The voice of opera in Scotland - is Welsh

ON THE face of it, we can only drool with envy at Welsh National Opera. Nine productions into its 60th birthday season; a brand new state-of-the-art performance venue in Cardiff with growing audiences; a relatively secure level of core funding; and an infrastructure that still supports a full-time chorus alongside its permanent orchestra and production support team.

Yet here we are in Scotland with an opera company scraping around for pennies, laying off essential artistic personnel and effectively silenced for an entire season by government edict.

To rub salt into the wound, WNO comes to Scotland next month with a mini-season of three major productions at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, including John Caird's much-anticipated new production of Verdi's colossal Don Carlos, a new version of Lehar's ever-popular The Merry Widow featuring Lesley Garrett and former Scottish Opera blue-eyed boy Donald Maxwell, and a revival of Giles Havergal's 1986 production of Rossini's The Barber of Seville. So why is it that Scottish Opera should be lying uncomfortably dormant, while its Welsh counterpart would appear to be firing on all cylinders?

The answer is, it needn't be. WNO has had problems remarkably similar to Scottish Opera. A few years ago, it was nursing a deficit of 1.4 million. It was forced to re-examine its finances and come up with a strategy that would ensure better husbandry of its arts council funding, and at the same time protect its national role as Wales's sole provider of mainstream opera.

"The company was at a point where its funders needed to take stock," WNO's executive director Peter Bellingham explains. "Grants were not keeping up with inflation, costs were rising faster than the grants, and a series of funding crises had led to cuts in the levels of work. Year on year we were becoming less cost-effective." How familiar is that tale?

Bear in mind that WNO's funding level, even then, was larger than Scottish Opera's. Historically, it has received revenue funding from two sources - the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) and Arts Council England (ACE) - currently totalling 9.8m, compared with Scottish Opera's 7.4m. The 3.9m it gets from the ACE comes under the cross-border touring fund operated by all four UK arts councils, for which WNO augments its Welsh presence with 14 weeks of performances a year in various English cities.

The most striking statistic in all this, however, is the fact that WNO, despite all its financial problems, has managed to maintain a regular full season of nine opera productions, stretching from early September to the second week in July. And rather than ditch its full-time chorus, as Scottish Opera was pressed into doing, WNO has merely rationalised the musical workforce with a few inevitable redundancies and maintained both its core orchestra and chorus.

The process of recuperation was made much easier for WNO by ACE's Stabilisation and Recovery initiative, which provided additional one-off funding to arts companies who are required to reassess their strategies and become more costeffective. "We had extra funding at an early stage to take care of the deficit and to fund various aspects of consultancy and research," Bellingham explains.

But, far from standing scared with its back to the wall, WNO took a daring, hard-line approach. "Our pitch was that we could become much more cost-effective, but only if our output remained at a particular level," Bellingham adds. Its case was no doubt helped by the imminent completion of the new Wales Millennium Centre, which opened its doors last year, and since February has been the impressive new home venue of WNO.

But that, too, presented its challenges. WNO's previous home in Cardiff, the New Hall, had a seating capacity of 1,000. WNO now found itself with 1,700 seats to fill. Once again, the company made a bold decision. It decided to reduce ticket prices both at the bottom and at the top, taking the highest price down from 47 to 35, and the lowest down to 5, with no special conditions attached and 250 of the lowest price tickets available in advance for every performance.

Of course, there were doubters, but the figures speak for themselves. "We've played to 98 per cent attendances since the new hall opened. Going to the opera in Cardiff is now cheaper than going to a rugby international," says Bellingham, going on to claim, with proud satisfaction, that the Welsh national sport is clearly more elitist than its opera.

The bottom line is, WNO audiences currently get a lot more opera for their money than Scottish Opera aficionados. It presents three seasons a year, each with three operas, at least one of which is a brand new production. This year's 60th birthday season is unusual only in the scale of productions - the new Don Carlos (in the lesser-known five-act version in French), new productions by Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser of The Merry Widow and Tchaikovsky's Mazepa (part of WNO's ongoing Russian Opera Series), and a new staging of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman featuring Bryn Terfel.

But there are concerns ahead. "From next April we will be directly funded by the Welsh Assembly," says Bellingham. WNO will be one of six national companies, including the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, whose funding will come direct from the devolved Welsh Assembly, rather than through the Arts Council. The English and Welsh combined funding relationship will continue, but now directly with Westminster's Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

"We've been working very hard to establish relationships with the 60 new Assembly members," Bellingham says. "There are no guarantees as yet, but the indications are that they value WNO." The fruits of the last few years' new initiatives are paying off. WNO's stage workshop, which builds scenery for theatres around the UK and abroad, is effectively a small, thriving business in its own right. "The politicians have been particularly interested in that," Bellingham says.

In the current game of operatic survival, WNO is fighting its corner with dogged determination and a reluctance to compromise its raison d'tre. Its visit to Edinburgh in October, supported by the Scots-based private bank Adam & Company, makes it the sole voice of opera in Scotland this season. The irony isn't lost.

Welsh National Opera is at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 11-15 October, performing Don Carlos (11 and 15 October), The Merry Widow (12 and 14 October) and The Barber of Seville (13 October).