BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Reckon you can start up your own performance company?
Do it. Why not?
This “let’s just do it” attitude was adopted by Chris Clement McNee, so in 2013 he went all out and founded Brisbane City Opera.
It’s not like he was born for the role. Actually, he was born in Canberra, raised in Port Moresby, and completed degrees in Political Science and Philosophy from the Australian National University – all before he even started studying singing.
So how did he end up putting on his own opera shows in Queensland?
In this interview, Chris tells us about his experiences with BCO – the way he went on to study a new degree in Classical Voice at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University before branching out with his fellow students to put on shows of their own.
Chris graduated in 2016 and, far beyond the realm of politics and philosophy, he has appeared with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra, Opera in the Burrow, and undertaken professional development with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden among a wealth of other opera experiences. Here’s what’s happening in the world of BCO.
So. Brisbane City Opera. Why does Brisbane city need a new opera company?
Brisbane needs a new opera company because there is so much opera and storytelling that needs to happen. Opera as an art form is over 400 years old and consists of thousands of works; many of which are known and loved, and many of which are unknown and may soon be loved. Plus, of course, all of the new works being written or yet to be written. The fact that this art form is still a living, breathing thing is so exciting; and I think it is desperately important to provide as much insight into this absolutely mammoth dramatic and musical tradition that we call ‘opera’ as possible.
Brisbane needs a new opera company for other more practical reasons. Opportunities for young artists are sparse the world over, but particularly so in Brisbane. From my experience, many young singers graduate from their degrees in their early 20s, and due to the painstaking nature of developing an operatic voice and an operatic artist, many, if not all, are not ready for professional careers for another 10-15 years. The question becomes: What do these artists then do when they graduate?
Many leave Brisbane for programs abroad and others stop singing entirely. It seemed to me that there was ample opportunity for us to do what we could to give singers an opportunity to perform, get experience singing and preparing roles before they moved on to bigger and better things. It also seemed like a great way to let Brisbane audiences engage with the fantastic young artists in their own city before they leave.
Because we exist to provide opportunities for young artists, this also shapes the repertoire that we choose to perform. For our young artists – not just the singers but conductors, directors, wardrobe design – much of the standard big repertoire that the bigger companies do is just simply beyond us. And that’s okay! It means that we get to explore more niche, small scale, interesting and appropriate repertoire that is rarely done.
So why are you the ones to make this happen?
When we started BCO, it was all very low-key: we would call up nursing homes or churches and ask if we could come and sing there. We would then all load up, head over with our pianist friends, and put on little concerts. It was a great way to get low-pressure performance experience while also providing classical music for audiences that might otherwise go without.
We operated at this level, with no greater ambitions beyond this, for a year or two. As our artists developed and our capacity grew, we eventually started taking on bigger events and getting paid work doing Christmas carols and corporate gigs.
It wasn’t really until last year that we pushed onto our own ticketed events with the ambition of raising enough money to stage our own operas. We achieved this last year with our first production of Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne staged in the Lumen Room, at Metro Arts. It was a great success in lots of ways; sold out shows, positive reviews, but ultimately it gave our young artists opportunity to hone their skills. And not just the singers:, it was a first credit for our lighting designer, conductor, wardrobe designer and myself as director.
Providing opportunities and work for all of these people was a fantastic thing to be a part of, and I’m very happy that we’re pushing on to a bigger program in 2018.
All of your lead singers have studied at the Queensland Conservatorium – indeed, some are still undertaking postgraduate studies. Why did you want to keep this company within this network of emerging artists?
I studied at the Queensland Conservatorium and graduated at the end of 2016. Initially, the artists we engaged came from this background as they were simply the young artists that we knew and had worked with over the course of our degrees.
The Queensland Conservatorium also offers one of the best vocal training programs in the country, and the young artists that they produce are truly world class. So it made sense for us to promote these young, highly trained artists while they were still in Brisbane.
As we grow, though, and this year in particular we have some fairly sizeable projects, we are also working with singers and graduates from the University of Queensland School of Music. The UQ singers will be performing as the chorus for a few events for us this year, which is fantastic and a great collaboration with more of Brisbane’s bright young singers.
What are the challenges of starting your own company together, early career?
The biggest challenge is most definitely financial. Opera, even at the small scale we operate at, is expensive. Theatre hire, costumes, artist fees – it all adds up. And managing that, while also hitting our targets of staging fun, engaging opera put on by Brisbane’s young artists, can be very challenging.
I was told recently that small businesses don’t make money for the first five years, and I thought: Actually, that is true for businesses that sell things people want! When you’re selling opera, it’s already an uphill battle to get people to leave behind preconceived notions that opera is overly long, boring, and pretentious. You’ve got to convince people to take a risk, buy a ticket, come along – and our experience from our productions and our unconventional concert series is that they have a great time.
What are the sorts of roles that your singers have within the company? How do you work together to get these sorts of events happening from the ground up?
Everyone on the BCO team are or were singers; with the exception of Mark Connors our music director, who is a pianist and accompanist extraordinaire. I have now very much moved into producing and directing, however the others who produce all these events with me are still some of Brisbane’s best young singers and have very bright careers as performers ahead of them.
I think I was very lucky that while studying, I was surrounded by so many like-minded people. I am very much of the persuasion that if something isn’t happening, we should just go out and do it. If we want to perform more we should just call up a nursing home and get over there. If we want to raise money to fund our first opera, let’s just, you know, do it. We’ll call up a venue, put a show together, set up tickets, and just get on with it. And basically from there, it just grew and grew.
Our committee is made up of people who share the same ‘let’s just do it’ attitude. Our team consists of: musical director Mark Connors, treasurer and creative producer Joshua White, secretary and creative producer Kathryn O’Halloran, and publicity and PR manager Bridget O’Brien. They all work incredibly hard and are passionate, intelligent young people doing their best for an art form we all love.
Heading into the future, do you see BCO continuing to function as a stepping stone for singers, who emerge from their degrees and gain experiences with you before picking up roles with large companies? Or will BCO be that large company?
I would love to see BCO remain a company focused on providing opportunities for young artists. To remain a stepping stone to develop the talented opera singers and other associated artists that Brisbane produces is an important role for us to fill. It’s my ambition to set BCO up to be in a healthy cycle of two productions a year, complemented by our concert series, that really does add value to the Brisbane cultural landscape.
I am not sure that we need to aim to be that large company. Opera Queensland provides big, large, spectacular productions of mainstream repertoire, and that’s fantastic! I think that really, it is about finding ways to complement what is already happening. We aren’t going to do the same repertoire as Opera Queensland, and we certainly aren’t going to put on shows on the same scale, and that’s good. We provide something different. We tell the stories of a different part of that 400+ years of opera.
It’s also worth mentioning that Opera Queensland has been a fantastic supporter of our endeavours. They provided myself with professional mentoring, provided costumes and rehearsal spaces for our production of Bastien and Bastienne last year, and are doing so again with our work this year. Their support really does help us immensely and we’re incredibly grateful to them for it.
You have quite an incredible background yourself, having studied Political Science and Philosophy before you even embarked on your Classical Voice studies and career. And you’ve achieved loads since! What has your former life taught you about how to direct musical projects?
Being asked how you use an Arts degree in Political Science and Philosophy is a tough one! I’ve always loved theatre, and loved the classics, and I think actually what drew me to theatre, plays and finally opera was the depth of the work. I love the multi-faceted complexity of these really enduring works that also just ring with a lot of basic, human simplicity. I really love trying to understand a work or find ways into a play or opera to present it as meaningful and interesting – basically trying to answer the question: ‘What is this about?’.
And when presented with a Mozart opera, or something similar, the question ‘What is this about?’ has a thousand different answers depending on who you’re asking, what characters/moments your emphasising, and even what time in history you’re alive! That’s what is the most exciting to me about opera: the fact that collectively, we have been staging these same works for hundreds and hundreds of years, and still nobody has definitively answered: ‘What is this about?’. It’s what keeps us coming back to see new productions and new imaginings of the same repertoire.
So maybe Philosophy helped me get a taste for wanting to answer vague, unanswerable questions? I’m not sure!
Why are you excited for BCO’s 2018 season?
I am excited for our 2018 season because it is our biggest and most ambitious program yet! We have some really exciting works lined up including a Brisbane stage premiere as well as an Australian opera premiere! All will be revealed on Saturday, but it really should be a special (and busy!) year.
See the Brisbane City Opera present its 2018 Season Launch Party at 2pm April 14, The Sideshow, 349 Montague Road, West End. For bookings and to keep up to date on BCO, visit the website.
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