Tête à Tête's latest production is Blind Date.
It's been a very interesting year for Tête à Tête. Last year we did two shows by two composers, both very big. They were both the end of very long processes. We found that were spending a lot of money and a lot of time on the work of two people. It was great. We made beautiful shows, proper operas. It was fantastic. But it felt like this year it was time to be very different. We wanted to work with more artists.
Towards the end of last year we had a very crazy evening. I'd sent lots of emails to composers and librettists and asked them to have a speed dating evening, so they can all meet each other. We did it so that there were a hundred people and they each met up to ten different people. So, say, if you were a composer, you met eight librettists, a director and a designer. It was all very structured. You met for four minutes. What was extraordinary, 45 of these people wrote two short operas together in eight minutes. They were then photocopied, rehearsed with the singers and with the orchestra. Then they were staged and an hour later they were performed. So a huge number of people came in and had this bizarre cross-fertilisation.
We definitely found that it was a really good thing to work with lots of people and do cheap things and instant stuff, to get them working together. In a way, Blind Date is the culmination of that year.
Since then we've done another evening of line dancing, which was real fun. Everybody was line dancing and when I said stop, composers, conductors, librettists and directors had to stop and change partners. There were about 60 people together. It was very random and uninhibited.
In summer 2007 we organised the Tête à Tête Opera Festival, which had 25 different performances. Most of it had come out of the speed dating and line dancing party. Through this process Blind Date came into shape. That's how it's got its name: putting people together and seeing how they get on; putting different pieces together and seing how they get on.
Blind Date is about making opera alive and useful, quick and instant, enjoyable and accessible, not over-complicated. You don't need great expertise to come and enjoy it. Though, that's not to say it isn't challenging.
I think it's very interesting to capture composers in their early stage, introduce them to opera this way. As a Staff Director at English National Opera I assisted on a series of opera by composers taking their first steps. That would be
a production where the composer in his fifties was invited to write an opera because he was so important as composer, with no demostration of his abilities or experience in the theatre. Quite an interesting phenomenon. It's happening at the moment. We have no composers working in opera any more. In the WNO leaflet for the James MacMillan opera he says that now it is down to us to put the theatre back into opera. His actual quote is: "Composers now don't have the same strong relationship with the theatre as Wagner or Strauss, who were employed by opera houses and embedded in the working of theatre. With The Sacrifice, we needed to put the theatre back into opera." Have you not heard of Jonathan Dove? Or Paul Clark? Or Will Todd? There's a great pile of people who are actually writing opera all the time...
That's exactly the kind of situation that Blind Date is designed to prevent. We need to make a future for opera by opening it up to the artists as well as the audiences, not getting hold of very grand people and doing clever, enormous things that take ages and cost a lot. Also, we need to make audiences for this new work.
How different is Blind Date from Jerry Springer the Opera?
I think the difference is that the musical standard is much higher. The standard of singing and the sophistication of the instrumentalists is something that people who do Jerry Springer could never do.
But the moment we try to make opera more accessible, or less traditional, we slip into the musical theatre, would you agree?
No, I don't think you're right. I think opera IS accessible and when you do traditional opera, it works. The problem comes when you start trying to be too clever, peddling something extremely grand, exclusive, intellectual, high-brow – and allienating.
To me, what we're doing is very little different from what Handel was doing in his time. He was a businessman, putting on shows and trying to get people in. We're not quite trying to take as much money because the human being has become much more expensive. The early composers, like Monteverdi, relied on patronage. The generation of Handel and Vivaldi were actually the impressario and their first job was to rent the theatre and hire singers; they just so happened to write the music to the very important librettists. Later on, in the 18th century, composers start getting important, Gluck, Mozart. All the way through to Puccini composers were trying to just make great stuff that people loved.
Maybe the inheritors of opera are Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Cameron Mackintosh. Maybe they are more connected to what Puccini was doing than to what James MacMillan is doing. I don't know.
I had a revelation when I bought a PlayStation and I started playing this game called Devil May Cry. I thought, My God, I'm in a Baroque opera, this is extraordinary! I am going through adventures like something from Alcina. In the game, you're stuck on this enchanted island, where skies can open and people can fall into the ground, you open things and go on a journey onto the next level, you're a hero with a sword and you slice through everything.
Actually, PlayStation games have quite good music, really exciting. Maybe there is a deeper connection between Sony and Handel than there is between Harrison Birtwistle and Handel. I think there probably is. Any composer is quite keen on technology, in some way or another. If there is a possibility to be a computer game designer, you might find that a lot of composers would do it. If that had been possible in Baroque, we could have Mozart designing the next computer game. (pause) This sounds alright in a conversation, but may look very pretentious when you write it down: opera compared to computer games...
What are the origins of Tête à Tête?
It was all reactive, really. I spent about five or six years as a Staff Director at English National Opera. Even then it was on the decline that has continued for the last ten years. When I went in, everybody who was directing the productions had trained there. David Pountney, Graham Vick, Nicholas Hytner, Stephen Pimlott, Keith Warner, all of them had been Staff Directors and they learned how to direct opera before they did it. When I was working there, this whole new layer of people started coming in, some very good, but who have not learned the technique. It meant that as a Staff Director you found yourself rescuing them very often. You'd rescue them from their own technical inabilities. You'd be in this very difficult position where you have the skills to make it happen, but you have to get inside their mind to make their idea happen, rather than creating it yourself. Sadly, especially at ENO, it's just gone worse and worse. Of my generation I'm the only one still directing.
I felt creatively exhausted by assisting people and not being allowed to do it myself, so I just left. I didn't know what I was going to do. I heard that the BAC Festival was an exciting place and I wrote to Tim Morris who was running it. He responded very quickly. I suggested I would do a Fledermaus. I translated it and called it The Flying Fox, we put it in a small room, took the audience's chairs away for the big party and then put them back. We got a sponsorship with unlimited champagne, which meant that the audience got incredibly drunk every night and they had the most wonderful time. They were a bit shocked at first and they ended up dancing and singing. It was marvellous. We had a really lovely time. And that's how Tête à Tête started: in order to do this, you had to have a company. It was 1998.
We've had and inredibly loyal audience. They love it because of the surprise. We thought the next surprise would be to do whole new operas. The show was called Shorts, different ways to make an opera: one by a very experienced composer, one by somebody writing their first opera, one by a hardcore classical musician, one community opera... The community opera didn't quite happen because we did it in August and they were all on holiday, so there was nobody to do it with.
The next year it was Vivaldi. I'd always been really interested in the fact that Vivaldi wrote a lot of operas. We put on one that had never been performed, except by Vivaldi. We were doing world premiere of Vivaldi opera, with arias that had diffeent versions. That was a very big job. Very hard to find. We had to go to Newcastle for the microfilms, where the Professor of Music had done a post-graduate degree on Vivaldi. He had the only copies of the manuscripts, which were on terrible microfilms. Then we had to go to Turin to look at the real thing. When you get a copy of music, you don't quite realise how much of the work has been done by the editor and how removed you are from the composer. It felt like the biggest job in the world.
Since then, Tête à Tête has carried on trying to do things that nobody else does, trying to plug gaps. We're only little, so we can't do very much. But you can look into the future and see where things can go and explore the possibilities, and then see what you think is being missed out.
The first proper show that Streetwise Opera did, The Canticles, was a co-production with Tête à Tête, in homeless shelters. A tremendously exciting thing; doing opera with homeless people hasn't been done before.
You can see from the speed dating and line dancing events that there are piles of people who want to make new opera, but there is nowhere for them to do it. So we just invited them here to have a go, see what they do and how they get on. Now we can do it next year and it will be really exciting. This year we worried a bit if it would work.
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I think what Tête à Tête is doing is very important. I also think what the mainstream is doing is very important. It's not like I'm trying to say that you are all wrong and this is what it should be like. I think that to support magnificent things like the Royal Opera House, where you see huge, grand, blossoming things, we need little places where we can experiment.
Are you a great suporter of modern music?
I suppose I'm very passionate about new music because I don't think it's really any different from old music at all. It's all one thing. Like the idea that we need to put the theatre back into opera - people just don't know what's going on, they're not in touch with what's happening.
I recently did a Mozart piece for The Classical Opera Company, The First Commandment. It was just like doing a new piece – nobody knew it. It's a stage work but it's religious. It's amazing that there can be a Mozart piece that had not been staged in Brittain ever before. We had a really good time with it. Nobody had any expectations.
How did you get interested in opera? Have you got a musical background?
I was very musical at school. I'd seen one or two operas by the time I was well into my teens, but I was very passionate about theatre and music. I'd just not seen them work well together. I saw something like Richmond Operatic Society's La Boheme, which was terrible.
Then I saw David Pountney's production of Makropoulos Case at ENO. I thought it was absoultely amazing. I was completely blown away by it but it never occurred to me that I could be involved in it. I carried on being very musical at school and when I left, I noticed that the music at my school was so good, that music in the real world seemed rather disappointing. I went on to do other things.
I travelled, lived in France and Italy, learned some languages. Then I went to university, St. Andrews, read logic, metaphysics and moral philosophy. Very intellectually rigorous, it was like doing the hardest possible sudoku for four years. Reading Wittgenstein and really understanding it. Very chalenging. I really enjoyed it. At the same time I got very absorbed in drama, I did plays for quite a few years. I ended up being chairman of the Scottish Student Drama Festival.
And then, rather marvellously, seeing that it was his show that got me into opera, I got on the ITV Regional Young Directors Scheme with David Pountney. He was determined to make me go and work at English National Opera, or at least that's what it felt like. In 1991 ENO was such an exciting company that everyone wanted to be a part of it.
What struck you about The Makropoulos Case?
It sounded amazing, it looked amazing. I thought the story was fascinating. I was a very philosophical teenager. The Makropoulos Case is very much like Bernard Williams. He was a professor of philosophy at Cambridge and wrote a whole book about The Makropoulos Case situation. It's full of questions about what it might be like to live forever and where does happiness come from. These are very good questions for a teenager, how should I live my life, what can I accomplish. I wasn't frightened of newish music. I was passionate about Messiaen. I suppose I enjoyed Janacek's music as well. I remember vividly Jo Barstow as Emilia Marty; she looked extraordinary, with flaming red hair and emerald green dress. It was a tremendous production.
At that point opera was being made by people who took life seriously and really cared about important issues, wanted to change the world. I don't see that anymore. Of course there are exceptions, but mostly I see opera being made by people who are trying to build careers, get the next job and be famous. That is destroying the art form. It's ruining it. It's so important for directors to have the security of the technical grasp of how to put on an opera, so that their energy and focus can go to the ideas and the reason why we do it, rather than how we do it. Opera companies tend to think it's not necessary anymore.
What would you change in the world of opera?
I think that opera is very passive and reactive at the moment. It should be making its own stars, like David Pountney or Graham Vick, or whoever. It shouldn't be chasing after everyone else.
Opera companies used to have a strong identity. When I went into ENO, most companies had a Director of Productions. David Poutney here, Graham Vick at Glyndebourne, John Cox at the Royal Opera. Now they don't. There is no opera company with a strong identity. There is a corporate identity, but no artistic identity. You can't say any more that you want to go and see a specific company because you know what it will be like.
I think things are in a very bad way now. I mean I don't really know, but the Government is encouraging everything to be run like a business and everything to be measured and statistically analysed. This means, I suspect, that someone like ENO, which is making an absolute artistic mess, is probably doing rather well. It's quite frightening that something like ENO can look like it's doing very well.
Do you think opera is funded adequately?
Yes, I think it's funded adequately - but it's distributed very badly. Too much is invested in too few places. And that creates a misconception that opera has to be very, very big, expensive and grand.
I'm the charman of the Opera and Music Theatre Forum (OMTF), the umbrella organisation for opera companies. There are 150 opera companies in the UK and something like 95% of the funding goes to five of them. The remaining 5% goes to 10 companies.
Actually, most opera goers to commercial opera which is not subsidised. On the other hand, an amazing statistic is that half of the works the members of the OMTF (45-50 companies) did last year were new. That's an extraordinary situation. The repertoire of thebig, subsidisied companies consists in 95% of old operas. Then you have all these unfunded companies creating a lot of new work. It's just chaos, really. What is the purpose of funding? Why is the size of the grant proportionate to the size of the opera company's PR department? I think it's very wrong.
A real problem is the museum culture. I think it's a big shame that only 25-30 operas get done regularly. The reason is that taking a risk on the Box Office is too expensive; you can only afford it probably once a year.
It would be better if there was more money to support the fringe, but I can't see how that can be realistic. I don't want to criticise the existence of big companies because I love working for them. I've had amazing times and you can do amazing work there.
I know this is not realistic, but if I had a chance to change something, I would give another 100 million to the Royal Opera House, so that the tickets would just cost a pound. Then everybody could go. Or they could take all the chairs out of the Stalls and charge £5, to make it more open, more democratic and public. ROH is a really wonderful place, and when it's good, it's absolutely amazing.
Money is a real problem for opera. It is very expensive. What we do at Tête à Tête is very expensive, even though it's just a few people.
And now it is all going to the Olympics.
They shouldn't have taken it away from the Arts. That's very damaging.
The Olympics remind me of the great Millenium projects, the Millenium Dome and the Eden Project. I went to the Eden Project and it's absolutely amazing. It's everything that the Millenium Dome should have been. It's incredible.
I think the Olympics could be amazing – or they could end up as the Millenium Dome, a hopeless disaster.
What do you do in your spare time?
It changes all the time. At the moment all I want to do is to go surfing. I really think I might go live by the sea in Cornwall.
Do you actually get into the water?
Of course! I went last weekend. Next year I go to Costa Rica for a month to surf every day. It's interesting how in my thirties and fourties I started really enjoying physical things. I've been doing lots of dance classes for the last five years. Capoeira as well. Loving that.
VIEW Bill Bankes-Jones’s page HERE.
VIEW Tête à Tête page HERE.
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