James Conway, director of Opera Theatre Company, is about to take up the job of general director at English Touring Opera, based in London.
He says he is attracted by moving to the larger company, which has an orchestra of 27, a cast of 25 on the road at any one time and tours from Perth to Jersey. He is also interested in being based in a city where there is more opera and, he says, "more comment about opera". The job would see him taking a combined artistic and executive role.
The fascinating twist to the tale is that he is going to remain at Opera Theatre Company in a new role as artistic director. He will dedicate 20 per cent of his time to this role, and the structure of OTC will change. An internal reshuffle sees Gemma Murphy move from administrator to general manager and Esther Murphy has been appointed to the new post of office administrator. Asked if it wouldn't be better to bring in a full-time director, Conway insists that OTC has considered the restructuring carefully. He has a strong programme in place which he wants to see out over the next two years, and wants to keep the confidence of the arts councils North and South. "Perhaps it's a good idea not to change everything at once," he suggests. He is expected to sign a contract with ETO very shortly.
Conway (45) has been the OTC director since 1991 and worked for the company on and off before that. He is currently directing Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, which opens at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, on February 8th before touring nationally.
More moves in the music world in recent months include a game of musical chairs at the National Concert Hall, where Ifty Finn has become box office manager (succeeding to Fiona Tully), Rosita Wolfe is the new marketing and PR manager (succeeding to Jacqui Mahon) and Aoife Carlin is the new marketing & IT executive (succeeding Michele Aboud).
Assumpta Lawless has moved from Music Network, where she was PR manager, to the RTÉ music division, where she has taken up the post of general manager for marketing and communications. The PR manager job at Music Network was advertised before Christmas, but it has not been filled, and will now be re-advertised.
Maura Eaton has been appointed chief executive of the Irish Music Board and the Arts Council is in the process of recruiting her successor as music officer. It's expected that interviews for the job will be held in February. David Byers has taken early retirement from BBC Northern Ireland, where he was chief producer, music and arts. The BBC is replacing him with a senior producer, whose appointment will be announced shortly.
Brian Kennedy is now firmly ensconced again in Australia, having had his contract as director of the National Gallery of Australia extended by two years from next August. The circumstances in which he declined the directorship of IMMA seem, not surprisingly, to be misunderstood in the Australian media. From an antipodean viewpoint, it looks as if Kennedy extended his Australian tenure as a second-best option: "Only two weeks ago," writes the Australian, "Dr Kennedy was in the embarrassing and peculiar situation of being director of two world-ranking galleries - Australia's and the Irish Museum of Modern Art - simultaneously".
The fact that Kennedy's appointment had caused resignations from the IMMA board was used by some commentators to back up the action of the deputy chairman of the National Gallery of Australia's council, businessman Rob Ferguson, who resigned because of the manner in which Kennedy was reappointed. He alleged the chairman of the gallery council, Harold Mitchell, had not followed "proper process" over the extension of Kennedy's term of office, in the wake of the offer of the IMMA job. He alleged that Mitchell had recommended Kennedy's reappointment to Australian Arts Minister, Richard Alston, "without any consultation with the council". He said this ran counter to the spirit of an informal gallery council meeting in May at which it was decided not to reappoint Kennedy.
Back home, the allegations surrounding Kennedy's decision to decline the directorship of IMMA are a bit more serious, and concern influence running in a different direction - from the political class to the museum, rather than vice versa.
Isn't it paradoxical to house street theatre? That's the question you can't help asking when you see the ambitious plans by Waterford's Spraoi company for a new performance space on a green-field site to the north-west of the city. Spraoi's director, T.V. Honan, is bullish about the need for the new space. There's the practicality of it - Spraoi has been working in garages and yards for most of its nine years of existence."Picture a mother arriving with kids on a Saturday morning to a rough and ready space," he says. There's the whole question of the making of the instruments for street art, a work of "industrial production", which Honan says has always been a celebrated part of Spraoi. Then there's the question of trying to move the work up a few artistic notches. "This style of work in Ireland is relatively new, and dates, possibly, from the arrival of Els Comediants (the Catalan street theatre group) in Galway in 1985.
"Then there were a number of groups, including Macnas, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and ourselves in 1993. The parade model was new and gave the sector a buoyancy, but people will get tired of dragons of one type or another coming down the street. We need to begin to tell stories about other issues other than the carnival thing. We need to say to our artists: 'Your art is as valid as what hangs in a gallery or is put on in a theatre'."
Spraoi plans to begin by building a 10,000-square-foot studio complex at the Carrickphierish site, bordering Waterford Industrial Estate. It is hoped to develop the site further to house studios for artists in other disciplines to form, what Honan calls, "a campus . . . a modest campus, admittedly." Spraoi has applied for planning permission and hopes to begin building in May or June of this year. Half of the required €700,000 has been raised, and the company has launched a fund-raising drive, inviting people to donate a euro a week to the scheme. If built, it will be one of the first cases in Ireland of an arts facility leading the development of a suburban area.
If the 1991 première of John Adams's opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, was controversial, it will have accrued further controversy by the time it is performed in the UK on Friday, January 18th. It recounts the hi-jacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner by Palestinian extremists, during which a wheelchair-bound Jewish American was murdered. At the time it was decried as having too violent a subject matter. Not surprisingly, this time around there have been objections to it being staged. It is just one element of a whole weekend at the Barbican dedicated to the work of the most frequently performed living US composer.
John's Earbox - the Music of John Adams, which is organised by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, includes a performance of Grand Pianola Music, which the composer describes as "Beethoven and Rachmaninov soaking in the same warm bath with Liberace and the Supremes". Baritone Christopher Maltman will sing a setting of Walt Whitman's poem, The Wound-Dresser, and Emanuel Ax will play the piano concerto Century Rolls.
See www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/so for full schedule
Dublin Institute of Technology's fascinating series of public lectures, "Culture, Power and Exchange", continues on Wednesday next with a lecture at DIT Rathmines at 6.30 p.m. by Richard Middleton, an eminent historian and theorist on popular music. He is the author of two books on the subject, Pop Music and the Blues (1972) and Studying Popular Music (1990).
The cultural historian and novelist, Marina Warner, will lecture on February 19th, and other lectures in the series, which is associated with the Arts Council's Critical Voices project, will be given by the media/performance theorist and practitioner, Coco Fusco (April 26th), and GertDumbar, the founder of Studio Dumbar, one of the world's most respected design studios.
All lectures are at 6.30 p.m., but venues are unconfirmed, unless otherwise stated. Information from: 01-4023000.
