Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It is two years since Arts Council England dropped its bombshell. After years of hand-wringing over English National Opera’s finances, ACE peremptorily slashed the company’s annual £12.8mn grant and told it to develop a new business model outside London. No other details were given. Nor, it seems, were any other organisations in the sector consulted.The first step forward came a year ago when ENO revealed it had chosen Manchester for its out-of-London base, but that left a lot unsaid. What kind of presence would the company have there? How could its finances stretch to cover that and continued seasons in London? Would it move its nearly 300 employees north, or try to bear the cost of ferrying orchestra and chorus back and forth?Now, at last, we have some of the answers. ENO has announced the first wave of its plans for a partnership with the city-region of Greater Manchester for the next three years, with the aim of being firmly established there by 2029.There will be no single theatre in Manchester that houses ENO performances, as the Coliseum does in London. Instead, the company will bring into play a variety of venues, each suited to a different aspect of its work. An immersive co-production of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach will be shared with Factory International, Improbable and Park Avenue Armory New York, premiering in 2027, and the first UK production of Chinese-American composer Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone will be presented at Factory’s Aviva Studios in 2026.The plans for operas in the core repertoire remain very modest. ENO will stage a new production of Britten’s Albert Herring at the Lowry, Salford in October 2025. A semi-staged concert version of Mozart’s Così fan tutte will go into Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in February 2026.Beyond that, there are multiple projects to take opera into the community. The creation of a Greater Manchester Youth Opera Company will bring young people from under-represented backgrounds into an ensemble singing programme. Perfect Pitch, a meeting of opera and football, promises a large-scale participation programme in mass singing. ENO Breathe, set up during the Covid pandemic, will work with people suffering from respiratory conditions. New work development programmes will be set up to encourage creativity reflecting Greater Manchester’s communities. ENO Engage will expand its free music-making programme for schools into the Greater Manchester area. A collaboration with Factory International will offer vocational training for those interested in working in opera.This will not be what people expected. The assumption had been that the kind of opera programme the company offers in London would be shared between the two cities. Instead, Manchester will get no full-scale, core repertoire opera at all in this first wave of activity. Opera North, which tours every season to the Lowry, can heave a sigh of relief.This also points to some possible answers on the finances. Only Così fan tutte and Albert Herring are advertised as featuring the ENO Orchestra and the latter only employs 13 players. There will be no need to break the budget regularly transporting the full orchestra and chorus up and down, though that does suggest the bulk of ENO’s grant money (the Arts Council has made several additional grants to keep the company going) will be kept for the London operation. Suddenly the Manchester operation looks a very different prospect.Jenny Mollica says setting up an “ENO North” or “ENO Two” was never the intention. Appointed the company’s chief executive six months ago, she now occupies an unenviable hot seat with the responsibility of bringing Arts Council England’s back-of-an-envelope edict into reality. All the experience she has had in various administrative roles at the Barbican and Guildhall School of Music & Drama, followed by her stint as director of strategy and engagement at ENO, will need to be brought into play.“We’ve developed [these plans] on our own terms,” she says. “I feel they have the essence of ENO’s DNA in terms of evolving the art form. As we approach our centenary in 2031 this is something I take very seriously, having come into the organisation at this point in its history. It is about where we position the company for the next 100 years and Manchester is enabling us to diversify the work we do to reach a wider range of audiences. If we can get the synergy between London and Manchester right, I think we can unleash more creativity than is possible within the constraints of one venue.”A key part of the plan is partnerships. All the community programmes have been set up with existing bodies in the Greater Manchester region and there is talk of resuming partnerships with international opera houses, for many years a prominent part of how ENO has exploited its work.“One of the key reasons why we chose Manchester was its abundance of partnership opportunities,” says Mollica. “The question was what we could do with partners there that perhaps we can’t do on our own, so this was never about shifting the Coliseum to Manchester or wanting to run our own venue there. We can be driven more by the stories we want to tell and which venues and partners will best enable us to tell them. This initial period from 2025 to 2027 is about testing a lot of different ways of making opera with our partners. Manchester will be a kind of engine room to incubate new work for the company.”Meanwhile, opera at the Coliseum in London will continue and the 2025/26 season is due to be announced next May. After five years of upheaval, ENO is edging towards firmer ground. The past couple of London seasons, though a lot smaller than in the past, have been artistically successful. Audience figures are higher than pre-pandemic with no less than 57 per cent first-time visitors. The orchestra and chorus have been moved to seven-month contracts, which must have been a painful experience for all concerned. Plans are once more being made with a five-year trajectory, crucial if there are to be partnerships with major international players.Given the demands on the public finances, it would be unwise to predict what might happen in the future, but Mollica says the company is ahead of projections for the current business plan. These pressures are not unique to ENO, or even to the UK. Opera companies everywhere are being tested by reductions in income or falling audience figures, or both. In being forced to take radical action now, ENO may find it is ahead of the pack.“This has been a turbulent time,” says Mollica with some understatement. “We have faced complex problems in having to reorganise our whole operating model to incorporate two bases, but actually the challenges are no different from other organisations in the UK or US. Each of us is taking a different approach, but I believe opera companies must not retreat or shy away from the problems. We have to look to the future with a mindset of growth and ambition. I don’t think any organisation can go through what we’ve been through over the last couple of years and not emerge from that with a strong sense of direction.”
