Richard Bratby

‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’: an interview with conductor Alpesh Chauhan

Birmingham Opera Company is the first British opera company to appoint a BAME music director – but for rising star Chauhan, his heritage is a non-story

He’s just very, very good: Alpesh Chauhan, Birmingham Opera Company’s new music director. Credit: Michele Monasta

The first time Alpesh Chauhan conducted Birmingham Opera Company, he was surrounded by rats: six-foot tall rats, singing Shostakovich at the top of their voices. There were singing cops, too, and a marching band wearing bloodstained wedding dresses, and this was all happening in a derelict Edgbaston dance hall best known as a location for the 1980s Central TV drama Boon. Well, of course it was. BOC is the company that staged Mussorgsky in a circus tent and Stockhausen in an abandoned chemical warehouse; its whole point is to upend traditional assumptions about opera. The big difference in its production last year of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk came from the orchestra. Chauhan drove Shostakovich’s score with a brooding, purposeful intensity that felt as though you’d been caught in a riptide and dragged under.

The company obviously liked what they heard, because last month they put a ring on it. Chauhan has been appointed as BOC’s music director, working alongside its irrepressible, combative artistic director Graham Vick to create…what exactly? BOC doesn’t function like other opera companies. Its chorus, for starters, is made up of local volunteers from a bewildering diversity of backgrounds. ‘Graham is well known in Birmingham, and he pulls together people of all classes, all colours, all religions, everything,’ explains Chauhan. ‘BOC advertises for performers in local shops — they put up posters in Tesco. Some are teachers; some are medics; some of them are refugees who’ve only recently arrived in the UK. They all come together on a human level while learning and being part of an opera.’

Which is where Chauhan fits in. He’s a born Midlander; a state school boy from Handsworth Grammar, still young enough at 30 to feel rooted in a community where attending (let alone performing in) an opera is about as normal as a mission to Mars.

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