Opera Australia: what the hell are they doing?
IN ONE of its best box office results in recent years Opera Australia has posted an operating surplus of $848,000 for 2008, a year also marked by the death in November of its music director, Richard Hickox.
La Cieca over at Parterre posted this clip of Rufus Wainwright doing Berlioz at the Verbier festival. Rufus’s love for opera is no secret, and his album “Release the Stars” was VERY operatically/orchestrally inclined. The Met’s tossing of his opera off the roster may be a big loss for them in the future should another company appropriate his talents (he was pretty great with New York City Opera in ’05).
And one from my own favorite collection is Chris Thile playing Bach on the mandolin (from a 10/2006 concert at Housing Works with Hilary Hahn, which I was fortunate enough to catch). Both Thile and Wainwright are folkier than most pop singers, but their fan bases could become easy opera converts when you look at the innate passion for music both types of listeners share.
And Look at the Advertising They Get in Tampa
The latest company to be facing financial fiasco, Orlando Opera, is short $500,000 to keep up the company. While no 7-11s are being tossed around (yet), the company is unsure at where it will go should it fall flat of its fundraising goal. According to the Orlando Sentinel, current ideas on the drawing board are combining forces with another arts organization, focusing on training, or the ominous “dot-dot-dot…”. Opera President Jim Ireland is quoted/paraphrased in the same article:
“Orlando Opera will not shut down, Ireland said, but without the $500,000 he doesn’t know in what form it could keep going.
And without a homegrown opera company, Ireland said, Orlandoans would have to do without opera completely because there is no touring opera the way there is classical music or dance.”
The problem with Orlando is that it’s most commonly associated with the Disney family of parks and products (which, granted, is nowhere near the city’s center). They can either latch onto that and piggyback onto the amount of tourism the area gets (offering tons of family-friendly programming, doing some cross promotion with the Walt Disney World resorts, etc.), OR they need to back off entirely and focus on the locals.
What’s interesting is that Orlando, Florida’s third largest metropolitan area, is about an hour northeast of Tampa, Florida’s second largest metropolitan area. What’s more, it’s a straight shot off the 4. What could save the companies is if they were to pull an Arizona Opera (which services both Phoenix and Tuscon) and join forces to serve mid/northern Florida with an elite opera/orchestra company. Like Arizona, there is also a great deal of retirees in Florida who live near these cities and probably have a couple of bucks to spend on tickets–or donations.
