I GOTTA... lot of tips on affordable opera tickets

Bargain_Rzl · 4 May 2005 at 1:43PM

During a thread on Money Saving Old Style earlier today, I was asked for advice on how to get cheap tickets for the opera. I PM'd the person who asked, but figured I'd put the info here for everybody else's benefit.

This is a long'un so I am posting it in two parts - most of the really useful stuff is further down. Hope it is of use to somebody.

Eliza252 wrote:

How cool! I've only ever been to see one opera 'The Magic flute' at the Opera House in Covent Garden and I loved it! - any tips for where to find affordable tickets? (am in London)

Affordable tickets for Covent Garden are really hard to find. The cheapest seats are rubbish. Standing room can be good if your legs are up to it (these cost between about £7 for rubbish standing room, and £15 for very decent standing room - prices also depend on what the show is and who's in it), but these are bookable like normal tickets and tend to sell out to subscribers. I'm a subscriber (hefty annual membership fee - and Covent Garden is NOT one of the places that gives me free tickets for writing reviews!) and just got my booking info through for next season - only to discover that they've amended the pricing structure in the seating plan, having cottoned on to the fact that there were some excellent value seats in one particular area (£15-£25 depending on the show, for a moderately comfortable seat with full view of the stage). They've now put them into the next price band up :mad:

If a show has plenty of tickets left, they normally make standbys available from a few hours before curtain up - these cost £15 if you qualify as a concession, or half the original selling price for anybody else.

Travelex are currently sponsoring 100 of the best seats for most Monday performances, available for £10 each by ballot. However there are an average of something like 120 applicants for every ticket! I've put in for every ballot since the scheme began last September, and have never yet been offered tickets! You can find out more at http://www.travelex.royaloperahouse.org/Home/Index.cfm

Affordable tickets elsewhere are readily available. English National Opera (based at the Coliseum on St Martin’s Lane, performs everything in English, tends to prefer modern-style productions) is much cheaper to begin with, and you can get a FULL VIEW seat in the back row of the gods (which are only available by phone from 12:30 on the day of the show, or 10:00 if you can pop in to the box office) for only £5. A few years ago they used to be £3 and I was going at least once a week, despite having a low income at the time.

If you fancy a better seat at the ENO, standbys are available daily to students (best available seat for £12.50), other concessions (£18) and on Saturdays only for £30 to non-concessions. These are almost guaranteed to be available as ENO shows rarely sell out completely.

Bargain_Rzl · 4 May 2005 at 1:49PM

If you look a bit further afield there are loads of ways to see high-quality opera for around £20 a ticket:

The Royal College of Music, Royal Academy of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama all have their own small theatres, and put on shows once a term, cast from their senior opera students. Some of the things they do can be quite obscure, but not always (the RCM is doing "Cosi fan tutte" this term) and the singing and production quality is often indistinguishable from a professional opera house.

The Linbury Studio Theatre, which is a secondary venue at the Royal Opera House (for details of any upcoming shows, look on the ROH website (www.roh.org.uk) and follow links to "ROH2")

English Touring Opera normally does some London performances (they're next on at the Hackney Empire in October, with Handel's "Alcina" and Verdi's "Falstaff")

British Youth Opera runs a season in early September with the same sort of cast as you'd find at the music colleges. Their next shows are Gounod's "Romeo and Juliet" and another production of "Cosi fan tutte", in early September at the Peacock Theatre (on Kingsway – nearest tube Holborn or Temple – but their venue changes from year to year).

The Holland Park Theatre is one of the loveliest places to spend an evening at the opera, and seats start at £21. It's a weatherproof outdoor theatre (basically it's a 700-seat (ish) theatre with a marquee roof, but the sides are open). The cheap seats are probably selling fast, so if you want some, get in there quick! The Holland Park season runs from June to August and they do six shows, normally sung in their original language. This year they are doing Verdi's "Macbeth", Bellini's "La sonnambula" (The Sleepwalker), Donizetti's "L'elisir d'amore" (The Love Potion), Puccini's "Madama Butterfly", Giordano's "Andrea Chenier" and Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin". I love Holland Park - the only problem can be one of background noise, as there are kids playing football in the park, peacocks in the Orangery, the Heathrow flight path overhead, and if it pours with rain the noise on the tented roof is so loud that you can hardly hear the opera!

Here's another moneysaving tip. Avoid virtually any opera at the Royal Albert Hall (except during the Proms – see below). There are two main types of opera production that you find here. One is the annual (sometimes more frequent) "in the round" show organised/promoted by Raymond Gubbay Ltd. They advertise all over the place, and pride themselves on "accessibility" and "non-elitism", but the quality can be really variable, and the cheapest full-view seats cost £33 :eek:. You also find a lot of Eastern European touring productions, which often play the Albert Hall along with a large number of regional venues. Like the Gubbay shows, they advertise heavily and are of variable quality. You’ll certainly get cardboard sets; if you’re lucky you might get decent singers, but the cost is almost always high for what you are getting. While on the subject, the same applies to these companies when they tour regionally – with the added problem that a lot of the "spectacular effects" they advertise are not used in the smaller theatres on tour!

The Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican have quite frequent, one-off opera performances, but these are normally concert performances (i.e. with little or no acting, but just the singers standing in a line in front of an orchestra). The same applies to the Proms (July to September, Royal Albert Hall). However, one of the highlights of each Proms season is the annual visit by Glyndebourne Festival Opera, who do a semi-staged (i.e. no sets but full costumes and acting) production every year. This year's is Handel's "Giulio Cesare" (Julius Caesar). Tickets start at £4 for queueing on the day for standing room, and I don't know the top price without looking it up but it will be less than £40. (If you saw the same show at Glyndebourne itself, it would cost up to £155!)

I GOTTA... lot of tips on affordable opera tickets

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