How to enjoy opera on a budget

I am privileged enough to have been born into a family that could afford to take me to the opera. Not often, but we could usually manage once or twice a year. Most people can't do that. Certainly, I'll hiss with poorly concealed envy at anyone who can afford to get a seat at the Royal Opera House on any kind of regular basis. This branch of the arts is not popular at least partly because no-one can afford to see it in the first place.

However, interesting things are happening to the world of opera at the moment. Let's have a look at ways you can enjoy it on stage or screen, without breaking the bank. I'm afraid this post is only relevant to the UK, but it would be well worth you checking around for similar options near you if you're not local.

Live Broadcasts

Isn't web streaming brilliant? We can use it to explore new music, learn how to make things, and, of course, watch concerts live from miles away. This summer, The Guardian is streaming six performances live from Glyndebourne, with its video of The Cunning Little Vixen remaining online until June 22^nd. At the end of last month, a giant screen was erected in Trafalgar Square to show the Royal Opera House's production of La Boheme (further screenings are planned right up until mid-July). Local cinemas in the UK hold regular screenings recorded from the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan and many others. It's not quite the real thing, but this writer reckons opera is best enjoyed in performance.

Fringe Stagings

If you know where to look, there is a vibrant and exciting operatic fringe in the UK. Smaller theatres often play host to small-scale, inventive productions of works both well-known and not often heard. Following the success of Opera Up Close at the 2011 Olivier Awards, the opera fringe is better exposed and populated than ever before. Tickets can be on the pricey side, but still a fraction of what you'd pay to get into a large opera house. And some of them will even let you take your pint into the show.

Listings of all sorts of classical music events can be found at bachtrack.com.

Music School Productions

Most music schools will put at least one major opera each year, and these are a fantastic opportunity to take in a show and get a glimpse of the talent of the future whilst you're at it. Many conservatoires and music schools have fully equipped theatres on the premises, so they'll not hold back on the spectacle unless they have to. And music schools, like most higher or further education establishments, have clubs and societies, so it's worth keeping abreast of any less official groups who put on performances. Our friends at En Travesti have been one such group.

Amateur Productions

The quality of an amateur performance can be pretty variable, but amateur shows can be great for getting a feel of the atmosphere, the story and the music attached to an opera. Again, it can also be a good way to scope out emerging talent. If nothing else, you can guarantee that the cast will be having a jolly good time.

Research!

Even the larger companies will put on public shows, special offers, competitions, or give space to new writers and emerging talent. It's a question of keeping your ear to the ground so that you know when they come up. Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds are great for hearing about this sort of thing as soon as it's announced – otherwise, local radio stations may well also put out announcements about them. It's also well worth joining mailing lists for theatres, companies and opera houses you'd like to go to, as you might find you can get early-bird tickets that way.

It's definitely worth saving up to go to the Grand Opera at least once in your life. But in an age of lightning technological advances, real-time networking and, yes, austerity, getting a flavour of the wonderful world of opera isn't as hard or as expensive as you might think.

Got any more suggestions? Comment and let us know!

Pearl-clutching and contemporary arts criticism

A month ago, Jessie and I took our seats in the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House for Exposure: Opera, a set of "snapshots" from new operas in various stages of completion. Also with us was my mother, who knows her repertory opera rather well - and who, incidentally, is largely responsible for my career ambitions as they currently stand.

As anyone would expect, the output was hugely variable. Jessie and I were particularly taken with Luke Jones' cabaret-jazz influenced A Fetus In America; my mother, with an excerpt from Raymond Yiu's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, made all the more exciting by the influence it drew from Chinese music and literature; and all of us loved the stunning vocal harmonies of Marc Teitler's Sea Shanty, the heady portrait of a famously unsettled writer in Elfyn Jones' The Trial of Jean Rhys, and the unsettling dual narrative of Jamie Man's Kenny and Taiye.

None of these works was perfect. Indeed, we're not even certain any of them are anywhere near completion, or whether they will ever make it to the stage, though we certainly hope so. But, since Better Strangers still holds the ambition of commissioning its own new works, we found the evening inspiring and hopeful, and left full of ideas for the years to come.

Which is why I am slightly alarmed by the media's reception of Judith Weir's Miss Fortune, which premiered at the Royal Opera House's main auditorium last week.

Judith Weir is dear to both of our hearts. Her art songs have challenged us both over the years, and we look to her as a prolific and current example of a female composer. We've been chattering excitedly about going to see Miss Fortune in the coming weeks since that evening at the Linbury Studio, and I know that I desperately wanted it to succeed. Not just because of Judith Weir, but because of the soaring optimism we felt as we left Exposure: Opera. Because of that reinforcement of what we'd known all along - that opera isn't dead, or even sleeping.

We haven't seen the production yet (though we'll certainly talk about it on here as soon as we do), so I'm prepared to allow for the possibility that Weir has work to do on the music and libretto yet. The Guardian's review contains some excellent constructive criticism from someone who has even seen the score. The work was also unfavourably received by critics at Bregenz last year. The opera itself is what it is.

It is not, however, is wholly representative of all new composition, which is where The Telegraph's review tries to place it. It is not conclusive proof that all non-repertory opera is worthless.

"Opera is the only artistic arena in which good money is regularly thrown after bad."

During the editing process for this post, I showed it to my dad, who said "This is reminiscent of some of the crap that was thrown at Pinter when he first started out." A quick check of Wikipedia shows that he is referring to inital critical responses to The Birthday Party, now one of Pinter's best known works.

Indulge me in following the reviewer's vision of an acceptable artistic process, using his same example of Harvey Weinstein's films. Yes, films use data gathered in focus groups to anticipate what their target audience might want to see. How infallible is this policy? How much "good money" went into Scream 4, for example? Or the (admittedly impeccably polished) turd that was Nine? The Brothers Grimm? Yes, Weinstein has some excellent titles to his name. He also has some awful ones, which he made because he thought they'd sell. I don't know how often we, the artistic community, have to repeat this, but commercial viability and artistic excellence are not the same thing. Michael Bay is living proof of this. Half of the popular music Top 40 is proof of this.

Furthermore, what would a focus group in the opera world look like? Who decides what an acceptable audience sample would be? Would it be the same middle-aged rich white people, bored executives and  music students that normally fill the Opera House's auditorium? Would it be geared towards audience development? Would the result be derided as populist, and therefore inferior, as so often happens with new operas and theatrical works? (Spoilers: almost certainly, and I bet Igor Toronyi-Lalic would be first in line with the rotten tomatoes.)

Modern art is about risk. It's not going to be to everyone's tastes. Not all of it will stand the test of time. We can't predict how popular it will be either in its intended setting or in the future. To go back to films, who would have thought back in the 80s that Withnail & I or The Wicker Man would be considered cult classics today? No-one, which is why no money was thrown at them. Wagner's Tannhäuser and Beethoven's Fidelio both flopped at early showings, and these are now considered repertory works. Great art is often divisive. I honestly can't believe I am saying this, here, now, because to me this is all so blindingly obvious as to be cliché.

On Tragedy

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I studied classics before pursuing music. One of the things that has drawn me to opera since my degree is its similarity to Greek Tragedy. Of course, there are comic operas (and Greek comedies, for that matter, which I love just as much and find almost as interesting), but I want to talk about tragedy and the tragic here. I promise that’s not as depressing as it sounds.

Greek tragedy, for me, is one of the most fascinating art forms ever. It’s over 2000 years old, still going strong, and - believe it or not - still relevant. It’s the basis of so many of our stories, even now. Perhaps it’s because it’s hard to improve on a story almost as old as time (as we know it); perhaps it’s because Greek tragedy plays on themes that are utterly universal to our Western world - the relationship between religion and state, the perils of excess and self-denial, the complexities of justice. Most of us worship different gods, these days, but surprisingly little else has changed. For my money, Greek tragedy is the art that comes closest to having humanity at its core.

Opera has a very similar structure to Greek tragedy, and seems to have evolved in quite a similar way. Like the earliest tragedies, the earliest operas deal with mythical (or fictional, or ancient historical) stories, rarely have more than two characters on stage at once, and have long passages of introspection followed by choral commentary. As the benchmark was raised - both dramatically and musically - it became common practice to include several characters on stage at once, engaging in complex and often overlaid dialogue.

Unlike tragedy, however, opera moved away from myth and ancient history to engage with more contemporary writing. In a way, that’s very positive. There are only so many times you can retell a story that’s already at least a thousand years old, after all, and all art must move with the times or be left behind. But, somewhere between its obsession with killing off the main female character and its labyrinthine plots, opera seems to have lost sight of how tragedy really works.

Dead heroines: Dido

Like many of its contemporary works, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas has quite an uncertain history. Popular theory suggests that it was written to be performed at a girls’ school by the school’s students. Scholars like to debate who played Aeneas and where all the tenors and basses came from, though the latter is probably redundant speculation considering that female tenors and basses exist. With our extensive cast of two, Better Strangers’ Aeneas will be played by a woman and sung in soprano tessitura. No surprises there, unless you’re new to this whole project. In which case, hi!

The most famous rendition of the story of Dido and Aeneas comes from Virgil’s Aeneid. As with much Classical mythology, our protagonists appear as pawns on the giant chessboard of the gods. Aeneas, son of Venus and last survivor of the ruling dynasty of Troy, has escaped to sea. After a whopping great storm, he washes up on the shores of Carthage in North Africa, where he is taken in by Dido, the queen of the state. Dido’s having kind of a rough time at the moment. She’s sworn eternal fidelity to the ghost of her late husband; she’s got a country to rule, subjects to feed, and neighbouring tribes to fend away from the city walls and her marital bed.

The gods - particularly Juno, everyone’s favourite antagonist - decide it would be lulzy to make Dido fall in love with Aeneas, incurring the wrath of the Furies and the neighbouring tribes in a single stroke of Aeneas’ heroic wang. When Aeneas leaves for Italy, prompted by Mercury (who stops his ears so he spends, like, a week completely blanking her, which is really uncool), Dido is bereft. She has broken her oath, she has no further excuse not to marry a local chieftain and surrender her kingdom, and her authority is in ruins. She chooses to take what’s left of her dignity and throw herself onto a huge pyre, which is the last thing Aeneas sees when he looks back towards Carthage.

Thank you

We're completely overwhelmed by the response to our funding campaign on Crowdfunder. We've raised a total of £1,255, which will pay for venue hire, costuming, props and publicity, and will go some way towards paying our dudes as well. Any excess will go towards our forthcoming projects, which are based around taking the show on tour in venues and schools across the country.

A couple of you have asked why we chose to use Crowdfunder as opposed to just canvassing via Paypal. Crowdfunder asks project managers to set a target, and funders donate an amount of their choosing towards it. If the set target isn't met, the project doesn't get any money. On some level, this seems harsh - after all, every little helps, right? - but on another level it makes a lot of sense: if the project doesn't meet its target and can't go ahead, there's a mechanism in place to ensure that the managers can't just take the money and run. Being a new company, we felt it was important that our funders could feel secure in pledging their money to us.

Crowdfunder vet the projects thoroughly before putting a bid online. After that, they are more supportive than I could ever have expected - they gave us an extra week when we looked like we might be falling behind, and they allowed us at the end to lower the target so that we could compromise on an amount that would allow us to move forward, even if it's not quite as much as we were hoping for. All this was done at their prompting and not ours. Rose at Crowdfunder support, you're a star. We love you. Mwah.

We would definitely recommend the use of Crowdfunder to anyone else who was thinking of trying to raise money by crowdfunding - as fiddly as the process may look to start with, it's definitely worth it for the credibility of the process and for the stellar customer support we've received. Thanks to them. And thanks to you, everyone who's put their hands in their pockets for us. We couldn't have done this without you.

Fach Passing

Following on from Cloud's last post about singing the 'wrong' music for your 'fach' or voice type, I'm going to look at the issue from a slightly different perspective.

Throughout my singing life, I have had several of those experiences with singing teachers. A recent-ish example – I went in for a consultation with a teacher who knew me vaguely although not well. After I had sung for them for maybe 20 minutes, they looked at me funny, and said, you know, I don’t think you’re a mezzo.

No shit.

I am most comfortable singing up above the stave. I am not as much queen of the high cs as I used to be when I was slightly younger and, on the matter of vocal acrobatics at least, more fearless, but I am absolutely and definitely a soprano.

But, see, there is an expectation not just about what sort of voice type will sing what kind of music, but what kind of voice type will characterise different personality types.

I am also, to put it bluntly, pretty damn butch. Again, less than I was when I was younger and, on the matter of femininity at least, more fearful. I am clumpy, stompy; one of life’s hairy-legged angry feminists. When I find graceful, it is an embodied, earthy kind of experience, not the disembodied floatiness that the inexperienced expect ought to go hand in hand with a high, angelic voice.

Strangely enough, it turns out you cannot judge on appearances.

And yet, the stereotypes are there. Flightiness and floatiness. Or, poise and pose. Mezzos are the ones who are angry, who are earth mothers and drag-kings, who play men and pass, visually if not vocally.

We are coming pretty close to saying - the sound of your voice limits the emotions you can express. Only loud women can be angry. Only gentle women can be in love. Of course, this is an art form where tone is used as a metaphor for content, where emotions are signed and signalled through means other than words. Of course, there is an assumption that anger will not be gentle, that love will not be violent.

We categorise and then give meaning to the categories. I am absolutely definitely a soprano, I said, not three paragraphs back. What does that even mean? I sing high notes, and violent emotions. And fear holds me back from both.

I sing regularly with a bloke with profound and multiple learning disabilities, whose voice glides effortlessly from basso profundo gravel to floating soprano glissandi. Who has never learned to categorise his voice into parcels he is and isn’t allowed to make music with. We duet, across space and understanding. And I do not want to call it inspirational, or freeing, or natural – I am so, so aware of his being relegated to the status of a lesson in a life that counts. But here’s something that’s true. When I sing with him, I am not a soprano. And I can manage graceful, in his company, in that space, where he is freed from constraints of category, and so am I.

My voice has limits. Boundaries. There are things I cannot say, or even sing. Limits of biology, of possibility, and courage. But limits of convention – if high, not low; if butch, not feminine; the imposed binary opposites of gender that radiate outwards into just about every aspect of our life. Those limits are things that can be opposed, deconstructed, thought through or worked around.

What does it mean to pair a butch voice with a femme body, or vice versa? A butch range with a femme tone? I don’t know, and more than that – I can’t find out, without... performance, audience, reaction, conversation. People find it disturbing. I know that from too many stories of the difficulty trans friends get into when they open their mouths and the tone that comes out is unexpected.

I know what it feels to sing as my butch-femme self. It feels right.

And I tell you something else, which you will have heard said before if you are a reader of feminism on the internet. I am tired of watching my tone.

Fach the Tyranny, or The Importance of Being Dramatic

Hey, you! Yes, you! Do you like music? Do you like feminism? Do you like fun? Do you have a spare fiver? If you do, please donate to Better Strangers on our Crowdfunder page!

A lot of people ask me how I came to be an opera singer. The answer is long and complicated, but can be condensed down to this: I’ve been doing it since I was little; I’m good at it; and it Just Made Sense.

WonderKid!Clouds was pretty full of herself. I was told, back then, that I was something special - that I had an exceptional voice which would bring me great success. I still get told that I have a lovely voice. The one thing that they don’t tell you when you’re an idealistic little kid is that having a lovely voice doesn’t actually get you all that far.

It will surprise precisely no-one when I say that all voices are different. In classical singing, we refer to different voice types as fãcher (singular form fach). As well as Soprano/Mezzo/Alto/Countertenor/Tenor/Baritone/Bass, there are further classifications within each pitch group: soubrette, lyric, coloratura, dramatic. A very, very basic analysis goes as follows: Soubrettes have small, light voices and do best in early music through to Mozart; light lyrics can extend through Beethoven into some Romantic repertoire; full lyrics and coloratura can sing the really famous stuff; and dramatics sing Verdi and Wagner. Essentially, the difference between soubrette/light lyric and dramatic is the difference between a choirboy and the woman in the horned helmet.

I am a soubrette soprano, which periodically gives me a bit of an identity crisis. See, lyric or coloratura is where the money’s at. Mozart still gets performed reasonably often, but early music is a bit of a niche market. Which is a shame, because I think it’s glorious, but that’s another debate for another post. Much as I love early music, I also love some of the later romantic repertoire and would dearly love to sing that on a stage for money. No dice.

I hesitate, here, to say that my voice is “different”. All voices are different. Jessie has a very different voice to mine, but the thing we have in common is that neither of our voice types is particularly easy to market. In my case, there is one practical reason why I won’t get hired to sing Puccini anytime soon: my voice isn’t very loud. It will grow, I’m told, with practice and confidence, but as it stands my voice would never carry over an orchestra in a large venue.

(The obvious answer might seem to be to use a microphone. However, aside from the fact that it’s Not Done, most conventional microphones cannot broadcast the dizzying heights of a soprano voice. Believe me, I was in a rock band.)

So I’m not going to be Mimi any time soon. That’s a shame. Can I start practising now, so I can be prepared for when I am ready?

The response, at this point, is divided. If I ask my singing teacher, I am rewarded with a frown and a sharp intake of breath. Oh, no no no. Too big. You’ll hurt yourself. If I ask my vocal coach, however, I am rewarded with an encouraging smile and the promise that I’ll get there really soon - all it will take is plenty of practice and an increase in confidence. Mixed messages, much? There’s clearly no universal law that states that She Who Is Soubrette Will Break Her Voice With Lyric Arias, so whom do I believe?

Practical considerations aside, there is one thing that confuses me about a soubrette attempting bigger repertoire. In these days of orchestral reductions and, yes, microphones (where the venues can afford super expensive ones), I sometimes fail to see why I should be quite so firmly discouraged from trying it out. Sure, I’d be a silly choice for a big opera house production with a full symphony orchestra, but for a little fringe production with a piano or string quartet?

There seems to be this idea that singing certain repertoire with anything less than the ideal voice is bad and wrong and will sound horrible. The quality of my voice, however - the thing that reportedly makes it so pleasant to listen to - doesn’t change, whatever I choose to sing with it. What’s wrong with taking a few risks once in a while?

I’m excited about Ah! Forget My Fate because I get to do just that. I’ll be branching into repertoire I’m usually advised against singing. I’m not going to break my voice on it, because I’ve been doing this long enough to know what is and is not safe for me. I’m just going to sing it, the way I know how, and see where it takes me. If it really does sound awful and wrong, I’ll have learned something about the way these things were written. If it sounds all right, then maybe I can come back onto this blog next month and start really challenging these ideas about what opera “should” sound like. Because, really, why not?