2 days ago
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Unwittingly, I begin my interview with Amy Lane even before we sit down for lunch in The Rocks.
On the drive to the restaurant, I’m chatting on the phone with Opera Australia’s communications supremo, Janet Glover, suggesting to her that I’d interrogate Lane mercilessly with hard-hitting questions such as: pineapple on pizza? Yes or no?
After she gently allowed me to make a fool of myself for a while, Glover suggests I ask Lane herself – they are sitting in a cab together and I was on speaker.
Score one to the interviewee and zero to the hard-bitten journo.
Lane, who has just been announced as Opera Australia’s director of opera, swiftly makes light of my fruit-related faux pas when we finally sit down, launching into her own entertaining anecdote about a pineapple that featured prominently in her 2022 production of Siegfried.
It’s a very English moment from a woman who comes across as very English, which belies the fact that for the past seven years she has lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, where she is artistic director of the city’s opera festival.
Before that, she held various roles at companies including the Royal Ballet and Opera in Covent Garden, the English National Opera, the Polish National Opera and Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. She also has a full Ring Cycle – the Everest of opera direction – under her belt. Not bad for just 47.
That record could be more than a little intimidating, but Lane is anything but. She is warm, passionate and genuinely open to discussing the challenges and opportunities facing opera in the 21st century.
But right now she has a more pressing issue – domestic arrangements for herself, her family and their three dogs when she arrives full-time to take up her role in September.
“I have a lot to absorb, including working out where to live,” she says. “That’s a really, really lovely problem to solve.”
Paddington is in the frame. As is Kings Cross and Kirribilli. She’s also heard good things about Glebe. But as long as her new home is in scooter commuting distance – she relied on her trusty Vespa in London and is considering something similar in Sydney – she’ll be happy.
Lane is joining Opera Australia at a pivotal time. The company is continuing to dig itself out of various holes, some of its own making and others – COVID prime among them – way beyond its control.
Lane’s appointment is the final piece in the company’s artistic leadership jigsaw puzzle, as she slots in alongside Andrea Battistoni, the newly minted music director, and Alex Budd, appointed as chief executive in August.
The hope is that this new team will provide desperately needed stability for OA, which lost previous artistic director Jo Davies in August 2024 and chief executive Fiona Allan less than six months later.
As Lady Bracknell might have observed, to lose one key leader could be regarded as a misfortune, but losing both in such a short space of time smacks of carelessness … if not worse.
However, all that feels rather like ancient history as we ponder the menu at the prosaically named Harbour Seafood Restaurant on a classic Sydney early spring day. We have an outside table with views over the harbour to Lane’s new World Heritage-listed workplace on Bennelong Point.
I plump for butterflied Skull Island prawns while Lane chooses the scallops crudo with yuzu dressing. Two salads and sparkling water complete a modest yet fresh and delicious lunch.
Lane grew up in North London surrounded by music of all kinds.
“Jazz, musical theatre, opera and pop … I’ve grown up with everything and I’ve never judged any form of music,” she says. “It’s just music. I have a 15-year-old daughter now and she listens to every kind of music without questioning. It’s just music and if you respond to it then fantastic.”
Of all those genres that reached her young ears, it was musical theatre that made an early impact on Lane.
“One of the first musicals I ever heard was Phantom of the Opera on a cassette in dad’s Volvo Estate,” she says. “I remember my mum said, ‘I’m going to play you something. You’re going to jump, but it’s going to be amazing’.”
“She put it in and she turned the volume right up and then out came those huge chords. And I remember being terrified out of my life, but it was so exciting. I’ve had a constant love of musicals for as long as I can remember.”
But perhaps the most formative early musical experience, and one that would establish the path her whole life would take, came when Lane was just 10.
She was taking part in an ENO production of Wagner’s The Master-Singers of Nuremberg and vividly recalls, as if it were yesterday, her part in the pivotal riot scene at the end of Act 2.
“There were acrobats, tumblers and obviously all the principals,” she says. “We were all given the same level of care and attention and us kids were choreographed into a fight, right at the front of the stage. And the first time I heard the chorus, it was that wrap-around kind of adrenaline kick that I don’t think I could put into words at that point or understand what that was doing to my whole body.
“I knew that was what I wanted to do forever. And so that’s what I’ve been pursuing ever since.”
Lane is clearly still fiercely moved by the recollection of that moment nearly 40 years ago. And it is that passion she wants to share with audiences.
“That is what has driven me to do what I do, both as an opera director and as an artistic administrator: to create and put on stage stories that allow people a visceral experience that kind of ripples through your entire body. And that’s what opera can do.”
Alive with that enthusiasm for music, she started a music degree at Bristol University, which lasted just four days before she switched to English (“The course wasn’t the right fit”).
In those Bristol years, she fed her passion for music with extracurricular projects involving percussion (“quite good”), piano (“medium”) and flute (“terrible”).
“I was the worst one-man band,” she says.
Realising she was not going to make a living on stage, she moved into management, beginning with three years on An Inspector Calls in London’s West End. Since then, her career, including her most recent stint in Denmark, could almost have been designed to accumulate the skills and experience for her new role in Sydney.
“I’ve been looking for and ready to run a company for a good few years now and I’ve been waiting for the right company, the right country …” she says.
In Copenhagen, she has spent much of her time taking opera to places it’s not generally expected to go, searching for new audiences.
“There’s little point in us putting productions or any operatic events in the [Copenhagen] opera house,” she says. “The opera house does that year-round and is very good at it, so that’s covered. The whole point is to put opera at eye level, put it on streets in places where you would least expect opera to turn up, where people live.”
One much-talked-about production was a 50-minute version of The Undoing of Carmen, which superimposed academic research around the “eight predictable steps” of partner killing on the familiar, terrible narrative of Bizet’s opera. Then there was the production that shoehorned 15 hours of The Ring into a fun, one-hour show for children.
‘These classics can exist forever by constant questioning and thinking and digging further into the heartbeat of the story.’
Amy Lane“It’s our job as directors to either solve or query or question and put those questions out to the audience,” says Lane. “It’s not necessarily our job to find solutions and to make things feel better or kinder or calmer. It’s our job to lift up the work and go, ‘What does that make you think about now?’”
But while Lane is clearly willing to innovate and take programming risks, she’s also at pains to reassure Sydney audiences not to expect, for instance, a Ring Cycle in drag on the Opera House sails.
The classics, she says, “are incredibly important”.
“These classics can exist forever by constant questioning and thinking and digging further into the heartbeat of the story,” she adds.
She thinks of programming as like presenting a menu, with something for everyone plus a range of options that might tempt them to take a punt.
“When you start to put together a potential go-for-gold draft season, you’re looking at, ‘So what are our classics? What are our less-performed gems? What are our new works? What are our family productions? What are our aficionado productions?’
“You’re inviting people to buy a ticket to something they already know and then saying, ‘Try this, you might like it’.”
One key programming question that has long swirled around OA is whether it should be in the business of producing musical theatre or stay purely in its opera lane. It’s particularly pertinent currently, with Phantom going gangbusters on the over-water stage at Mrs Macquaries Chair and Anastasia (a co-production) looking like a hit at the Lyric. It’s enough to gladden the heart of any CFO.
Lane is in the broad church camp on this one, leaving the programming door wide open.
“Terminology is always interesting to me,” she says. “What makes opera, opera? What makes musical theatre, musical theatre? And what makes it music drama? We’re all about encompassing visual, aural experiences.”
As we finish lunch, your dogged newshound takes the chance to return to that probing question about pineapple on pizza.
Lane’s answer is a resounding yes. Which is, obviously, deeply disappointing.
However, despite that glaring character flaw, I’m still left with the sense that Lane may just be the person to help OA continue turning the corner.
