{"id":16,"date":"2025-04-29T17:14:50","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T17:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/?p=16"},"modified":"2025-04-29T17:14:50","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T17:14:50","slug":"a-new-documentary-featuring-conductor-antonio-pappano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/2025\/04\/29\/a-new-documentary-featuring-conductor-antonio-pappano\/","title":{"rendered":"A new documentary, featuring conductor Antonio Pappano"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We make sure there’s a real variety of socio-economic backgrounds and ethnicities, and an even gender split,\u201d says Tom Floyd, ROH senior opera manger, talking about its open recruitment system. Most of the young people who join them “come from families who probably have had no real experience of opera,” he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Opera for all<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over at English National Opera (ENO), the company has stayed true to its egalitarian roots of the late 19th-Century, when theatrical producer Lilian Baylis and music director Charles Corri shared a vision of it as a place for “people’s opera”. ENO has “opera for all” in its mission statement. It does not assume knowledge of opera; its website has \u00a0key figures of the organisation \u00a0explaining what opera is and how it’s made; and \u00a0the site hints at how it skillfully reimagines crowd pleasers, like La Traviata (to be performed this October), in thrilling new ways, alongside daring new work, such as 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, by performance artist Marina Abramovich (November).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“We sing in English to be accessible to the widest possible audience,” an ENO spokesperson tells BBC Culture. The company offers free tickets for under-21s; discounts for under 35s, and tickets from \u00a310 for all. No surprise, then, that more than half its bookings last season were from opera first-timers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, in order to survive the cuts to Arts Council England (ACE) funding, the ENO will next year\u00a0move its main base<\/a>\u00a0from the London Coliseum to outside the capital and in so doing will \u00a0qualify for \u00a324m funding over three years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A new generation is embracing opera and music presented in new ways: opera in car parks, in pubs, opera on your tablet \u2013 Darren Henley<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Opera must change, ACE chief executive\u00a0Darren Henley wrote<\/a>\u00a0in an article for The Guardian: “A new generation is embracing opera and music presented in new ways: opera in car parks\u2026 in pubs, opera on your tablet”. In truth, most opera companies are not digital-age dodgers; they have presences on the popular digital platforms, while the hashtag #operaisopen invites new audiences to click through.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Streaming services \u2013 \u00a0like Royal Opera Stream and Glyndebourne Encore \u2013 have dished up productions and events, both popular and esoteric, to reach a wider audience. And there’s also opera at the cinema. At ROH, 2022\/23 has been its biggest cinema season ever, with more than 1,300 cinemas worldwide having shown or showing 13 productions (opera and ballet), including Madam Butterfly, La Boheme and Aida. The latter, staged in May and June 2023, was conducted by Pappano.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nurturing promising young talent \u2013 like soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha \u2013 is a passion of Pappano\u2019s, and he’s also a role model for young opera conductors, like Avishka Ederisinghe, who says that watching him talking on YouTube was what inspired him to explore the art form.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"GettyGetty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Conductor Antonio Pappano is keen to fight elitism and make opera more widely accessible (Credit: Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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As he steps down from his music director roles \u2013 at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome after 18 years, and at ROH next summer, after 22 years \u2013 Pappano is looking forward to change. He will not be hanging up the baton yet: he will succeed Simon Rattle to become chief conductor at the London Symphony Orchestra, his “dream job”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He describes how he grew up in a council flat that was just “a four-minute walk to Westminster Abbey”; and that rising from his humble background to conducting the coronation at that same abbey was “not a bad gig”. Jokes aside, there is a message there that \u00a0he’d love to hand down to a younger generation: “If you have a vision for what you want to achieve in life, that spark and\u2026 the energy and resilience to keep pushing when you know things will get tough, you can make it in any walk of life.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We make sure there’s a real variety of socio-economic backgrounds and ethnicities, and an even gender split,\u201d says Tom Floyd, ROH senior opera manger, talking about its open recruitment system. Most of the young people who join them “come from families who probably have had no real experience of opera,” he says. Opera for all … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17,"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifelumen.site\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}