Romanian employees’ strike cancels shows at the Bucharest National Opera

The Bucharest National Opera’s employees led by conductor Tiberiu Soare have boycotted three shows that were supposed to take place at the end of last week due to a conflict with culture minister Vlad Alexandrescu related to the institution’s management. Many of the Opera’s Romanian employees were unhappy with minister Alexandrescu’s decision to reinstate George Calin as interim general manager. This was a concession Alexandrescu made to Danish choreographer Johan Kobborg and his fiancé, famous Romanian ballerina Alina Cojocaru, so that they would return to the Bucharest National Opera’s ballet company. Kobborg resigned as artistic director of the ballet company on April 12, after a conflict with the Opera’s new interim management. Alina Cojocaru and other members of the ballet company also announced that they wouldn’t dance under that management. The scandal started when Vlad Alexandrescu appointed Romanian conductor Tiberiu Soare as interim general manager of the Bucharest National Opera, on April 4. Soare replaced George Calin, a member of the former management team, which has been targeted by a corruption investigation last year. Tiberiu Soare removed Johan Kobborg as artistic director of the Opera’s ballet company, claiming that the position didn’t really exist, which ignited a war within the institution. The conflict quickly took a nationalistic turn and split the Opera’s artists in two sides: the foreign ballet dancers and some of their Romanian colleagues, who support Kobborg, and the Romanian employees, led by Tiberiu Soare. As the situation could have led to several ballet shows being cancelled, the culture minister intervened and, after talks with Kobborg and Alina Cojocaru, decided to reappoint George Calin as interim general manager until the ministry would bring an international manager to the Opera. This decision angered the Romanian employees, who took over the Opera’s great hall and boycotted the shows that were supposed to take place. They refused to perform in the opera Falstaff, on April 20. Some well-known Romanian artists as well as representatives of other culture institutions in the country declared their support to the Bucharest Opera’s employees and for Tiberiu Soare. Confronted with this wave of criticism, minister Alexandrescu changed his decision again and withdrew George Calin from the interim manager position saying that he would come up with another nomination. However, on Thursday evening, when the spectators gathered at the Opera for the ballet show DSCH, The Dream, the orchestra led by Tiberiu Soare remained silent, so the ballet dancers on stage could not perform, Moreover, Soare apparently told the spectators that the dancers on stage didn’t represent the Bucharest National Opera, although they were both Romanian and foreign dancers, according to several witnesses quoted by Mediafax. It’s unlikely that another quick fix by the Ministry of Culture will be able to solve this conflict as long as the underlying factors persist. The Opera’s Romanian artists are unhappy with the fact that foreign ballet dancers are hired without any selection process and get much higher salaries than the rest of the institution’s employees. The Bucharest National Opera is a state institution, which gets financing from the state budget.