Graham Vick of Birmingham Opera Company: “So much is encouraging about opera just now, most of it found in the sense of adventure of performances in pub theatres, supermarkets and car parks. … Making this expensive art form accessible does sometimes mean finding less costly ways of presenting it. … But trapped between tyrannical, unyielding musical values and a theatrical inferiority complex, artists and programmers, artistic directors and marketing departments cling on to outmoded models by the fingernails (or do I mean by co-productions?). They fear the implications of radical change. But we need to bend – there’s no use pretending something’s not broken.”