Richard Gill talks opera

Richard Gill  

If Berlin can support three opera companies then, it would seem, so can Melbourne. The Victorian Opera, the Melbourne City Opera and the Melbourne Opera are the three companies, all creating and touring productions in Melbourne and around Victoria. It is all looking very positive for the long-term development of Opera in Australia.

The Victorian Opera is the most recent of the companies. It was created in 2006, on the eve of the hearing of the contentious Edith Melva Thompson opera bequest that so tore the opera communities apart for a while. The arts minister Mary Delahunty announced that the government would invest $7.6 million over four years for a new "boutique opera company" that would "secure Melbourne's position as a home of innovative and accessible opera in Australia"; the company that was to become the Victorian Opera.

To meet the artistic director Richard Gill last week, I visited the Victorian Opera which lies nestled on the edge of Melbourne’s city, inhabiting the ageing victorian grandeur of Horti Hall; a lovely, slightly musty context that belies the fresh and innovatory nature of their innovative 2010 program and approach.

Dedicated to the support of contemporary music, the Victorian Opera commissions a new Australian work every year. In its fifth year it has produced six new Australian works to date, placing it at the forefront of commissioning new opera in Australia.

Every second year (2007, 2009, 2011) the VO tours, visiting “most towns where there is a theatre". In the future, they hope to extend their tour to Canberra, WA and Tasmania.

The VO disitinguishes itself from other opera companies in its strong educational agenda and fresh, innovative program aims to stimulate and educate their audiences, and to expand the notoriously conservative tastes of the opera-going public.

The VO would appear to benefit greatly from having the the charismatic and impassioned, composer and educationalist, Richard Gill as its musical director. “We are super-duper accountable since the last company collapsed for all sorts of reasons” but Gill views the company’s future as bright, with subsriptions from the public growing and an education program more engaging and empowering than any seen before.

Their program for 2010 includes Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and a double bill with two operas by Walton and Ibert. It reveals a dedication to exploring lesser-known operas and a gentle invite to Opera audiences to experience a repertoire beyond the perameters of the “well-known” classics that soak the other Opera companies’ programs.

Themed vaguely around “the year of the woman” with its emphasis on the librettos in which women feature prominently (though no female composers are to be seen), Gill talked me through his thinking behind the program and the VO’s missions.

“We will always do something from the baroque, because it is a small orchestral force generally. we will always do something brand new, because we commission a new work every year, we will always do something mad, like The Bear and Angelique, always do something a bit left of centre like the Threepenny Opera, and always do a gala concert.

“The idea is to try to return opera to the people because Opera is really very accessible as it is quintessentially about telling stories with music. and that is the end of it.”

Gill’s own passion for choral work and opera he suggests may have stemmed in his own life from an education at catholic school where “the mass was in Latin with bells and incense and whistles and people got dressed up and it was very theatrical; high drama and lots of music. I was hooked.”

He started learning piano at 13 and on leaving school completed 3 years music teacher training at the Sydney Conservatorium. He went on to teach at high school for seven years. His passion for music is equalled only by his passion for seeing the transformative effects of education. He told me,

“I love teaching, I still love teaching. I adore to teach. I love leading people to discover things they thought they didn’t know….getting people to think, to find ways of learning, it is irresistible to me. I taught in London for two years in the East End in Hackney. It was really extraordinary. I saw people change because of music and singing.

“Then I drifted around the world doing stuff. and now I am here”.

The “stuff” he is talking about amounts to an impressive history in involvement with the world of music as a composer and as an educationalist.

Gill wears many hats in his dedication to music education and the development of young musicians, including adviser for the Musica Viva in Schools program, artistic director of the Education program for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and for the last 18 months advisor on the National Curriculum.

“Opera Education is very important. We have two youth companies in Victorian Opera: The Parrot Factory and The Cockatoos. We have children involved in the company and making opera from the age of 7 to 25. The idea is we bring children in to the company and they learn to perform an opera properly in the hands of professionals and then stage it. We are just about to welcome an educational officer full time into the company.”

By involving and charging children with direct experience and knowledge of the spectacle, musical expressiveness and diversity of Opera, a future audience of enthusiasts are born.

Noticing Sondheim on Opera Australia’s program, I asked Gill whether these youth operas were pure opera or actually musicals. Gill assured me that though he “loves” musicals these works are “genuinely operatic in content and not musicals. We have a child’s opera every year. Musicals have lots of dialogue which lead into numbers which may not have a lot to do with anything and then more dialogue. These operas will be through composed and sung entirely."

Unsurprisingly, Gill’s dedication to education is premised in a genuine concern for children and adults who do not have,or have not before had, the opportunity to experience the world of music. In addition to children’s programs the VO runs a Sing your own opera event, this year with Gilbert and Sullivan music, taking place at BMW edge, Federation Square. It also offers a discounted subscription price for people under 30.

“80% of school children in Australia do not have access to musical education” Gill tells me. Aware that most of those children, however, have access to sport Gill asked to join the advisory board of the National Curriculum; he tells me, “I said, “I need to be there””.

“The idea that there are that many children missing out on music is abhorrent to me. And that is why I am leading this campaign with the national curriculum and trying to keep music foregrounded in the national curriculum.”

“On the altruistic side, we teach music because it is good, because what it does for children spiritually, emotionally and physically, mentally is intangible, immeasurable and priceless. These are all the intrinsic benefits of music. “

Free of any purist agendas, Gill asks from a music education that at least “every child in the country can sing”; neither advocate for one particular style nor another, his feeling is that “in the hands of a really good teacher, they can work out what they need to do with their children.

Many share Gills view that there is a grave need in this country for children to have a serious musical education. The other challenge that art companies face daily in addition to poorly musically -educated audiences, is a basic attitude problem

“In Australia the arts are not necessarily seen as essential to the quality of life. Though people go to things, to get them going all the time, remains a challenge.”

In Gill’s hands the new generation of Australians will hopefully find the world of opera more familiar, accessible and vital than the last. The popularity of the VO tours, its prioritizing of Victorian musicians and composers and its friendly events program will hopefully secure it in the hearts of the Victorian public.

At the end of our conversation he looks at me with his distinctive calm, self-composure and says, “We are determined to keep going, to win lots of cases and keep the repertoire alive.” There is no arguing with that tone.

For more information about their 2010 program, visit the Victorian Opera website here.