A new website, including an Artist, Role & Production database, for Opera Europa members will be launched in 2020

At its last General Assembly, Opera Europa members voted for the development of a custom-made online database for artists and productions to replace the service currently offered by Truelinked Operabase until the end of 2019. These tools will be part of Opera Europa’s membership services, included in the annual fee.

An important step towards an integrated service accompanies the Board’s decision to develop a new website for our organisation, to be launched in January 2020.

 

Database

Opera Europa is working with French company IT4Culture on this new system which will allow subscribers to search for artist and production history since 2011. An interim presentation of the proposed system was given to the Artistic Administration forum and the Opera Europa Board during the spring conference in Antwerp. Members appreciated the technical capabilities of the tool and the responsiveness of the developers.

 

■  Production sheets share detailed artistic teams, casts and performance dates.

■  Role searches currently include 14.270 roles from 2.600 opera titles.

■  Artist profiles show performance history, direct links to the artist’s website and official agents’ contact details, in partnership with IAMA and AEAA’s Classical Music Artists database.

 

A consultative group made up of Jan Henric Bogen (Opera Vlaanderen), Laura Canning (Garsington), Henning Ruhe (Bayerische Staatsoper), Klas Sjöblom (Royal Swedish Opera) and Stephanie Wippel (Wiener Staatsoper) is contributing to the creation of the tools and their functionalities.

 

Please contact audrey@opera-europa.org if you’d like to join the group.

 

Website

In a short survey, we found that conference and specialist forum information was your main reason for visiting our site, closely followed by our address book and presentations from previous meetings.

 

We aim for this information to be displayed in a more comprehensive way. Our meetings provide invaluable knowledge which should be easily available to all Opera Europa members within a centralised documentation repository.

 

Our listservs provide a useful way to communicate at short notice and to a great number of you but they are often under- or mis-used. So our aim is to provide members with an easy platform to be able to pose questions, seek advice, share industry information, … within their respective specialist groups.

 

A representative group of test-users will be consulted throughout the development stages of the new website.

 

Contact aline@opera-europa.org if you’d like to be involved