Access All Arias continued.. In addition to running a huge annual international festival, Aldeburgh does a lot of educational work. The company's ethos is working with the community, partnering many different groups of young people including marginalised ones such as refugees, homeless people and those with mental health issues. One of Aldeburgh's biggest sources of pride was Let's Make an Opera, a project to perform a play/opera written by Britten.

‘The opera was based in Aldeburgh,' Virr explains. ‘It used local place names, local village name and originally Britten wanted to use local young children. His whole ethos was breaking down the barriers between amateurs and professionals, getting them to work together and having inspiration from your environment and having a real sense of place.'

Virr is keen to stress that the quality of the performance is high but he admits that, in the early stages, not everyone was as confident. ‘It's quite hard because the adults and directors are used to working with professionals and I think they were perhaps a little bit – well, not wary but they weren't quite sure what to expect working with just local children. They didn't have specialist teaching in school, they'd never sung in a choir even, been directed in any way or had to attend proper rehearsals for things. How they all blossomed over the period of time we worked was just incredible. Everyone was full of praise and the quality was really first rate.'

As inspiring as outreach projects can be, Opera North has decided to go a step further. In partnership with Leeds College of Music and all 16 local authority music services in the Yorkshire and Humber region, the Leeds-based company has established Yorkshire Young Musicians (YYM), a new centre of advanced training for exceptionally talented young musicians aged 8 to18. With financial support from the government's Music and Dance Scheme, YYM provides specialist (one-to-one) instrumental tuition and advanced general musician-ship training to all who can benefit from it, regardless of means.
Operating initially in Leeds and subsequently in other centres across the region, YYM is designed to be accessible to all and to provide vocational training of the highest quality, integrated with local provision and enabling participants to remain at their own schools.
‘One of the things I say to the ones we audition is don't think you've got to play a Grade 8 piece,' says YYM director Penny Stirling. ‘I'm happy if it's a Grade 1 piece played absolutely beautifully. That's what it's about: spotting the talent and being able to train it, with enough time. As a musician you need a lot of time to develop so the earlier you can catch them the better.' There's the added advantage that talent will stop draining out of the area: ‘If we end up taking a wonderful kid who becomes a fantastic singer then the connections eventually may prove very worthwhile – but it's going to be a long way in the distance.'

The launch of YYM isn't the only reason Opera North is excited – it's just a part of a major redevel-opment affecting Opera North's education work and the company at large. The next year or so sees the completion of renovations to the Assembly Rooms, a secondary space adjacent to Leeds ' Grand Theatre and Opera House which has been unused for some time. Once completed, Opera North will have its first permanent base, which will also allow it to bolster its vast amount of outreach work with new ‘in-reach' work.
‘One of our great aspirations,' says Dougie Scarfe, executive assistant to the company's general director, ‘is that we can bring some of this work with the community back into our home venue so that we can further that relationship between the work that we do, the communities that we're working in and also our home venue.'

If all this talk is just too rose-tinted for your jaded mind, then Welsh National Opera head of press Caroline Leech has a way of looking at her company's outreach initiative that's refreshingly business-like. ‘WNO MAX gets its name from our desire to maximise the resources of the company,' Leech explains. ‘If you run an opera company, you have on salary a large number of professional people. While the majority of their work will be promoting the main-scale tour, there are points in their work, particularly the performers, where there are little gaps.'
Put like that it all seems so simple: it's not only about noble causes, it's also about treating an opera company like a real business and running it to the utmost efficacy. ‘There's a “noble cause” behind it,' Leech argues, ‘but there's also a very practical one: if we don't make the most of people we're not going to be able to ask for the funding we need. We can prove to people we are absolutely offering value for money for every single pound the taxpayer spends on us.'

No matter how commercially minded it is, the cheering glow of WNO MAX's various success stories has a way of winning out over purely practical talk. The company works hard to bring opera to the furthest corners of the country and in a place like Wales – with only four theatres large enough to accommodate the company – that can be tricky. But through a diverse range of projects WNO has achieved great educational things, most notably The Katerina Project. In 2001, WNO MAX devised this large-scale project for primary school children, which involved creating and performing a new choral opera with professional artists. Taking Janác?ek's opera Kat'a Kabanová as inspiration, extensive workshops encouraged the children in the under-privileged Merthyr Tydfil area to create their own story and perform it. The project resulted in a great show, a CD and lots of favourable press. It even left a lasting legacy, as the area is now home to the Katerina Chorus. The exercise was repeated in North Wales in 2003, helping WNO win a coveted Royal Philharmonic Society Award that year for best education initiative.

Still cynical about opera's ability to reach into the hearts and minds of today's youth? Then perhaps Caroline Leech should have the last word.
‘They don't know it's opera – it's just music,' she says, as if to address Rupert Christiansen's opening concerns. ‘They've created it so how can it be this scary thing called opera? But hold on, they're working with an opera company, opera singers and an opera orchestra… bloody hell! That's opera.
‘If you ask a seven-year-old or an 11-year-old who's been part of one of these shows if they like opera, they say “yeah, opera's fantastic”. But if you talk to a parent they'll probably say “no” – they have preconceptions,' admits Leech. ‘But in 10 years' time those 11-year-olds will be saying, “Well, I worked on an opera and it was really cool”.'