<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    MOUTHS TO FEED

The Opera and Ballet company, with several hundred souls on the payroll, has many mouths to feed, Cocieru points out. And currently it is succeeding. In a country where even a doctor sometimes scrapes a meagre twenty dollars a month, the company's foreign earnings (literally millions of Moldovan lei, which work out around fourteen to the dollar) are essential to its very survival. That, he argues, must take priority -- for the present anyway -- over the expense of mounting new productions in a time of serious economic pressures. And anyone who knows the creaking Moldovan economy and unemployment record must have some sympathy with what Cocieru says.

Ellen Kent knows exactly their problems. In the UK she sees that for all the company (Chisinau has an eighty strong contract orchestra, around half of which tours with the opera) the equivalent of Musicians' Union wages are paid; but a direct parallel is not entirely fair, for also involved is a healthy subvention which Kent provides to the opera company itself, to help subsidise heavy overheads and the crucial work of the company back at home (where it contrives to mount a continuous ballet and opera season). The administration back in Moldova seems well-satisfied with arrangements : finance director Alexander Maximov has no doubts : 'touring makes the whole difference to our budgeting; without Ellen Kent, the Chisinau National Opera would have sunk under debt years ago.'

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