Tag: 02.07.05

Should Melbourne get a new state opera company? The government commissioned a study to find out. “The consultant’s final report, handed to the Government shortly after Christmas, outlines five options. They range from increasing Opera Australia’s state government funding and asking it to perform 10 to 11 operas at the Arts Centre (up from the current seven) to setting up a new state opera company that would also perform at the Arts Centre. It is estimated the latter would cost $5 million to $7 million a year. Neither of these options is expected to be taken up by the Government. The option emerging as the most favoured is to fund a new smaller-scale company whose primary focus would be to create innovative new work pitched at a youngish audience. It is believed this would cost the Government up to $3 million a year.”

Conductor Edo de Waart has lost no time in diving into the middle of political controversy in Hong Kong, where he is the new chief conductor of the city’s Philharmonic. Protesting the government’s devotion to a HK$40 billion “arts hub” project which doesn’t include money for arts education or a new concert hall for the Phil, de Waart says that the plan severely miscalculates the city’s scale. “For a city with no opera company of its own to build a 2,000-seat theater, it most probably would have to rely on flying in unknown numbers of performance groups because no home group will be able to regularly fill it. It’s promoting glitz – a culture of events, not a culture of continuity. It’s the completely wrong way to do things.”