Providing masses for the opera ...

Interview: Raymond Gubbay

Raymond Gubbay, the music promoter, doesn't really come off as a flash Harry, stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap market trader dealing in damaged goods from the pop end of the great classical tradition of the West. It's almost a pity. He is 51 and will shortly (and plumply) morph into a fair simulacrum of Robert Morley.

He came to the rehearsals for Madam Butterfly for his production of the opera, which opens this week the Albert Hall, wearing a grey flannel suit that would not have disgraced his accountant father. The promoter did not throw his weight around but, rather, hovered around the chilly TA hall in the City, beaming and humming along.

Come showtime, the audience will watch the opera in the round. The set looks like an expensive bit of B & Q rose arbour support-work, placed more or less as a boxing ring would be for one of those bouts big blokes and their doxies put on tuxes for. The sound will be amplified. "`Enhanced' is the word we prefer," says Gubbay. He points out that using the Albert Hall in this way means that the furthest seat is no farther from the action than it would be at the English National Opera's Coliseum. The electronics simply help everyone not sitting downwind of the singing at any given moment. David Freeman, founder of the Opera Factory and director of the show, adds: "Eric Clapton achieves real intimacy in the Albert Hall, even in an acoustic concert."

To Gubbay's surprise, Butterfly has been easy to sell. Getting on for 50,000 seats had gone long before the water had been put into the giant fishponds in the arena of the venerable Proms venue. But Butterfly is surely the piece that most belies the worst of the genre's reputation: the achingly sharp theatre tightly fits the destroyingly beautiful tunes. There is no mawkishness.

It carries the full horror of a news story, and reveals a real richness, especially in having no villains. Pinkerton strikes an ordinary deal with a woman who, to her own society, seemed perverse in never accepting her fate.

As Freeman says, to Gubbay's delight: "In Butterfly, things start badly, and then get worse." Freeman's own company has lost its Arts Council funding and faces collapse. You sense, however, that it is not merely the Prisoner's Dilemma that makes him speak so well of Gubbay and this enterprise.

"He has to make a profit, and that's great," he says. "But he has standards. What on earth can be wrong with making the best available for everybody?"

Gubbay and Freeman sing from the same songsheet about how commercial and "fringe" opera at least understand about the tight management of scarce resources, whereas big companies probably never got that message.

Gubbay notes, "People are coming to this Butterfly with no idea who's in it." In any case, in this production two casts alternate, so every night of the run can be played. His singers are up-and-coming, middle- rank people.

It's an interesting paradox that the punters are buying the Gubbay brand. But the Royal Opera, possibly the best brand name imaginable, mostly attracts people by renting in stars at vast cost. Raymond Gubbay believes the subsidised theatre could cut costs dramatically without impairing its role of nurturing talent and experimental work. But he accepts, too, that he is dependent on the subsidised world.

Gubbay insists that he has no mission to improve. "I just want to have people come in, have an enjoyable evening and go away happy." And in quantity. "I realised the other day that I have to sell 1,000 tickets a day." This comes across as neither a burden nor a boast. It's just that, with 11 people in the office, that level of sales is required.

By mass market standards, finding an audience for Butterfly ranks as brave. In 1991 Gubbay lost money on a co-production with the Royal Opera of Turandot at Wembley. He didn't, on his own with La Boheme (1996) and Carmen (1997) at the Albert Hall. But Gubbay isn't so sure that the repertoire can be adventurously expanded.

At Earl's Court, Harvey Goldsmith has essayed Aida, Tosca and Carmen. Gubbay would love to try to do The Magic Flute, but thinks that Don Giovanni would be too dark.

Raymond Gubbay may not look extravagant, but he has an apartment "very near the Luxembourg Gardens" in Paris which (he is a born scheduler, of course) he visited last year for a total of 70 days in 24 separate visits. This is a man so amiable that you end up glad that those trips look likely to be able to continue. He expects the critics to maul the show; they always do. He really does not seem to care. He knows he has customers who are fussy in their way. "If they're not pleased, they certainly do write and say so. We don't get many letters," he adds quickly. "But they would write."

Maybe those tickets sold because the audiences see performances for less than half the price, seat for seat, that they'd expect to pay in an opera house. But it is just as likely that some overhang of timidity deters people from proper opera houses, while Gubbay promises not so much a pop experience once you're in your seat, as a Cats or an Evita, from the box office to the seat.

He bridles at the thought that he's a philistine. Not he but David Freeman points out that Raymond Gubbay commissioned a fresh English translation of Butterfly from Amanda Holden. "I'm always being accused of not allowing enough orchestra rehearsal time", says Gubbay, as he reaches for a schedule. There it is in black and white: the BBC Concert Orchestra booked several times into the Golders Green Hippodrome.

"My grandmother used to take me there," he adds. "Saturday matinees in the gods - half a crown." And then, a little later, it was Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden and the development of a taste for opera.

His own musicianship was quickly abandoned, but he is intensely interested and - you suspect - rather knowledgeable. Do you listen to much music? "No, not much," he replies. "Not if you mean on a CD player or anything. Not in the car. But I'm listening all the time to music in my head. Don't you?" No, but it explains why he hums incessantly, like a boy in one of those old listening-booths in a record shop.

He has a standard answer to how he got into the music promotion trade. Victor Hockhauser (the doyen of the business) was approached by Arnold Wesker, who had been asked what might be done for the boy. Hockhauser asked the tyro the three crucial questions. Was he a good Jewish boy? Did he go to the right school? (University College School, Hampstead, that is.) Can you start Monday? Yes three times and Bob's your uncle.

Gubbay always answers the next question in the same way, too. How long before you were working on your own account? "Ten months, 28 days and 12 hours."

It took no longer to become sensitised to the will of the people, and it's a message which stuck. Last Christmas he mounted 54 concerts. "You know, carols and so on. It takes a good Jewish boy, that," he laughs. " `You want carols? We got carols.' At the end of the day, I'm dictated to by what I can take at the box office. But this is a business with a lot of soul, a lot of passion."

Madam Butterfly opens this Thursday and runs until 11 March (0171-589 8212), tickets pounds 21-pounds 45.