A NITRO AT THE OPERA

Reviews

• Review by Tom Service in The Guardian

• Review by Robert Maycock in The Independent

• Review by Anna Picard in The Independent

A Nitro at the Opera - a one-day festival of new operatic works by black composers at the Royal Opera House.

As part of my work with Nitro I produced Nitrobeat, an annual series of festivals of new musical theatre, written by black artists, with several notable partners including Contact Manchester, The SouthBank Centre, and The New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich.

A Nitro at the Opera, in partnership with the Royal Opera House, was a natural development of this project and it was based on a single, simple notion and an undeniable observation. The notion: that opera was about telling a story by singing the words. The observation: that there were barely any black artists involved at any level in the world of opera. Yet telling stories musically was at the heart of most black performance, be it in theatre or song, we told stories through music. Years of advocating for more black involvement in opera – a world seen as stuffy, conservative, elitist - had changed nothing, so a more direct approach was necessary. We approached Deborah Bull, Artistic Director of the Linbury Studio in the Royal Opera House and A Nitro at the Opera was born…..

Using the principles from our Nitrobeat Festivals we commissioned six composers to make short arias and three more to compose 1-act operas.

Our composers:

Nicky Brown

Dee Drysdale

Dominique Le Gendre

Clement Ishmael

Tunde Jegede

Ola Onabule

Orphy Robinson

Errollyn Wallen

Alex Wilson

 It was a chilly morning in November 2003, hours before the Royal Opera House would open its doors. Admission was free, no tickets were booked in advance, so Deborah and I had no idea how many people would turn up. Would anybody be interested in the idea? If black composers had never been given platforms for this type of work before, would audiences – black or white – believe such a thing was possible, relevant, interesting?

We were in a room overlooking Covent Garden square; glancing out of a window. I noticed a long queue snaking around the perimeter of the square. I turned to Deborah, “There must be something on nearby…. strange, most of them are black… can’t be for us though, there’s still two hours to go….”

Two thousand people turned up for A Nitro at the Opera. Anecdotally around 1500-1600 were black and for 75% this was the first time they had ever been to the Royal Opera House. They enjoyed not only the commissioned pieces in the Linbury Studio and the Crush Room, but also children’s workshops and a chance to be part of a huge choir, rehearsed and conducted by one of the ROH’s Choirmasters, to sing the chorus parts of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha (not only the first black opera but the first American opera), led by leading black British opera singers and performed in the Floral Hall later in the afternoon. In the Crush Room, after the arias, we held debates on several social and artistic issues, with enthusiastic participation from a very vocal audience. One woman said, “when I lived in Trinidad I went to the opera and classical concerts all the time, it’s only when I come to this country that I feel I am not welcome in these places”.

As the Independent’s critic Robert Maycock put it, A Nitro at the Opera was “the glamorous tip of an improbably iceberg”. Tom Service, writing in the Guardian, said: “that the day was deemed necessary is an indictment of opera’s image as something for the white upper classes, but the huge demand it generated – the Linbury Studio could have been filled many times over – pointed to a huge popular success.”

The following year we put on Revival!, which featured just the performances from the festival, whilst the year after that we attempted a multi-composer production of A Rake’s Progress, with nine composers each taking one of Hogarth’s pictures as a scene. This hugely complex project made it as far as a full rehearsal but, sadly, never to the public stage. 

Nevertheless, there was a legacy. Dominique Le Gendre’s piece, Bird of Night was subsequently recommissioned by the Royal Opera House as a full opera. Startlingly, this was not just the ROH’s first commissioned full opera for a black composer, it was also the first – in 2005 - for a woman….