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NBR New Zealand Opera reveals deficit

Submitted by Lindis Taylor on May 31, 2004 - 19:00.

The Sunday Star Times of 18 April published a report revealing that NBR New Zealand Opera (NZO) is facing a deficit of $420,000, and that pleas for Government assistance had been rejected. Apart from the limited level of state funding, the company was hit last year by a reduction in funding by a principal sponsor, Tower.

As well as rejection by the Government, NZO General Manager Alex Reedijk noted that the Auckland City Council had recently rejected a request for a $45,000 funding increase, over its present support of $75,000. He said that was particularly bitter, for the company’s activities in Auckland brought the city an estimated $2 million a year.

The company sustained a loss in 2003 with the artistically successful Boris Godunov while the productions in the rest of the year, from which surpluses had been hoped, did less well than expected.

This year, the collaboration with the New Zealand International Arts Festival with Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore resulted in below budget ticket sales, particularly in Auckland. That is clearly a bitter pill in the light of the decision, which ran counter to the opinions and advice of most opera commentators, to perform a comic opera and to take it to Auckland for the first time in the Festival’s history.

The paper reports confidence from Alex Reedijk, however, that the company will manage to trade its way out of debt. He says that losses come with the territory. “We have good days and bad days. As long as ultimately it evens out, that’s what’s important,” he said.

Reedijk points to ‘incredibly low’ government funding as a key problem. Only 16% of NZO’s revenue comes from government, he noted, while the Royal New Zealand Ballet is 40% government-funded. He pointed out that opera companies in Australia get 50–60% of their revenue from government sources.

NZO has said it will feature more popular productions, and plans a more ‘artistically challenging’ opera only every three years. The newspaper observed that this year’s schedule should leave little room for box office bombs, with the popular Rigoletto, light-hearted Così fan tutte and Carmen—the world’s No. 1 opera.

Alex Reedijk is bullish about the future, nevertheless, and believes opera in New Zealand is going through a “renaissance”; an opinion backed by ticket sales, which rose 33% last year, he said.

Let us hope that Mr Reedijk is right

Submitted by Lindis Taylor on October 3, 2004 - 15:55.

Let us hope that Mr Reedijk is right. Certainly the rest of the world is experiencing an opera renaissance, but that only comes with a civilised level of state support.

He is certainly right about one thing: that the level of government funding is a critical problem. It might be possible, in a city of 8 million like London, with a huge tourist population, to support non-subsidised opera, but even then it will only work by endless repeats of the top ten (like Raymond Gubbay’s Savoy Opera, which had its opening run in April). For healthy, comprehensive, artistically excellent and adventurous opera to flourish, non-box office revenues for at least half the total budget are indispensable.

Low levels of state funding will lock the company into high prices and standard repertoire—and no one is denigrating the great masterpieces—consigning New Zealanders, alone in the western world, to a condition of musical poverty and deprivation.

Such unenterprising programmes will provide Creative New Zealand with its reason to reduce funding still further.

And indeed, it might be better to cut funding altogether than to prolong a regime that demands such high ticket prices that elitism becomes a fair criticism.

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