AI Profile Tony Hall, chief executive, Royal Opera House; chairman, Cultural Olympiad Board
A year ago, in his last interview before stepping down as chairman of the Arts Council, Sir Christopher Frayling showed that he had become increasingly frustrated at the lack of action on the Cultural Olympiad. “There are too many front doors” he told AI. “The way through it is to get a ringmaster, someone with a vision.”
Tony Hall is not the ringmaster. Although he stands at a new single portal to a proper national cultural representation in the 2012 Olympics, and despite the press having hailed him as the visionary required, he expects to announce the actual master of ceremonies in the next few days.
The delay in appointing the director of the Cultural Olympiad is partly his fault, he concedes. “They weren’t offering enough and this is a serious job, a huge opportunity. We want somebody who is going to shift things”. He won’t say what was on offer, but it was around £90,000 a year and now will be nearer £120,000.
“There are so many strands to pull together” he says, adding that he hopes the director will bring on other people “to help do the heavy lifting”.
“We have chance in a million to do justice to 2012 –and it is 2012 in my opinion, not 2010 or 2011 – and to demonstrate to ourselves and the world how immensely powerful the arts, culture and creative industries are in this country” he says. “I think 2012 is a showcase of arts and culture in this country, and I hope that at the end of 2012 people remember it as a year in which they were wowed by concerts and opportunities they never dreamed of.”
Tony Hall himself couldn’t have dreamed, during his long career which took him to the top in BBC News, that he would be hailed as the saviour not only of the Cultural Olympics but of the Royal Opera House.
It’s almost nine years since he arrived at Covent Garden to take charge of a dysfunctional and ailing subsidised giant. The opera house had reopened a year earlier after a protracted, costly and controversial refurbishment, thanks to the determination of his predecessor, Michael Kaiser. But it was in serious of danger of closing again.
“Michael Kaiser did a remarkable job in opening the place, but there was not a shadow of doubt that it needed to go from opening into how do you keep this thing running” Hall says.
“I felt there were two things we needed to do: One, to ensure financial stability, we needed to get funding for the seasons, simple as that; but, two, to make the debate about the opera house about the art and what we do on the stage, not about the management and the board and the building which had been dominating headlines for so many years.”
The advantage he had was that he was coming from outside the arts, and could be a wide-eyed ingénue with no background to get in his way. He brought a pragmatism, got rid of Ross Stretton after a year in post as director of the Royal Ballet and replaced him with the respected Monica Mason, and added an artistic development arm under the former ballerina Deborah Bull. He says the credit for Covent Garden’s revival should go elsewhere, however.
“It was the passion and commitment and creativity of the place and people in all sorts of different ways” he says. “It wasn’t what you saw reflected outside, where it was the fact that there had been five of me in four years that people were aware of”. He defers to the work of Tony Pappano as music director, Mason and Elaine Padmore as head of opera for keeping the artistic quality high, and later Bull in the studio theatres doing new work and giving opportunities to younger artists – “this season Thomas Arne’s Artaxerxes has been a wonderful achievement, for instance”.
“Now it’s a really good and happy combination of talents” says Hall, “and I hope that’s what people see.”
