Double dose of Phantom of the Opera to make up for lost dollars

Artistic director Lyndon Terracini has bold plans to restore the finances of the national opera company.

Diego Torre and Natalie Aroyan in Verdi’s Ernani. Picture: Adam Yip

Lyndon Terracini is pressing ahead with bold plans to put Opera Australia on a sound financial footing — including dual productions of musical blockbuster The Phantom of the Opera — after a disastrous pandemic year that has lost the company millions of dollars.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical to be staged at the Sydney Opera House and on Sydney ­Harbour is yet to be announced but Terracini said it was intended to help boost the company’s depleted coffers.

“The bottom line is that I ­realised, when COVID started, we had to have a show that’s going to make a lot of money,” the OA’s ­artistic director said. “Phantom is the most bankable musical there is.”

On Tuesday OA opens a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Ernani, which is set to delight aficionados of big operatic voices. It features Australian singers Diego Torre and Natalie Aroyan — as the outlaw nobleman Ernani and his lover Elvira — alongside ­Bulgarian baritone Vladimir Stoyanov and Ukrainian bass Vitalij Kowaljow.

“The music just fantastic, wonderful,” Torre said. “I think people will like it a lot.”

But the use of foreign artists has angered a former singer with OA who said it was “alarming and unacceptable” for the national company to hire internationals when Australians were out of work.

Other moves by OA also have been controversial. The company expects to post a multi-million-dollar loss after it was forced to cancel hundreds of performances last year worth $75m in ticket sales.

A cost-saving restructure has involved the sale of a Sydney warehouse used for set storage and the loss of 56 jobs across the organisation, including 16 musicians from the orchestra.

Several musicians have settled claims of unfair dismissal and one has alleged unlawful dismissal in the Federal Court.

Terracini told The Weekend Australian Magazine that the measures were intended to prevent OA from becoming a part-time operation. H e rejected the suggestion he did not support Australian singers, naming Nicole Car, Stacey Alleaume, Aroyan and Torre as singers whose careers he has nurtured. “I have spent a lot of time with Australian singers, and trying to develop Australian singers,” he said.

Aroyan said it would be possible to stage Ernani with an all-Australian cast, but those decisions were made by OA’s ­artistic team. “The style of Verdi is quite challenging: you have to have the voice to carry the line, and yet have the strength and warmth to do justice to the music,” she said. “It takes a long time to train somebody to get to that point.”