An angel in disguise

By this time, hopefully, the EU election will already be a distant memory. As this article was written last week and I have not been blessed, or cursed, with second sight, I will not even bother to quote the opinion polls as the outcome, at least this time, is almost a logical conclusion. Yet, things can and will go wrong. The marginal Nationalist Party victory was not on the cards last year was it? The electorate is king and a country gets the government it deserves. So, to whoever is crowing at the moment and to whoever is stuffing their Louis Vuittons to get to Chocolatelandia, go my sincerest congratulations.

With that over and done with let's talk theatre and culture once again. A little snippet of a press release issued by the National Statistics Office last week may have been overlooked in all the excitement and angst of the pre-election run up. "Theatres post €200,000 profit" in 2008 and attracted 209,003 patrons to 314 productions; 22 per cent more than in 2007. The release further informed us that theatres enjoyed revenue of €1.4 million and an expenditure of €1.2 million. Concerts, we are informed, were the most popular and accounted for 24 per cent of the fare on offer while, again, the number of shows rose by 70 over the previous year, 58 per cent of which were concerts.

While a breakdown of the concert types would be relevant, let us presume that a good proportion of these concerts were orchestral involving our Malta Philharmonic, which, in my lifetime, I have seen evolve from a provincial little band of the oompah oompah variety to a splendidly professional and dedicated group of musicians able not only to play but interpret Villa Lobos, Mozart, Dvorak and Schedrin with equal dexterity and inspiration. That I had a hand in its development during my 10-year stint with the Manoel Theatre management committee may be neither here nor there, however, I consider myself to have been privileged indeed to have put my experience and expertise where my mouth is.

Maybe some of you will remember my pre-1990 reviews. Most of them concerned the orchestra, which, at the time, was being mismanaged and left undeveloped on the premise that it was the best Malta could produce and with the attitude that if a critic like myself did not like the souped-up piano that was substituting a harp, the next time round there wasn't even that! The good thing is that, by 1996, the Manoel Theatre management committee with John Lowell as chairman created the nucleus of what the orchestra is today. Michael Laus and I sat on several audition boards and many key appointments still extant today are the fruit of our decisions.

After the 1996 election I was dumped for doubtlessly political reasons and the fateful divorce, in a country that officially refuses to recognise it, happened. The Manoel Theatre Orchestra was divorced from the Manoel Theatre and became the National Orchestra under separate management; this is how things still stand today. When reinstated on the theatre management committee after 1998, I found that I was unable to plan out my dozen or so annual orchestral concerts and operas as before. The national theatre now had to pay through its nose to use the national orchestra and that is when the downhill slide began.

Had the orchestra an alternative permanent home, a concert hall that was large enough and acoustically adaptable to effectively project a variety of orchestral sounds from the most explosive to the most intimate, then, yes, I would have seen the logic of the financial consequences of the divorce. Yet, because this concert hall did not exist and still doesn't, the whole thing remains farcical and merely robs Peter to pay Paul for, at the end of the day, both the Manoel Theatre and the National Orchestra, now Philharmonic, belong to the same owner, the Government of Malta.

In view of this vital piece of the jigsaw being made public, albeit surreptitiously, I remain nonplussed as to why the present chairman of the Manoel Theatre, who also holds the post of chairman of the Mediterranean Conference Centre, started off the very upsetting opera controversy in the first place. The much-vaunted €90,000 loss and the 700 people who attended the erstwhile Bank of Valletta Opera Festival pale into insignificance when compared to the €200,000 profit and the 209,003 patrons who attended a total of 314 productions; presumably all held at venues that belong to and are run by the ministry responsible for culture in 2008. The statistics office release does not specify whether opera was included but one must presume that it does as, otherwise, the statistics would be misleading.

So what was that red herring all about? What's the motive behind placing opera, out of all things, on the sacrificial altar? Could the chairman have anticipated Bill Gates's recent exhortation for millionaires to offload their money? Could he have expected an angel like the one God sent to prevent Abraham from sacrificing Isaac? I wonder, for, instead, God sent Lou!

kzt@onvol.net