English National Opera has announced the first steps in its plan to make a new base in Manchester.
After The Arts Council two years ago threatened ENO would lose its taxpayer-funded grants entirely unless it sought a new base away from its London home, Greater Manchester was chosen as ENO's future location. See our previous story here.
The new announcement is impressively wide-ranging and ambitious and a boost to arts provision in the North West, though talk of complete "relocation” from London for ENO seems to have been quietly dropped, in favour of striking new “partnerships” with Manchester and its existing arts and music organisations.
ENO’s chief executive, Jenny Mollica, says the company will be working “with partners and venues, rather than coming in and running our own building”; adding: “We were very interested in seeing what we could work with within the existing ecosystem and do things together that we couldn’t do alone, and complement and enhance that, rather than coming in disrupting that.”
It is clear the company intends to retain its substantial performance programme in London for as long as it can. Jenny Mollica has told The Stage there are currently no plans to cut jobs in London, with the move to put down roots in Greater Manchester an “evolution” rather than a “cliff-edge” moment. “One of the things we are already getting underway with is recruitment here in Manchester,” she said. ”We never wanted this to be about lifting and shifting a model of an opera house and putting it down in the middle of a city-region. We want it to be about growing something from within it, and working with partners to imagine what that could look like. That’s why co-production and partnership is such an important spirit of what we are doing.”
Plans announced so far are:
The formation of a Greater Manchester Youth Opera, in partnership with the Royal Northern College of Music (which already has a thriving opera department), plus Darwen Music Hub and other groups, from September next year. The RNCM is also to provide space and mentoring for new operatic projects, and cross-disciplinary “labs” to foster new forms of immersive and mixed-reality opera, in a three-year project from spring 2026 called “Creative Incubator”.
A new ENO production of Britten’s Albert Herring will come to Salford’s Lowry in October 2025. Musicians required for the small-scale village-based comedy (it needs no chorus and only a small orchestra) will be supplied by ENO. It’s said to be the first of a series of “signature classics”, with a concert version of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte to be given at the Bridgewater Hall in central Manchester in February 2026.
The UK premiere of Pulitzer prize-winning contemporary opera Angel’s Bone, by Chinese-American composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek, which explores modern-day slavery and human trafficking. It will be in a new production at Aviva Studios in central Manchester, in collaboration with Factory International and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, in May 2026.
A new “immersive” production of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach is to be presented in collaboration with Factory International, theatre company Improbable and Park Avenue Armoury New York, directed by Improbable’s Phelim McDermott, in spring 2027. This will also be part of a collaboration with Factory International’s training programme, in which young people are invited to work on technical and producing skills.
In summer next year there will be a “participation programme” to explore the impact that mass singing has on team performance and spectator experience at football matches, co-created with Salford-based outdoor arts specialists Walk the Plank, community groups and local football teams. It will be called “Perfect Pitch”.
ENO’s creative health programme ENO Breathe, and its free learning and participation department ENO Learning, are to work with 30 schools in the region in the current academic year, and ENO is planning to work with the University of Manchester on public consultations and conversations focused on opportunities for opera in Greater Manchester – the first of these being at Aviva Studios in July 2025, during the Manchester International Festival.
Andy Burnham referred, at the launch of the present plans, to the ill-fated project to persuade the Royal Opera to establish a base in Manchester – floated by Manchester City Council when he was Culture Secretary in the 2000s, and abandoned after an unrealistic feasibility study projected large audiences coming from over the whole North of England to performances at the Palace Theatre – as having “over time… grown into a partnership you’re hearing confirmed today”. There will probably be relief that ENO’s idea, by contrast, is to start small and be imaginative.
Arts Council England chief executive Darren Henley says the plans announced are “truly electrifying in scale, scope and ambition. It’s thrilling to anticipate this innovative, exceptional work being staged here in Manchester – and to know that, from here, that work will reach out to touch audiences around the world.”
One elephant in the room, however, is where Opera North is supposed to fit in all this. The Leeds-based company - originally an offshoot of ENO for the North of England, regularly presenting top-quality, full-scale performance of a wide repertoire of operas to the North West and specifically to its partner organisation, the Lowry – is funded by Arts Council England and maintains a full-time orchestra and chorus of its own. For now.
More info here