Comments (13)

• Performing in the chorus for OA's amazing production of Peter Grimes was one of the highlights of my performing career. Sadly it was unquestionably a box office disaster. From the stage it looked to be less than 50% attended. Such a disappointment!
  Posted by Anonymous

  21 November 2014
• In response to Mr Terracini's statement that Opera Australia sold 5349 tickets to Peter Grimes in 2009. What was the percentage of seats bought for each performance, or perhaps just an average percentage would do. The number rather implies that the Grimes performances were a little over 50% sold! which doesn't gel at all with my memory of being in the audience at the time, on more than one occasion. So what we're the box office percentages in total, not just those sold through OA but also via the venue? Just over 50% houses, on average seems preposterously low.
  Posted by Phil Turner

  11 September 2014
• In response to "Insider" Opera Australia sold 5349 tickets to Peter Grimes for the season in 2009. Batavia had 3640 paying customers and VOSS, 4780
  Posted by Lyndon Terracini

  09 September 2014
• In response to Richard Letts' questions. In 2013 OA presented
  
  142 main stage performances
  
  133 musicals performances
  
  20 Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour performances
  
  11 Concerts
  
  4 Free Events
  
  419 Opera Australia Touring and Access performances
  
  13 Co-production performances.
  
  Total = 742 performances in one year.
  
  I hope that clarifies OA's activities.
  Posted by Lyndon Terracini

  09 September 2014
• Understood - I stand corrected.
  
  But I'm assuming you accept the difference between new to OA and new to opera as an artform? Both really valid - and as I stated previously - as great achievement - but very different.
  Posted by David Smart

  08 September 2014
• In response to David Smart I would refer him to my original OpEd piece for The Australian:
  
  "Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour (HOSH) played to 42,000 paying customers over three weeks in its first year alone and importantly 66% of that 42,000 had never ever purchased a ticket to an Opera Australia performance."
  
  The subsequent HOSH events, which he cites, had slightly lower first-time audience percentages, which I attribute to the first-timers from 2012 becoming repeat attendees.
  Posted by Lyndon Terracini

  08 September 2014
• If we're REALLY talking hard facts and figures Lyndon, there should be transparency about the difference between new to opera and new to OA. You could be a WA opera subscriber but never have attended OA (and therefore not be on the database). You're new to OA - but you're not new to the artform. This is still an achievement but stop trying to inflate the access figures as it just smacks of gimmickry.
  It may also be useful to be consistent with your own figures. OA's releases cite two different figures for Handa across two years (fine) - but neither of them are the 66% figure which you state above. Links here: https://opera.org.au/res/pdfs/media_releases/HOSH/130417_Carmen_triumphs_in_second_year.pdf and here https://opera.org.au/res/pdfs/media_releases/HOSH14/HOSH_Wrap_Up_release.pdf (thank you Twitter).
  
  And yes, 'accurate reporting and research are essential components of a serious debate.'
  
  People (including media and politicians) aren't stupid and notice inconsistencies. All of them are your audience.
  Posted by David Smart

  05 September 2014
• I think the quality of OA performances has improved markedly under Lyndon Terracini's leadership. It is good to know also that audiences have increased and the company operates in the black. All credit to him for those important achievements.
  Concerning factuality, Mr Terracini says that OA is presenting 743 performances this year. It advertised 384 of which 185 are popular music theatre. So there will be 200 mainstage opera performances. What accounts for the other 360 performances? Where do they fit in the budget and budget priorities?
  Mr Terracini says that "We are all desperate to broaden the repertoire" but the only gesture in this direction is a commission to a composer known as a popular singer whose record as a composer, so far as I know, is limited to popular song-writing. Presumably, this will not be a main-stage work and will not be a work that uses soloists, orchestra, chorus... In short, it seems a pretty weak response to those feelings of desperation and is as unlikely to broaden the "grand" opera repertoire as the modernist works upon which Terracini built his reputation as a singer.
  Implicit in Mr Terracini's article is that the requirement for a new work to be included in the OA mainstage season is that it should break even financially by attracting audiences to as many performances as are given of the less popular standard repertoire works - AND it should be able to be successfully re-presented at intervals of considerably less than ten years. With such requirements, Mr Terracini's desperation is unlikely to be relieved any time soon.
  The regional opera companies in the USA are managing to present new operas with sufficient success to remain in business and I am told, with audiences as good as those for less popular standard works like Rigoletto.
  Opera Australia's current all or nothing policy cannot lead anywhere. A rethink is needed: a longer-term strategy to find existing works that speak of our time, and to give Australian composers the opportunity to write and workshop operas with the prospect that the best will be presented by the company. These might initially not be mainstage works . It is a strategy that should be conceived as unfolding over the next couple of decades.
  If the State Opera of South Australia can have such a strategy, it should not be beyond the national company.
  Posted by Richard Letts

  05 September 2014
• Why we continue to accept Mr Terracini's nonsense about Peter Grimes only being able to be done every ten years is absolutely beyond me. It is demonstrably false. English National Opera has managed to do a complete sell-out run of 9, then 7 performances in the space of 5 years, OF THE SAME PRODUCTION, with largely the same cast. Not to mention the fact that Opera Australia itself had such a sell-out of it's Peter Grimes in 2009 that they were actually trying to recruit the cast to stay on for extra performances. Sadly, international schedules being what they are, none of the major cast members were available. But to say that this award-winning production could only be repeated every ten years is just plain false, and, I think, knowingly so.
  
  With the vocal resources that OA currently has at its disposal, the entire show could (and should) be cast from singers currently living in Australia: Barker, Coleman-Wright, Moran, Dark, Breen, Fiebig, Gore, Arthur, Anderson et al. They can even import a Grimes with an Australian passport, should they choose.
  
  No, this sort of selective use of what are being called "facts" is exactly the sort of things that. Mr Terracini claims is wrong with Prof Tregear's piece.
  
  German houses, every the highly subsidized ones, don't do Grimes for a very specific reason. It's because the story and the music simply don't resonate with a non-English speaking audience in the same way that it does for us Anglophones. To use the fact that German opera houses don't do a particular work often as an excuse for not doing it here is simply ridiculous and non-sensical. The corollary is that if a German house does do something, then so should we, so we can expect lots of Der Freischütz, Lohengrin and Viva La Mamma and Evita then, all of which get frequent outings in major German houses? Of course not. Completely different audiences. So using the "they don't, so we shouldn't either is equally ridiculous in both directions.
  
  Enough of treating us like people who are prepared to be spoon-fed whatever nonsense you'd like us to believe about your lack-lustre and boringly repetitive programming, Mr Terracini. If you continue to serve up the gruel, your regular diners will abandon you in droves and the "new" audience you seem so keen on will starve and won't be back for seconds.
  Posted by Insider

  03 September 2014
• This still doesn't explain why 2015's offerings are so slight--couldn't there be ONE opera from the 20th century or 21st century repertoire? There's been some wonderful seasons in the recent past--including Of Mice and Men, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, Macropoulos Affair, Peter Grimes. Some were poorly attended, like Of Mice and Men--but it hardly had time for the word to get around.
  Posted by Susan Lever

  03 September 2014