Francesca Chiejina and Luciano Botelho
(Picture: Richard Hubert Smith)Last September, English Touring Opera aroused controversy and anger when James Conway, the company’s artistic director for nearly 20 years, announced that in the interests of diversity, the company was not renewing contracts with 13 members of its orchestra. Then in December, Conway revealed his intention to stand aside as artistic director. No doubt the two announcements weren’t entirely unconnected.
From my seat for La Bohème on this first night of ETO’s spring tour, I couldn’t check the diversity in the orchestra pit, but onstage, it was amply evident. The tour will take two operas – the other is Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel – to 14 towns, from Durham to Exeter. The production, dating from 2015, is by Conway, although Christopher Moon-Little handles this revival, set, as Puccini intended, in the mid-19th century. The opera is sung in the original Italian, with succinct surtitles to help us keep up.
