Classical Music

Look through Time Out's listings and in the theatre section you will find an amazing volume of ‘fringe’. This is the bedrock on which our big national institutions and commercial ventures are built. Each week, all kinds of people pour into the National Theatre, devouring material and performances by artists who acquired their skills in the several hundred ‘Fringe’ and ‘Off West-End’ performances each week. Visit the classical and opera section however, and you will find no more than half a dozen operas, most likely written more than 100 years ago and packaged to appeal to the unadventurous conformist. While there are at least 100 London venues dedicated to small-scale theatre or new writing, there isn’t a single one for small-scale or new opera. Feature continues

When it’s good, opera can be easily the most consuming, absorbing, thought-provoking and human of art forms. Music, movement, text, drama, design and dance all come together to create a richly sensual, heightened experience. The balancing of all these elements is a hugely skilled job, without doubt something that only comes with experience. Most of the great names of opera (Mozart, Rossini, Verdi etc) produced a huge volume of works, building their great masterpieces on the foundation much youthful stumbling; their lessons were learned from close contact with paying audiences. But where is there nowadays for operatic youths to stumble?

Diva pitch: Julia Sporsén in 'Dreamlives'

Tête à Tête, the company I run, came into being partly out of a need to share the very intense feelings in the rehearsal rooms of our great national companies, diluted once productions moved on to their enormous stages, but also entirely thanks to the support and stimulation of Tom Morris, former artistic director of the Battersea Arts Centre, now associate director at the National Theatre, at his opera festivals. The focus at BAC has rightly moved with the passions of its current artistic director, David Jubb. Meanwhile, a whole raft of other nurturing organisations has collapsed in the last 10 years: the ENO Studio, Bridewell Theatre, Covent Garden Festival, and many others.

At the moment there’s a definite sense, backed up by funding and programming support, that the opera of the future needs attention. So there are laudable initiatives like Operagenesis at the Royal Opera House, and the Jerwood Opera Writing Course at Aldeburgh. The focus is pretty much entirely on authors, though, and as long as new opera is nurtured by ‘experts’, rather than audiences, the final output will inevitably be for experts, rather than for a broadly based public.

Taking risks is crucial to the development and success of any art form. Yet unlike theatre, our system of subsidy for opera is now so top-heavy that – beyond our big national companies – there is nowhere else funded to make opera in London. And the sums of money flying around our national companies make the stakes so high that they are understandably extremely risk averse. But at the same time, these bigger national companies desperately need a seed-bed for new talent; not just performers, but every kind of creator (producers, administrators, designers, directors etc).

In my own job, my immediate predecessors became the leading lights of the form (David Pountney, Graham Vick, Nicholas Hytner, David Alden, Keith Warner, Elijah Moshinsky, Steven Pimlott). Nowadays, the stakes are too high to allow small cogs in the machine a chance to take the helm. Instead we get a long series of stellar directors from other fields, who usually flounder. Opera desperately needs to regain its self confidence, to make its own stars rather than leeching off the successes of other art forms.

Over the last year, Tête à Tête has organised a series of playful matchmaking events for creators of opera, based around speed dating and line dancing, each culminating in spontaneous performances. We’ve found a huge enthusiasm for such events, a great crowd of artists and producers hungry to come together and find an outlet.

With that experience under our belt we’ve taken over the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for three weeks in August, where, with very little money, we will present world premieres, works-in-progress and jamming sessions involving 30 composers and a dozen new companies, and where you can sample three different performances in one evening. Some will be brilliant, some may not go any further, but there will be a chance to see a lot of possible futures, and to be in at the beginning of something. And, at least for a few weeks, the classical and opera listings will show a thriving fringe.

Tête à Tête: the Opera Festival is at the Riverside Studios, Aug 9-26 (020 8237 1111/www.tete-a-tete.org.uk).