IT’S TRIM UP NORTH
BY THE EDITOR
So, English National Opera’s move to Manchester by 2029 has been confirmed: it’s what had been suspected ever since Arts Council England wielded its axe in November 2022, threatening to defund ENO if the company didn’t move out of London. But ‘confirmed’ is perhaps too positive a word to take away from a details-free press release that left everything as unclear as before. Will ENO indeed be keeping the London Coliseum as a base for its bigger shows, throwing only smaller-scale crumbs to Mancunians? What will happen to those—orchestra, chorus, stage management, technicians—that form the true heart of any opera company, all long established (with homes, children, etc.) in London? But 2029 is a long way off and my prediction is that the move won’t happen: either ENO will have collapsed by then or ACE been shut down. Possibly both. Manchester’s peevish mayor Andy Burnham (‘If you can’t come willingly, don’t come at all,’ he said in November 2022) now swears eternal friendship with ENO, but as an ineffectual former culture secretary who in 2008 himself championed Covent Garden’s ill-fated plan to establish a Manchester base he should know what the pitfalls are. It’s not that more opera in the regions isn’t welcome—of course it is—but as Amy Kerenza Sedgwick, an Equity representative in ENO’s chorus, said, ‘Moving an opera company to Manchester, only to employ people sporadically on freelance contracts, isn’t the cultural investment the north deserves’. Were it not for the government’s so-called levelling-up policy there would be no need to defund London to invest in another city, yet no one seems able to explain how if London (population almost ten million) can’t sustain two opera companies, Manchester and Leeds (a combined five million) will manage. Quite apart from Manchester’s lack of good operatic venues, nobody appears concerned about treading on the toes of Opera North, which understands audience supply and demand in Manchester better than anyone. It would be a double tragedy if Opera North also fell victim to this social engineering. As a former ENO boss observed to me, ‘The city has been chosen without any inclusion of an artistic voice’.
Opera in the UK has of course fallen collateral to a far-right government’s campaign against the country, but it is a long time since ENO did itself any favours. Currently lacking leadership—with no music director, an interim chief executive and an artistic director on parental leave—it is at the mercy of a board readily colluding with ACE’s whims.
In a curious twist, ENO’s chairman Harry Brünjes and colleagues turned up in New York for a company fundraiser at the residence of the British ambassador to the UN held in mid November. It is hard to believe that the large but motley assembled audience would have been inclined to give much money—what was ENO expecting? The fate of New York City Opera has for several years now stood as a dire warning to its London counterpart, and if such a wealthy city as New York can’t—or rather, won’t—support NYCO, what chance ENO? It’s difficult to really know what Team Brünjes thought they were doing there, apart perhaps from getting far away from Manchester.
Opera, February 2024
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