Top 10 Pandemic Pivot No. 4:
Covent Garden as Experimental Stage

Closed to the public from March until July and reliant annually on around £50 million from box office alone, the U.K.’s largest opera company stood to lose a great deal this year, but its response has been significant. From March to September, it managed to broadcast 21 productions, a trio of Live from Covent Garden performances, and 19 free archival productions. October saw its return to performance with #OurHouseToYourHouse, a series of COVID-safe events with two brand-new staged productions, the world’s first hyper reality opera, a Meet the Young Artists Week, and a live concert performance. A notably more ambitious and inclusive program than the kind of celebrity solo concerts taking place elsewhere.

“Our ambition was to present an exciting, wide-ranging line-up to bring our beautiful theater to life, give expression to the creativity and artistry that define who we are, and delight our audiences after so many months of absence,” says ROH Director of Opera Oliver Mears in a recent interview.

The series opened on October 17 with 4/4, a quartet of short vocal pieces, intriguingly none of them operas, which brought the freshness of works new to the house. Mixing youth with experience, a trio of Jette Parker Young Artists performed Barber’s Knoxville, Summer of 1915 and Handel’s Apollo and Daphne, alongside Christine Rice in Britten’s Phaedra, directed by Deborah Warner, and Allan Clayton in H.K. Gruber’s campy Frankenstein!!, staged by Richard Jones

That was followed by New Dark Age comprising The Knife of Dawn, a one-person opera for chamber orchestra and baritone Peter Brathwaite by rising star composer Hannah Kendall, which tells the story of Guyanese activist and poet Martin Carter as he reaches the critical 28th day of his hunger strike in protest to British rule. It shared the bill with A New Dark Age, devised and directed by Katie Mitchell, which featured music by three contemporary female composers—Missy Mazzoli, Anna Meredith, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Young directors who had taken part in the ROH opera training program assisted on both projects.

“Working with minimal resources, a small cast, and a monologue format we were able to completely rip up the rule book and start afresh, but also produce work that felt part of Covent Garden’s identity, with pieces by Handel and Britten, both of whom wrote so many works for theaters on this site,” says Mears of 4/4. “For both productions we worked with a British-based renowned cast and crew, nearly all of them regular collaborators with us. It felt home-made!”

The technologically innovative Current, Rising, a collaboration with Figment Productions and Royal Holloway University, opened on November 28 (current restrictions have temporarily shut it down). An artistic experiment in hyper reality, it was developed by a female-led creative team and inspired by the liberation of Ariel at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Located in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theater, four socially distanced people at a time are led through a 360-degree virtual world, exploring imaginary landscapes from twilight to dawn that reflect ideas of isolation and connection.

The October 26 – 31 Meet the Young Artists Week employed the eight singers of the ROH Jette Parker Young Artists Program (a two-year operatic apprenticeship) as well as the trainee director and a pair of trainee répetiteurs in a series of live and streamed concerts alongside Solo Stories, a set of pre-recorded monodramas comprising a modern adaptation of Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, Poulenc’s La Dame de Monte Carlo, and a solo adaptation of Jake Heggie’s At the Statue of Venus.

The November 20 concert performance of Ariodante, the first opera written by Handel for the first theater on the current Royal Opera House site in 1735, was acted out on a bare stage but with the ROH orchestra socially distanced behind the singers and renowned soloists including Paula Murrihy, Chen Reiss, Gerald Finley, and Sophie Bevan. “Due to the second lockdown, sadly, we had to cancel performances of Falstaff and scale-back scheduled performances of Ariodante for a live stream audience only,” explains Mears.

“However, this lent the performance a stripped-back intensity which only served to emphasise the breath-taking talent of the cast.”

Audience figures and budgets are deemed commercially sensitive, but Mears will say that they were able to reach audiences on a larger scale than ever have before with their lockdown activities generating millions of views in 183 countries around the world.

“After so many months away from the stage, it was a massive tonic to everyone involved to walk through the stage door and create something special for our audiences,” he says. “For our community of freelancers, 2020 has been beyond challenging, and their support was absolutely vital in giving life to the new work.”

Photos: Alexandra Lowe as Daphne, baritone Jonathan McGovern as Apollo in Apollo and Daphne; soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha in Knoxville, Summer 1915; Paula Murrihy in the title role of the ROH's new Ariodante.

_{Photos by Tristram Kenton, ROH}