ever-increasing proportion of what I do see is at Covent Garden simply because it now completely dominates a rapidly shrinking field.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Concur on all points. Regrettably, it's no surprise. They are basically trying to do something with almost nothing.

It is easily the thinnest season I can ever recall in terms of both number of productions and actual performances (excluding 2020 etc, obviously).

What choice do they have? They have been adept for a long time at achieving quite a lot with limited resources. It's only a few years ago they were putting on the likes of Khovanshchina and less well-known Verdi plus the usual bums-on-seats stuff all in the same season, regularly. Every so often they would pull off something memorable despite rarely being in a position to get A-list singers or do lavish productions. Die Meistersinger, Prokofiev's War and Peace and more recently The Makropulos Affair come to mind.

Latterly they seem to have been working their way through works with a cut down orchestra (beyond the obvious Mozarts etc) - Ainadamar, Candide, Death in Venice. If you look at the orchestra list, it speaks for itself. There are now around 40 members including no harp, tuba/cimbasso, timps/percussion, only a few cellos and basses etc.

Candide was tremendous, though only performed a few times at a few venues which must make it difficult to amortise the costs. Il Trittico coming up in summer 24 is a bold move in context - presumably blowing much of the budget for 23/24 for just a few performances in Cardiff. It looks like they're taking parts of this forward to tour, but only as either a concert performance or stagings of the better known two of the three.

Essentially, they are still there but it's like watching something quietly vanishing towards a point. What else can they do when each performance mounted probably loses more money, and there's less and less of it available?

It's already reached a point where in terms of permanently established companies with a resident orchestra there's Covent Garden and... intermittent signs of life elsewhere. ENO as we knew it is clearly history. Opera North is retreating in the same way as WNO albeit more slowly, starting from a better place and with less funding starvation because politics. Scottish Opera has existed in a twilight zone for years. None of this is to denigrate what they are able to do - of which I continue to partake when things of interest to me are put on. However, an ever-increasing proportion of what I do see is at Covent Garden simply because it now completely dominates a rapidly shrinking field.

An excellent analysis.It’s just not artistically healthy for one company to dominate the opera scene in this fashion.

[alywin]

Don't know if anyone has already reported on Melvin Bragg's recent speech in the House of Lords?

"It’s strange that over the past decade the creative industries have grown at 1.5 times the rate of the wider economy. They have contributed billions of pounds of business activity and exports. But again and again these profits drain away and the only begetter, the arts, is left stranded on overdrafts."

An abridged version was printed in The Times, but I don't have a link.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Don't know if anyone has already reported on Melvin Bragg's recent speech in the House of Lords?

"It’s strange that over the past decade the creative industries have grown at 1.5 times the rate of the wider economy. They have contributed billions of pounds of business activity and exports. But again and again these profits drain away and the only begetter, the arts, is left stranded on overdrafts."

An abridged version was printed in The Times, but I don't have a link.

All true - much of the profit drains away to US based multi media combines like the streamers or Sony, Warner, and the European Banijay .Huge swathes of the British media are now foreign owned - they get the added value and contribute nothing or very little to our tax base. But the education of the tens of thousands actors, writers , technicians , directors , musicians (who are essentially world-beating ) is still largely state funded or , in terms of training, done by the BBC and FE / HE colleges. The latter have been cut and cut. A lot of the cost also now falls on the students themselves - thus ensuring poorer people don’t get much of a chance.

[mopsus]

The cuts have bitten deeper and 2025 visits to Bristol Hippodrome and Venue Cymru have been dropped.

[Simon B]

Something which has largely gone below the radar but is rather significant in context:

The remaining orchestra is about to be made permanently part-time with corresponding remuneration cuts. Not sure what the position with the chorus is but it's sure to be at least as bad.

Essentially WNO is much more quietly suffering a similar fate to ENO except without the (nominal?) chance of partial redemption via a notional move to Manchester.

Funding bodies appear to be withdrawing support for opera since they increasingly hold it in thinly veiled contempt on the cliched grounds of "elitism". As such, it's a sitting duck. In so doing they are making it an actual elitist pursuit, at least in terms of ticket prices and ability (or otherwise) to access Covent Garden. So that's all good...