Noisy at the Wrong Times (29 page)

He took it well as I got up from my ragged, reclaimed armchair, walked out of the hut, out of the yard and out of denial.

The story from there is long and winding, but suffice to say I read, I listened, I thought. I decided to repay the debt that
I owed Woolverstone. The pride of being at the school returned to me, and my eyes fell open – wide open. It is hard to say what I actually did to change things other than taking more interesting and challenging jobs, but I curbed my belligerence a bit and from various bosses learned the art of ordered thinking, I took broadsheet newspapers instead of The Sun, I listened to Radio Four instead of Radio One. I am aware that this all seems ridiculous – like
Educating Rita
. I find it a little embarrassing to impart the information to be honest, but what it did do is enable me to feel normal about having had an education; that to know and appreciate things beyond the environment in which I lived was, in fact, something we are all capable of and nothing to be ashamed of. My sense of selfworth had never left me inasmuch as I had always thought of myself as being ‘equal’ to others. My precocity had never dimmed either, but the ambition that Woolverstone instilled in me had been squished and mangled to fit my old Fulham mindset. I had, in this respect at least, reverted to type and what my awakening did was simply recalibrate my self-image to a version of myself that Woolverstone worked hard to put there in the first place. When I left school I thought anything was possible, but it was within a boundary set by my little world. Now, I was ready to try the one everyone else lived in.

That was 1984.

OPERA HOLLAND PARK

T
he story of the rise of Opera Holland Park probably deserves another volume all of its own, but it would be remiss not to explain why, after so often being cast as the well-intentioned pariah of any company I ever worked in, I have managed to sustain a quarter of a century in this one job.

In 1989, after moderately successful stints in newspapers, the hotel industry, advertising and marketing, I ended up at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the strength of a scant CV and the gift of the gab – and that is really all I had. I had no knapsack of qualifications to offer employers, but I was fortunate to be in a time when ‘talent’, if it was discerned, was allowed to flourish. Along with the experience I had gathered in my other jobs, I also had the knack of being able to learn quickly, to absorb, draw on things I had learned at school and to create an apparent whole. So I convinced Kensington and Chelsea to let me loose on their cultural portfolio. Indeed, they had in fact pursued me when the job had failed to attract a suitable candidate, although I had turned down the offer of an interview to take up a post in a marketing agency where, within a couple of months I realised that scratch-card promotions and working from a hideous office on the North Circular was never in a million years going to satisfy me, nor, if truth be told, was I ever going to satisfy them.

With my mortgage rate going through the roof, it was a desperate time, and the letter repeating the invitation to interview came at a good moment, although the meeting didn’t
go well on the surface of it; one of those interviewing me was dozing through half of it, but I must have been the best of a bad bunch. The first incarnation of my life at the Royal Borough saw me in a pioneering role as a marketer of the libraries and arts services, which seems an odd thing to say now but which nevertheless rang very true at the time, when libraries had never previously felt the need to actually persuade people to use their services. I was also required to promote and publicise the cultural offering of the borough, which had a surprisingly vibrant portfolio of museums, galleries and what was known then as The Holland Park Theatre – it was inevitable that I would find the latter of greatest appeal.

Simply acquiring some press for the venue was enough to take its audience from 14,000 in 1989 to 25,000 in 1990, my first season. I even persuaded the BBC via its GLR radio station to become media sponsor. Opera was a large part of the festival, provided by visiting companies of varying quality, but there was a rich programme of dance – contemporary as well as an annual residency by the Royal Ballet School – theatre and even puppetry. Birmingham Rep brought two productions to the festival, including
Cider with Rosie,
which remains one of the most vivid memories I have of anything on our stage.

Opera, though, was the big seller, and Mick Goggin, the then theatre manager, had developed a roster of companies who generally produced the pops of the repertoire. At the same time, I was being pressured into acquiring greater levels of sponsorship of a financial kind, but I was increasingly exasperated by these demands because I knew that no sponsor worth its salt would invest in something that had the pong of amateurism about it. I don’t want to insult these companies because they were not all amateur in the least, but they didn’t always give us the finest productions. When a chorus member in
Aida
has not only a real tea towel on his head but one with
the word “glasses” emblazoned upon it, you know that something needs to be done. That production was given by a company called Opera Lirica, which had at its head the conductor Joseph Vandernoot, who was irascible, as old as the hills and conducted at half-speed, but he had enjoyed a distinguished career, notably as music director for Ballet Rambert. He had also given the first UK performance of Puccini’s
Edgar
under the auspices of the Fulham Symphony orchestra, and I always admired his dedication, learning an awful lot from him whilst he growled and spat at me. It was, however, possible to knock twenty-five minutes off the length of any production he gave when he allowed his assistant to conduct a performance. So these were not the best productions our money could buy and, after several years of listening to my colleagues bemoaning the fact, I proposed a radical solution: we should start our own producing company, an idea that went down like cold vomit, to be fair.

By 1995, six years had passed, and I had immersed myself in the process of opera, learning its distinct producing dynamics, the personalities of its proponents, the details of delivering it and, most crucially, the technicalities of the singing and playing at its musical heart. I had also begun to explore the repertoire beyond the core pieces, and my tastes were becoming well defined. I had experienced opera at Woolverstone and had sung throughout my time there, and had a facility for the theatre in general. But meeting and working with singers and directors, designers and conductors meant I could absorb so much more. I was essentially, once again educating myself. What I knew for certain was that the nuts and bolts of putting on a production were simply not for me and held no appeal beyond being a horrifying matrix I could admire and understand. So in arguing for the creation of our own company, and pressing home the idea that every
penny we spent went not into the pocket of an independent producer but onto our stage, I also insisted that we engage someone to do the legwork. The council agreed.

By the autumn of 1995, we were fully engaged in creating the company Opera Holland Park, and it had strong ideals that we still retain. The intention was to give emerging, British-based performers the opportunity to sing and work with more experienced and established artists, and, to that end, we engaged Anthony Besch and Peter Rice to direct and design our inaugural production of
Un ballo in Maschera
. The production sat head and shoulders above anything we had done previously, and we acquired the support of American Express for the run.

Suddenly, we had a brand, indeed a branded opera company, and this enabled me to envision a future that saw development and growth, rather than merely sustaining a cute but ultimately half-arsed festival. Most of these plans I kept to myself for fear of terrifying the council, but if I could maintain the company for three years, perhaps then it would build a momentum of its own. Already, I had begun to nurture the idea that we could ape the old Camden Festival by reviving rarities that London seemed at that time to be starved of.

My time in the Royal Borough’s employ had been characterised by an innate and instinctive unwillingness to succumb to the rigidity of council practice; officers and councillors who remain with the Royal Borough will freely attest to their frustrations with me. If I couldn’t beat it, I worked around it; if I couldn’t work around it, I moaned on relentlessly. I was
always
right. What is obvious now is that I had stepped into another environment that was naturally allergic to someone like me, but one I was determined would eventually accept me. I was certainly an unusual beast, forthright, even cheeky to the politicians and never afraid to
tell them categorically what I believed they should do, but I was loyal, honest and dedicated. It was these qualities that I think stopped them booting me over the threshold. There was, of course, a proper way to deal with the council, a process and a strategy and I am much more adept at it today but if I am perfectly honest, words are still often had in my shell-like.

Anyway, it will not have escaped your notice throughout this book that ideas were never a problem for me, but the strategic patience to deliver them (and to
gently
coax people into sharing my vision) most certainly was, so after our successful launch it might have been more wise to table a longer-term plan to deliver the concepts I was percolating gently. Obviously, I didn’t, and having scoured old libraries and books for late Italian rarities, my attention was drawn to
Iris
or, as it was initially put to me, “Mascagni’s Butterfly”. At this point it would have been prudent to walk away because the opera was monumental, with a very large chorus and an orchestra featuring four or five percussionists. It also required, I believed, sumptuous costumes, a ballet and a soprano who had to pretend to be sixteen but sing like a Wagnerian. And it had not been seen in London for ninety years. Yet I had been listening to the Domingo recording of the opera and was in love with it, so, whilst we were actually running our inaugural production, I was already planning to take a mighty plunge.

In 1996, one of my other responsibilities – Leighton House Museum, a glorious architectural wonder in Holland Park and the former home of Lord, Frederic Leighton – was celebrating the centenary of the artist’s death. As part of the programme of events, we recreated the interior furnishings of the house as a backdrop to a dramatic interpretation of his life. The decorative accessories and costumes were designed and made by the couturiers Charles and Patricia Lester, who work in silks and hand-tinted fabrics of exquisite beauty and refinement.
Their work is also powerfully orientalist and it didn’t take much for me to see their creations being translated into Japanoiserie for
Iris
. The problem was that their clothes tended to cost a lot of money per item, and we needed about sixty or seventy of them. Having got to know them during the Leighton centenary, I and the director, Tom Hawkes, went to see them at their home and workshop in Abergavenny, where they generously agreed to provide the costumes at an enormously reduced rate. As artists, they relished the project, but even with the Lesters’ effective sponsorship, I was still looking at a budget beyond anything we had ever conceived. I returned to London that afternoon for the evening performance of
Ballo
in weird mood, excited at everything
Iris
promised but glum at the growing prospect of having to ditch it.

As I stood on the balustrade, deep in thought, Mick tapped me on the shoulder, handed me a business card and said, “An expensively dressed, important looking bloke just asked me to give this to you. He wants to talk about sponsoring a production.” If fate ever smiled on me (and I was generally of the view that it only ever scowled), this was the moment. I searched the theatre for the owner of the business card, John Grumbar, managing director of the London office of Egon Zehnder International, one of the world’s biggest executive search companies, and found him having a picnic with his party of friends. Why Mick didn’t just point him out to me, I don’t recall, but I still chuckle at the memory of Mick’s description and my ability to use it.

John explained that he wanted to have an exclusive evening during the following season to which he could invite 800 guests for his company’s annual get-together with clients and colleagues. An Opera Holland Park performance seemed the perfect thing, he said, and asked what we were planning for the
following year.

“I have just the thing for you, John,” I said, scarcely containing my glee,.” It’s is an opera that nobody has really ever heard of and which hasn’t been done in London for over ninety years. I would say it is perfect for you.”

John’s grimace didn’t deter me from persisting, even when he said, “Haven’t you got anything more, erm,
popular
?”

Desperation leads you to many misdemeanours, and I took the view that I couldn’t really lose. I suggested I sent John the CD of the opera: if he liked it, he could sponsor it – and I assured him it would be one of
the
events in London – but if he didn’t, we would happily produce a
Bohéme
or
Tosca
instead, even though I was almost completely consumed with the idea of
Iris
. Neither did I tell him that OHP were planning to produce
Tosca
anyway, as well as
Onegin
,

John, to his eternal credit, loved
Iris
, agreed to sponsor the production and even purchased hundreds of copies of the CD for his guests. We persuaded Sony to reissue the CD, selling it directly to our patrons. Sony later told me that had those sales been transacted in shops, the album would have been, by far, a number one in the classical charts. Liberty, which sold the Lester’s clothes in London devoted their windows to the production, and there was as much fashion press about the opera as there was anything else. It was a hit. Such a big hit, in fact, that we revived it immediately in 1998, when we also produced Cilea’s
L’arlesiana
. The die was cast for the company, and ever since we have mined that repertoire relentlessly.