What’s the secret of your success?
(JC and MV laughing) We think other people need to answer this for us.
JC: For me, it's about communication. Because we’re such a small company, there’s no politics in getting to me. For people who are working for me, directors, conductors, designers, anyone, it’s a one-step call to get a decision. I always say to designers and directors that you can ask me anything as long as you can accept me saying no. “Can we have another 10 people in the chorus?” “Why? - No, you can’t”. Another day, on Nabucco , they ask for five extra people in the chorus to be circus performers - it makes good enough sense for me, yeah, you can have it. In Holland Park decision making doesn’t get lost in the maze of politics.
We treat the teams seriously. I like people to come up with ideas about the operas. I like to work on it together. I make our directors and designers explain their entire concept to me to make sure it works, so it’s not just one idea that works and the rest of it does not hang together.
I didn’t come from a traditional opera background. I was producing plays in the West End for many years. I like drama to work. I really like directors and singers that perform rather than just sing. I hate that sort of old star standing in the front of the stage, singing and not being part of it. Maybe it’s too idealistic, but I like to think that when you watch one of our operas, you can see proper acting..
What’s especially important, we really have gone out to find new talent. This is the single thing that I’m most proud of. Anne-Sophie Duprels is singing Jenufa for us this year, she’s sung with Garsington and Grange Park, Opera North, New York City Opera and all over the world now. She got her first job with us, Traviata in 2001. Sean Ruane, whose first proper job was here, is now one of our biggest tenors, singing Alfredo this year. It’s a nice thing that people keep coming back to you. Some of them we haven’t discovered but we’ve given them a chance with a bit of buff. Yvonne Howard is one of our favourite singers. She stepped in on a night when someone was ill and she did our Fidelio, which she is singing this summer at the Royal Opera House.
We give people a chance. It also happens with the chorus. Five years ago we had a guy on our chorus, from the Royal College of Music. He did well, he came up through the ranks and did a couple of small roles for us. Last year he sang Ferrando in Cosi fan tutte. He was the first one to go the entire way with us – from chorus to the top lead role five years later. That’s an excessive version of it, but there’s lots of other times where people have done something like that. I think in every show this year small roles are sung by someone from the chorus. It’s because I like people to think they can develop. I know a lot of other companies work differently. In most companies, if you go in as a repetiteur, you’ll always be a repetiteur, never a conductor. You go in as a chorus member, you’ll always be a chorus member. With us, we’ll see what we can do. If you’re good enough, we’ll push you.
A conductor some time ago called us “grown-up opera”. I really liked it. We don’t have too many fights or fuss about silly things. Communication with everyone is very important, trying to get them talk to you in a real way, rather than hiding behind things. When I need people to work a little bit later, I go to the rehearsal room and ask. People work longer, and then I take everyone to the pub. It’s not very complex or deep.
MV: This is why the product is so strong. One of the other reasons for our success is the pricing. People won’t pay cheap prices for rubbish. Also, we’re not fluttering around trying to find a new identity every two years or re-define who we are. We’ve been doing THIS for the past ten years, we are getting sharper and tighter.
We’ve obviously done some good repertoire choices, a couple of bad ones maybe, but mostly good. We developed a very strong thread that we’ve stuck to and people have come to recognise. That's why, when we put an opera like L’amore dei tre re which you’ve never heard of, and you’ve never heard of the composer either, we want you to trust us. As you know, we wouldn’t put any rubbish on.
I think the secret of the success has been consistency, when it comes to what we’re about and what we’re trying to do. The other thing is a bit trite to say, really, but it’s the passion for the work we’re doing. The passion is very strong. So the answer is the quality of what’s on stage, the consistency of message and the passion.
What is you operatic background?
MV: I come from an Italian family. There were bits of opera around the house, Mario Lanza, and so on. But it was never a big passion of mine. I just liked a few bits and pieces, like most people.
I came to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea 18 years ago. The Holland Park Theatre, as it was then known, was just one of the things I had to promote and market. It included Leighton House Museum, art galleries, libraries, exhibitions, etc. It became quite clear that Holland Park Theatre had a potential. At that time, it hosted lots of small opera companies. We started our own company. One day I woke up and realised I was an opera manager as opposed to a marketing manager. We’ve just created and developed the product as we’ve gone along.
JC: I used to use opera recreationally, rather than habitually. I just used to go for pleasure, from time to time, a few times a year to ENO. I would go out, see some plays, a few musical, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see opera. In 2000, I was at a particularly low point in the West End; I wasn’t enjoying it any more. I was working for Bill Kenwright on Joseph and I think he is the best producer in the word, but we fell out quite badly. I just really needed a change. At that time, Mike and other people in Holland Park decided they were going to move to completely self-producing the season. Before that there was one or two operas produced by Holland Park and the rest was done by touring companies. Obviously, they needed someone new to do that, and I happened to be free at the time. They wanted to get through that season. It was in April, I had a job lined up for the September.
I came to do just one season, for six months. I really enjoyed it. The job I was going to do looked so dull in comparison. We talked with Mike, I stayed on, we did it again the following year. It became clearer that they needed a more direct picture. I got more control of the artistic side. Since then, the two of us have been running the company, Mike on the business side, marketing and general management, and me just being left to get on with the shows.
Opera Holland Park has no Administrator.
MV: One of the problems was that traditionally opera companies use an administrator. We had one, but it didn’t work: you’d looked at the budget and it would be 50% above what it should be. What I noticed was that the directors, the designers and the conductors were in charge. And they were telling the Adminstrator what to do. When this person decided to leave, it was an opportunity to re-think the model and get somebody with a completely different outlook. We needed someone who like me would be in charge. We pay the cheques, we take the kicks if something goes wrong, we have to sell the tickets, so we are in charge.
JC: It is partly because of my grandness… As soon as I came, I said I was not having that. I am not an administrator. I get people to administrate things for me. I am a producer. This causes confusion, because in opera a producer is normally what I call a director. I am a producer in the same way they have it in film: someone at the top with people working for him. It doesn’t mean that I am always right and you have to do as I say; it’s more collaborative than that.
The administrator would be told to go and get things. I decide whether we’re going to get it. I don’t reject certain ideas because they cost more money, but I want to see that it brings me something back. If it sounds like a great idea, I will have cuts somewhere else.
It doesn’t always work; obviously, things happen and go over the budget. From talking to people I know that they understand. It’s easier for them, it’s a straighter choice. They also know that I’m not just a producer with a cigar asking where all the money is. I want the best possible product. I know that I could work in many other places and earn a lot more money. But for me, it has to be about getting up in the morning and feeling you want to go to work. And you have to feel proud of what you do.
Has it all gone smoothly, straight from the beginning?
MV: In the early days, say 2000 – 2003, it became clear where the company was going , what it was doing and what it could achieve. There were a few incidents where we made it very clear to people how it is done here. I can remember a couple of times when James had a huge problem with the way a director was working. In order to preserve the integrity of the company, two weeks before the opening he removed the director from the show. We were not going to establish a habit where directors run the company.
JC: It’s also a part of a bigger picture. The company will be here after me, after any directors, conductors, singesr, and so on. It’s got to be about getting it right for the company. We sometimes produce operas I don’t like but I know the audience likes them, and my job then is to make it as good as I can. We appeal to a lot of different people. I’ve got no interest in certain parts of the repertoire, but now and again we attack those bits.
Any bigger mishaps?
MV: We’ve had our usual run of people tripping up on stage; one of the cigarette girls in Carmen, a particularly well-endowed one, falling out of her flimsy dress, and not realising it at all; we’ve had lots of silly things like that. We’ve had singers passing out on stage. We’ve always been miraculously saved. Also, critics have been very supportive. When you produce 60 operas in 10 years, you’re going to have mishaps and problems. But on the whole, we’ve been fairly mishap-free, really.
I can’t think of any great disasters. We had lots of potential disasters, like the Queen of Spades tenor who lost his voice and got replaced by a tenor borrowed from Valery Gergiev, who happened to be in town. We’ve always managed to make a triumph out of it.
Once, it was incredibly hot. We were showing Stiffelio, with John Rawnsley. They had to wear those heavy coats and it was the hottest night ever in London. John got a bit of a heat stroke. He finished his duet and went down on one knee. The conductor stopped the music, we rushed around, John was being helped off the stage. We rushed on stage and asked the audience to give us five minutes. About four doctors came backstage from the audience, including John’s brother-in-law. John was fine but he couldn’t really go back on, he needed to cool down. We cut his Act III aria and Keel Watson, who was singing another role in that production, sang John’s bits from the score at the side of the stage, when he was not singing his own part. The show went on and it was a triumph at the end.
How do you deal with opinionated artists?
MV: I guess that depends who you are. I think the problem is not about artists having opinions, but when and how they express them. The rehearsal room is not an appropriate place.
What was the first opera you ever heard or saw?
MV :The first opera that I sat through was Tosca, somewhere like a Wimbledon theatre.
JC: The first opera I ever saw has been following me around. I don’t even like it, actually. It is Madama Butterfly and it was the first opera I ended up producing. That was my first opera to see and to produce.
People like me are terrible audience members because if I go and see someone else’s shows, they are difficult to enjoy: if it’s great, you are gutted that you didn’t do it - if it’s bad, you think you could have done that so much better. It busts my holiday most of the time, going to operas. It’s a real problem.
Have you got your favourite composer or your favourite period in opera?
JC: I know it’s probably too obvious for most people, but Verdi is my man. For me, he is incomparable. It’s like Shakespeare, you can’t believe that one person was capable of so much. I remember a few years ago, when we were producing Macbeth, I was going to work and thinking what a lovely job I had to do, to produce Verdi and Shakespeare at the same time.
MV:My favourite period is probably late 19th century – early 20th century Italian opera: Romatic, verismo, lyric opera. I’m the one who is finding those rare little verismo pieces, but I am starting to develop a much stronger affinity for Richard Strauss, Weber, Korngold, and sort of slightly more intellectual lyricism. These are exquisitely beautiful works, but before there was something about their pace that never really appealed to me. Maybe as I’m getting older, I start to appreciate things differently.
Favourite composers… there’s a whole stable of them. It’s usually the one from the current season. At the moment it’s Montemezzi, because I’m spending a lot of time with him and I’m looking forward to the show.
I’m a great admirer of Bellini and Donizetti, of Mascagn, though he didn’t have enough people around him to tell him what was bad. But he did write exquisite melodies. He also defined the genre – you can’t do better than that in your life, I suppose.
I’m an admirer of Mozart operas, but not a huge fan. There’s something about his idiom that doesn’t connect with me emotionally at all. I’ve been told off for this, but I just can’t do it. Even though I recognise the brilliance, it never moves me.
Verdi is such a complex and clever composer, very driven and intense. Puccini was very manipulative, but it takes a real genius to make the manipulation work so well. He breaks your heart every time and it’s an involuntary response. I think his best piece is Fanciulla del West. I love the quartet from La Rondine; it’s not just beaufiful, but also very clever. You can see Puccini manipulate his audience, but hey, what’s wrong with that? It’s pure entertainment.. Puccini was quite shallow in many ways, and quite brilliant at it. He creates an incredible dramatic pace in Tosca. Funnily enough, I think Butterfly is one of his worse pieces, although it has one or two moments of his best music.
I’m becoming very, very attached to Strauss and some of the German repertoire. Like James, I’ve been toying with Wagner, listening to bits and pieces, recently to the overture to Parsifal. People like Wagner were just as manipulative of audiences and had rather an overblown sense of importance. Verdi was also a very serious man. But Puccini was a fast-living, car-driving womaniser. I’m not sure Puccini’s genius is fully recognised.
I admire Cilea a lot. I think L’ArlesianaAndrea Lecouvreur should be done more. They are great theatrical pieces.
This season, you are showing three operas rarely staged, one of them totally unknown. It used to been five favourites and one less popular. Why have you changed your formula?
MV: We have tended to do three popular operas, one rarity and two middle-of-the-road operas.
This year, we have Montemezzi, Lakme and Jenufa.
Lakme is never done, but it’s not unknown. Montemezzi is selling well. Jenufa is a new departure for us as a company; our audience isn’t Czech opera friendly - yet. Jenufa is a terrific piece and perfect for us.
There is so much bull**** and sniffyness in the British repertoire planning. It is so disrespectful to audiences. Their problem is that they are not putting on what audiences want. Why shouldn’t an opera house put on Norma? Our Norma was sold out; we sold 6,500 tickets in no time and we could have done it twice over. Nelly Miricioiou was very excited about it and when she did a concert performance at the ROH, she suggested putting Norma in the repertoire there. How can the Royal Opera House NOT have a production of Norma?? They don’t think there is an audience for it. Well, if you don’t put it on, there won’t be, will there!
Who would have thought there was an audience for Iris, when we did it in 1997, an opera not staged in London for 93 years? We sold out and it was so popular, we had to do it again the following year.
Montemezzi was suggested to me by someone who had seen our production of Iris. I found a recording with Domingo and Moffo – and just loved it. I felt the audience wasn’t ready for it then, in 1997. We are doing it this summer and it has sold by now 4,500 of 5,000 tickets available.
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Would you be able to survive just with the ticket income?
MV: That’s a hard question. We couldn’t survive with just the ticket income before we expanded because there weren’t enough seats that we could sell. We could sell a hundred percent tickets and it still wouldn’t be enough. Now we have a bigger theatre, so obviously we have more potential to generate the funds from big audiences. We have a sponsor now, hence Korn Ferry Opera Holland Park, and it’s not the first time we have a sponsor. We also decided to slightly reduce the number of performances. It’s a better financial model.
JC: We are owned and managed by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It‘s a great, unique thing for a local authority to own and run an opera house. They employ us and they underwrite it. It’s pretty enlightened for any local council to own an opera company; it’s very unusual in England. I think they’d support it, but having a sponsor makes so much more sense.
Are the Olympic cuts in the Arts funding going to affect you?
JC: It is not going to affect us at all, because we’re not funded centrally. We get no central funding at all, Arts Council, British Council, Lottery and such. It’s purely our local authority.
MV: And it’s not much, if you’re thinking of millions – it’s about £200,000, which is about 10 % of our turnover. But we do have targets to reduce that, and our ultimate goal is to run a neutral budget.
Are you planning to achieve it with the help of a bigger theatre?
MV: Yes. That’s the plan. We have to grow our audiences and develop the commercial side; sponsorship needs to be continuous. Council financing is a very complex thing and a lot of the problems you get stem from where you budget has been booked. In the past, we had budgets in inappropriate places. When we were funded from the education budget, we had people complaining that they had to choose whether to make cuts in nurseries or in opera. We shouldn’t be played off against each other like that.
That has changed. As an opera company, considering the work we produce and the tickets we sell, we’re very profitable.
The problem is that unlike many other companies, we have to build a theatre from scratch every year. That carries a very heavy cost. That’s the unusual thing about us.
JC: If we had just to run the theatre, we would be easily in profit. But the fact is that every April it has to be built again. All the transport costs, the building costs, pulling in toilets, dressing rooms… If that was all just there, even if we paid a very high rent, we’d still be in profit. The cost of building is incredibly high.
MV: A normal theatre spreads its costs over a whole year. We have nine to ten weeks.
Your ticket prices for 2007 have gone up but they are more staggered than before.
MV: In fact, the largest category of seats, which are the mid-price ones, has come down by £2. There are over 450 of those. We’ve also introduced £10 seats. Our £20 seats came down from the previous £21. The £43 seats are the same as last year and we have an extra 200 seats at £46.
Last’s year capacity was 800 seats. This year the theatre is bigger and 800 seats are at the same price or less than last year.
As you are sold out most of the time, with a 99,8% average last year,you could easily afford to double your prices and people still would come…
MV: That’s not the point. That’s what we’re not about.
JC: I think you need to make a decision about the direction you’d like to go.
We are often assessed with the other summer opera festivals, Glyndebourne, Grange Park and Garsington. Glyndebourne is a bit different, because it’s been around forever and it’s a world-class institution, but for the three of us, we were by far the cheapest. Over a hundred per cent.
JC: We don’t want to raise prices.
We are the only one of the summer festivals that doesn’t have an hour-and-a half interval. We have just a normal theatre interval. We focus on the opera, rather than the social event. You can have a picnic before or you can carry on afterwards. We don’t have a 60 – 90 min. break. The main reason is that singers, like athletes or anyone with a similar level of concentration and intensity, are too disrupted to have such a long break. It’s too disruptive to perform for an hour, then have an hour-and-a-half break, then go back to performing. You wouldn’t ask someone to play Cup Final like that, would you? Or a tennis match.
I just talked to a singer who told me that in a very dramatic opera in the interval he would go out and play tennis for an hour, just to try and keep his energy levels up, even though playing tennis for an hour in no way can prepare you to go back and sing the second half of Madama Butterfly or Traviata.
You don’t want to be seen as elitist.
JC: There’s also a level that we really believe in. I hate the discussion about how opera is elitist. It shouldn’t even be a subject that ever comes up. We could easily make the tickets more expensive and turn the festival into something different.
MV: Exactly. It would make it something different.
JC: Yeah, we could do a hundred pound ticket and everyone wears dinner jackets. And I’m sure we’d be full up. But I think there’s no need for it.
MV: It’s harder to do what we do.
JC: There were many more working and middle-class people going to the opera when they were being written. You could just go and see an opera. Somehow that’s got lost. It should be easy: going to a football, to the opera, ballet, horse racing, to listen to The Beatles or Aretha Franklin. I think they should be equally accessible. The barriers shouldn’t be there. We shouldn’t allow people to put up those barriers. Music, art, entertainment, they should be all a part of having a good time. I genuinely believe it. It’s not too idealistic.
How about those people who come to Opera Holland Park just to have a good time with their friends on a nice summer’s night…
MV: Some people do. But they are not allowed to do anything else but sit and watch an opera. You might have a picnic before. We can’t stop people from having a different motivation for coming, but we’ve just sold out one of the rarest operas in the late Italian repertoire, L’amore dei tre re. That’s 5,000 people not coming for the event. They are coming to see the work. The same I would say about Lakme and about a lot of work that we do.
JC: We also have Jenufa. That’s not a nice, easy night out. It’s an early twentieth century Czech opera about baby killing. It is selling very well. Of course there are people who come just for the event, in the same way as people who don’t care about football go to executive boxes at football, just to have a drink and a nice night out. But the core audience, both at football and opera are there for the show.
You’ll hear us talk about the two a lot because we are both football fans. I genuinely don’t think there’s too much difference from how they’re run and how they’re perceived. Most of the time they’re perceived in the opposite way. People think that football is just a lot of louts, which is as far from the truth as the belief that all opera people are lords and ladies. Neither is true. Football tickets, on the whole, are a lot more expensive than opera tickets.
MV: Absolutely. The other issue about price is that we have developed an audience over the years. And it’s very interesting – we know this for a fact because we get it a lot from people - that our audience is always just waiting for us to become another Glyndebourne or another Garsington. They think there is an inevitability about it and one day it will happen. It’s incredible if we put a ticket price up two pounds, how quickly they say, “This is not Glyndebourne, you know”. It’s not. Really. I think one of the great achievements of James for working with the kind of budgets that he does have to work with, and for us as an entity, is to create a product that sits very comfortably alongside all other opera companies with a certain kind of caveat. To do that, with an absolutely dedicated pricing policy over accessibility is, I think, probably miraculous. And it is utterly unique in this country.
You could say ROH, ENO, ON, WNO do all these £5 - £10 tickets, but you have to remember they all get millions of pounds a year of subsidies. We don’t. Our subsidy hovers around zero, in comparison, although it’s 200,000. And we have 44,000 people coming this year and our top price is £46. For that, they get first-class opera, with a first-class orchestra. Doing this for these prices is nothing short of a miracle.
Whatever way you approach it, it looks miraculous. Whatever analogy you care to take from this industry, how other opera houses do things, and how we have to do things.
JC: We do six new productions in ten weeks. The production staff is me and myassistant Kate. That’s the entire production office. And I’m very proud that we can do six new production a year.
MV: It would be incredibly tedious to reduce the capacity by, say, 500, and put in nice, big, glossy, arm-chair seats, charge £120 a ticket, put in a dress code, bring in Anton Mosimann to do the chef’s cooking and have a nice, easy, black-tie, social London festival. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. We would probably put every other summer opera festival out of business because no one would have to travel out anywhere anymore. But that would be a very, very dull thing to do. It would be boring. Where’s the fun? Where’s the challenge?
I mean, good luck to them, that’s their niche. That’s not a criticism of Grange Park or Garsington. They set up that way in the beginning, they’ve never made any bones about it and none of them get public money. That’s absolutely fine. But it’s not for us.
We’ve got our own niche. We want to genuinely make opera accessible, not just do a cheap version of La Boheme, charge £30 a ticket and make a few thousands on it. We are doing challenging, interesting work and we are educating audiences. Publishers and record companies are benefiting from what we’re doing. Singers expand their repertoire. Sony BMG have just re-released the CD of L’amore dei tre re . It gave the publishers the opportunity to get the work out. We’re making a contribution to the industry – and we’re educating audiences. There are thousands who come to see the rarities that we do and that benefits other opera companies who might want to put that on.
What are you planning for the future? We haven't seen an awful lot of Baroque in Holland Park…
JC: Baroque is not for me. Although we don’t produce opera just for us, I think you have to believe in what you do.
For the last 18 months I’ve been listening to a lot of Wagner, for the first time. I think it’s beyond us at the moment, size-wise and in every way. It’s quite refreshing for me because I can listen to it without thinking how I would do that, for its own sake…
MV: laughing …that will change, that will change!...
JC: …so no Baroque at the moment. But you never know.
James, is it true that you sit through every night of every show that you produce?
JC: It is true that I’m in the theatre every night. I watch at least half of the show from one position and the rest of the time I walk around and look at it. I’m certainly there every night and I certainly see the beginning and the end of every show. I listen to it every night.
What would you like to change in the world of opera?
JC: Without being too drastic or evangelical about it, I’d like to see more people from different backgrounds. It would be nice if you could get into music colleges easier, if you had the talent. There are people who get to a certain age and realise they could have been a singer, but it’s too late, it has sort of by-passed them…
The biggest thing is opera elitism. I don’t mind people saying to me that they don’t like my work. That’s down to them. But when they keep repeating that opera is for the toffs… It’s such a lazy argument. It costs more money to go to a pop concert than it costs to go to the opera.
People often ask me in interviews or at dinner parties, “Oh, do you like opera then?” I always answer that it's like asking me whether I like food or drink. That’s a generalisation I really can’t stand. There’s operas I love, there’s operas I hate. For me, just pushing it all in one, “I hate opera”, or “I like opera” is just embarrassing!
It’s a lazy, lazy argument, to say that you don’t like opera. Have you ever been? Come and see it. If you don’t like it, I’d say you didn’t like that particular show. If you’ve seen four or five shows and you didn’t like any of them, I’d say that you’re probably right, you don’t like opera. But not before you’ve seen it.
MV: I agree. Another issue would be that there are too many talentless people getting big jobs in opera. I see it all the time. There is too small a fraternity doing all the big things. The talent out there isn’t given enough chance. It annoys the hell out of me. There is not enough development of talent.
I see lots of very talented, established people, people with exceptional track record, who are ignored because they’re not part of a clique. I think that still is a very powerful problem in the opera business. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve taken on singers and conductors that were called ‘really difficult’. Everyone of them has been a dream to work with.
There isn’t enough creativity or bravery in the opera business. There are too many people pushing their own agenda, trying to develop a cult of personality about themselves.
There is too much disrespect for the audience. I think you can do very challenging and controversial work if you encourage the audience to see things differently.
And I think that the operatic financial pot is too concentrated. Between them, ROH and ENO get about £50million a year. Give me 1.5 - 2% of that money and I will provide 44,000 with free opera. And between the two of them, they wouldn’t miss that million. I’ve had the opportunity to look at the accounts of large public funding bodies. Some of the staffing levels I find quite shocking. I think the operatic money could be better spent.
OHP is a summer event. What do you do at other times?
JC: The opera season itself is probably the time when we’re doing the least, apart from networking. The rest of the year is busier. Now we are starting to audition for 2008. We’ll be auditioning throughout the season, up to September.
Running Holland Park is a constant thing. The first year I did it in more or less a month. Now it takes a year, but the standards and the profile are so much higher. Many companies have a lot more people working on their production team. We have two. It’s flat-out for us all over the year. After a season there’s probably a dip for a couple of weeks, when we all take a holiday.
MV: And spend our time on the phone.
JC: Immediately after the season I go to Italy and I lie by the pool for a week. By the end of the week I’m on the ipod looking at the next year’s season, thinking who I can get for that.
MV: We start selling tickets in January. We spend a lot of time talking about the repertoire. We have to have the publicity ready in October – November. That gives us one month off. But we have to raise money, so it’s never-ending. We are working two years ahead now and it’s not a nine-to-five job. My hobbies are fencing and boxing, but I haven't had enough time for them. I listen to music a lot, opera as well as non-opera.
And how are the famous Holland Park peacocks?
MV: Well, the peacocks aren’t as bad as the legend suggests. There was one year when they had put a whole new batch of peacocks in the park, younger birds, and as a result you had a lot of young males not accustomed to opera roosting at night and being territorial. They would get up in the trees and think that opera singers were their rivals. But now you hardly hear the peacocks at all.
What we do is a kind of revenge. We serve Peacock Pie in the bar. It’s not real peacock. The pie was created by Lidgate’s, the butcher in Holland Park Avenue. It’s just a beautiful game pie. Apparently, peacock meat is very nice too, allegedly of course. We wanted to start a rumour that every 500th pie had real peacock in it, but it may have upset some people, so we didn’t.
VIEW Opera Holland Park’s page HERE.
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