Mark Wigglesworth: 'ENO must stay at the Coliseum'

Mark Wigglesworth’s five-year term as Music Director of English National Opera got off to a splendid start in September with a new production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. His electrifying conducting of a fine cast and a brilliant orchestra inspired critical raves and ovations from the audience. “I feel the bar has been set high,” he says wryly. “I hope we can continue to raise it. But there’s no point in doing amazing work if the money doesn’t add up.”

But does it? Aside from an astonishing number of casual backstage staff, sixteen silent extras, twenty-one extra chorus members (on top of its permanent establishment of 48) and thirty-two extra orchestral players (on top of 69 permanents) were required to mount this production.

The auditorium didn’t sell out, and however creative the accounting, there is no getting away from the fact that this show will end up being subsidised by the taxpayer north of half a million pounds.

In the present austere climate, such a level of expenditure cannot continue, and it won’t. Having lurched over the last three decades from financial crisis to management collapse to total meltdown, ENO’s ultimate paymasters, Arts Council England, has punitively cut its annual grant by a third (it now stands at £12.4m) and delivered its historically ineffectual board an ultimatum – find a viable business model, or else.

Wigglesworth, 51, is part of a new régime charged with this heavy commission and a fight on his hands. He is determined to win it. “I have to defend to the death the company’s right and need to remain in the Coliseum, and I have to defend to the death the company’s right to a full-time orchestra and chorus. Without that, that there is no ENO.”

Does he think that the Arts Council poses a real threat to any of these pillars? “Our discussions are very positive and constructive,” he replies with a glacial smile.

“I believe what we have now is a very strong team, and team work will be what saves us,” he continues. The previous Chairman Martyn Rose and Executive Director Henriette Götz, neither of whom served long, left suddenly last January. Both of them had crossed swords with John Berry, the talented and daring but divisive Artistic Director, whose high-risk, high-spending policies had brought ENO prestigious awards and éclat in the media without meeting basic economic criteria.

Berry’s ability to get his own way was finally crushed at the ACE’s insistence, and he resigned in the summer: but his forward planning - expensive, expansive and risky - is locked contractually into the company’s work for next two years. But after that, if the plug hasn’t been pulled altogether, it will be iron rations and no more of those extras.

A new Chairman Harry Brünjes, founder of a company specialising in legal reports on medical cases, has been appointed, but Berry has not been replaced: Wigglesworth insists that his departure does not leave a hole: “John was the only Artistic Director the company ever had, with a very specific set of qualities. We’re doing things differently now.”

The post of Chief Executive has been awarded on a somewhat tentative three-year contract to 33-year-old Cressida Pollock, who previously worked for the management consultancy McKinsey and has no professional experience of the opera snake-pit. She has the whip-hand over a committee responsible for artistic decisions and policy, on which Wigglesworth and the former casting director John McMurray also sit. This is unlikely to be a satisfactory arrangement long-term.

The company urgently needs to save money by drastically cutting costs (administrative staff levels are already skeletal) and creating fresh income streams. It is hobbled in this quest by the limitations of its home at the London Coliseum, a white elephant of a theatre which suffers from cramped and dilapidated backstage areas as well as a dearth of office or rehearsal space which necessitates the costly rental of scattered outhouses.

Plans to transform the foyers into a daytime café-restaurant are under way. Also on the agenda is the creation of an all-purpose centre for the company’s operations in a suburban business park, but fund-raising for this at a time when every penny in needed for day-to-day expenses will be problematic.

Against this background of crisis, Wigglesworth has hit the ground running: cool, assured, canny and on the ball, he impresses. His c.v. as a conductor is tagged by some relationships which have terminated abruptly and he has a reputation for being an awkward customer, but he shrugs the latter off as a fantasy of the press and refuses to rake up “things that were done or said twenty years ago.” To be fair, one suspects that his problems were more with managements than with players. “Ask the people I work with here if you want to know what I’m like,” he says briskly.

Being based in West Sussex with his archaeologist wife and young daughter, he has personal as well as professional reasons not to function as the sort of Music Director who flits in and out between lucrative guest engagements. So he has cut all external appearances to a minimum to concentrate on ENO, where his prime task away from the podium will be to mount a fierce defence of its orchestra and chorus.

Given the steep reduction in the number of performances that the company gives (reduced by nearly a third over the last fifteen years), both are vulnerable to the charge that they don’t do enough to justify their full-time contracts, world-class excellent though they both are.

Wigglesworth promises this this low productivity will change, but doesn’t specify how. He also assures me - “watch this space” - that he is concerned at the current domination of Americans in the top ranks of ENO’s casting and the amount of young British talent which doesn’t get a look in or is prematurely lost. “We must build audiences’ loyalty towards singers trained in this country.” He should be held to this assurance.

He will conduct bread-and-butter revivals as well as new stagings. “I won’t be the kind of Music Director who just looks after his pet projects,” he says, “I want to do what is useful, not just tick things off my wish list” - and as evidence of this, he has agreed to lead thirteen performances of a revival of The Magic Flute through the winter as well as nobly yielding a conductor’s showpiece, Tristan and Isolde, to his predecessor Edward Gardner.

Meanwhile he is following Shostakovich with Verdi – his next assignment is The Force of Destiny, one of the composer’s trickiest works, often described as “sprawling” and certainly uneven. “It’s interesting that Verdi wrote it for St Petersburg,” he says, “because I think of it rather like a Russian novel, a rich tapestry which follows the central characters through their tumultuous lives and builds to a terrific propulsive climax. It’s going to be wonderfully exhilarating to conduct: if Shostakovich drains you, Verdi is replenishing.”

Perhaps he can replenish the box office too: ENO’s attendance figures remain shrouded in mystery (nor is their latest Annual Report being made public), but the management admits it needs to sell many more seats if it is to get anywhere near filling the Coliseum’s capacity (at 2,359, higher than Drury Lane or Covent Garden). “I don’t like the word 'outreach’,” says Wigglesworth, “but we must find ways to connect with communities beyond central London. And we also need to draw in people who go to all sorts of shows in the West End, but who don’t have opera on their radar. “

One tactic, inaugurated by John Berry with Sweeney Todd last April, is the incorporation of splashy starry musicals into the mix: next spring will see forty-three semi-staged performances of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, with Glenn Close as Norma Desmond. It will sell tickets, doubtless, but is it a score of sufficiently high quality to justify presentation by a leading opera company? Wigglesworth will not be drawn on this question: “We have to cast the net wide, we can’t be precious.”

“Our name implies that we are this country’s national company, even if we haven’t got money to tour and I’m not sure what 'this country’ means any more. But I know we have to lead the way in being resourceful and less reliant on subsidy.” Let’s hope a spirit of imagination and innovation survives the chill.

'The Force of Destiny' opens at the London Coliseum, WC2, on Nov 9; eno.org