Standing room only | 7 April 2012

Of all the operatic ventures that have sprung up in England in the past 20 years, Birmingham Opera Company may well be the most remarkable. Its artistic director is Graham Vick, who is well acquainted with opera at its most elitist — he was artistic director of Glyndebourne from 1994 to 2000. BOC is at the other extreme, in that productions now regularly take place in a disused steel foundry on the outskirts of the centre of Birmingham, and the aim is to involve as many local inhabitants as possible. Over the past few years there have been impressive performances of Verdi’s Otello (it was televised, and survived the scrutiny extremely well), Idomeneo and, most movingly to me, Ulysses Comes Home, a wonderful version of Monteverdi’s greatest opera.

This year, however, BOC is breaking new ground. Not only has it scored a coup in putting on the world première of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), which will be given four performances in August (it lasts six hours); but it has just staged the première of Jonathan Dove’s new opera Life is a Dream, adapted by Alasdair Middleton from the play by Calderón.

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Whatever I write in critique of the work or the enterprise, it is still an outstanding achievement, though perhaps not primarily an artistic one. Having located the theatre — visitors would be well advised to go by taxi — one passes through the entrance area into a large tent-like room, where, not to my pleasure, a PE instructor who would have been more at home at Butlins in the 1950s tried to put us through our paces. Then through a narrow passage to the vast barn-like space where the opera is performed. There is no indication, at first, as to where the action will be, but stewards urge people in various directions, and depending on where you are sent you witness a funeral procession, a wedding party, a family Christmas, a birth.