Opera Australia names new leaders after 12 months of turmoil
By Nick Galvin
Opera Australia hopes to draw a line under an extended period of uncertainty in its senior managerial ranks with the appointment of a new CEO, music director and board chairman.
The company was thrown into turmoil when artistic director Jo Davies quit at the end of August 2024, after barely 18 months in the job. She was followed out the door by chief executive Fiona Allan in January, which left the company without a leader. Since then, Simon Militano has held the fort as acting CEO, with conductor Tahu Matheson as head of music.
Andrea Battistoni at the Sydney Opera House on Tuersday. Credit: Wolter Peeters
All three of the new – male – appointees are familiar faces, having previous or current roles at the company.
The new CEO will be Alexander Budd, who had a 20-year stint at OA in a variety of roles before being appointed director of the Canberra Theatre Centre in early 2020.
Italian conductor and composer Andrea Battistoni will be the new music director. Battistoni, 38 and a rising star in Europe, is also no stranger to OA - he started conducting there in 2015. He will conduct Madama Butterfly and Turandot for the company next year.
The trifecta is completed by new board chair Glyn Davis, who replaces Rod Sims, former chief of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, who quit his role on Monday.
Glyn Davis will be Opera Australia’s new chairman.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Davis was appointed chair of the OA board in November 2021. But he relinquished the board role in September 2022 after being recruited by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to be secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Davis signalled his approach would differ from that of Sims, who has been criticised for being too hands-on when it came to artistic decisions.
Former Opera Australia chief executive Fiona Allan in happier times.Credit: Pamela Raith
“I’ve got a relatively traditional arts board-type approach,” said Davis. “Our role is to support and, on occasion, guide, but we are in the hands of our artistic and administrative professionals. You don’t want the board picking repertoire or picking conductors. Our job is to keep Opera Australia sustainable so it can do what it does - bring brilliant opera to Australian audiences.”
Asked about the optics of announcing three men in senior leadership roles, when it was only a couple of years ago that OA was celebrating having two women in the top positions for the first time, Davis admitted “no one is happy about it”.
“You want a mixed team,” he said. “All I can say is we’re going to be trying very hard.”
One key appointment - director of opera - has yet to be made. It is believed there is at least one woman on the shortlist of international and local candidates that the board and executive will soon consider.
The challenges for the new chair are extensive. In May, OA posted a $10 million operating deficit, due in part to a disastrous run of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard with veteran soprano Sarah Brightman in the lead role. The bottom line was also strongly affected by the temporary closure of Melbourne’s State Theatre, slated to reopen in 2027.
Davis admitted Sunset Boulevard had been a misstep for the company but defended the decision to program the musical.
Sarah Brightman in Opera Australia’s disastrous Sunset Boulevard.Credit: Daniel Boud
“The thing about disasters is that when they do happen, everyone can see in retrospect that it was a disaster but in advance you would probably have gone somewhere else,” he said. “It’s in the nature of show business that not everything works [but] that was a very disappointing outcome.”
Meanwhile, Verona-born Battistoni will spend just three months a year at OA, shuttling between Sydney and his major European commitments, however he said he was confident he could make his mark.
“There is a wonderful, wonderful energy and a wonderful potential also for future development,” he said. “I think that there is the real potential to become a shining light in the international scene. The commitment of the artists of the company is really what drove me here because it’s evident that there is a true understanding of the art form and of the tradition behind it.”
Battistoni, whose core repertoire is the great Italian works, said he was looking forward to expanding to German, French and “even English” operas, in particular Benjamin Britten.
And as to the perennial question of the art form’s relevance and sustainability, he said it was a mistake to “alter the greatness of opera”.
“It’s the only art form that can bring together all the arts, the visual, the sound, the acting and the singing. And it happens live in front of the eyes and ears of live audiences. And this is something that is unique to the form and it has to be nurtured at maximum.”
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