The Stage

Alan Sievewright

Published Monday 12 February 2007 at 17:25 by Patrick Newley

Opera producer and influential figure in the arts Alan Sievewright numbered among his friends and associates Marlene Dietrich and Maria Callas. He produced award winning television documentaries on both stars and in 1990 co-founded OnLine Classics as well as launching the digital channel, Classical Music TV.

In a career spanning over 40 years he rose from working at Warner Brothers as a designer to producing rare operas with some of the greatest names in the genre.

Born in Edinburgh on May 12, 1945, he moved to London as a child where he studied music and became a boy soprano. Most of his spare time was spent going to the theatre. “I started going to the theatre at the age of eight,” he said, “and at 11 I stood for five hours watching Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. I was fortunate to grow up in an amazing period where I saw people like Laurence Olivier, the early Kirov and Bolshoi Ballet, and the explosion of Nureyev. I think you learn from the great, this is where it all starts.”

After training to be a designer he joined Warner Brothers’ British studios as a consultant and later went to Paris to work for Pierre Balmain under the auspices of Ginette Spanier. She unexpectedly took him to lunch with Marlene Dietrich at the screen idol’s flat. “Chopped liver,” said Sievewright. “She cooked it herself and then began to scrub the floor.” A friendship began between the pair and years later he produced a TV documentary on her.

In 1968 Sievewright launched a rare opera season in London. The one-night concerts including The Huguenots with Joan Sutherland at the Royal Albert Hall, Lucrezia Borgia with Montserrat Caballe, Elena Suilioutis in Nabucco and a young Jose Carreras in his international debut in Caterina. In the first seven years there were 23 shows, all of which were sold out.

In 1977, encouraged by his friend Placido Domingo, Sievewright took the stage himself in a series of celebrity interviews which included Victoria de los Angeles and the veteran Eva Turner.

Ten years later he devised a Maria Callas Exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall and presented his own programme, Callas Sings Again, which he toured worldwide. The programme included clips of Callas on screen.

Sievewright acted as a co-producer for a TV documentary, Maria, for which both he and the director, Tony Palmer, won two awards. He also coached Jane Seymour for her role in Callas in the US TV series Ari, for which she won an Emmy.

Later Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show commissioned Sievewright’s Tales of Helpmann, a film biography of the actor and dancer Robert Helpmann made with the collaboration of Margot Fonteyn and Katherine Hepburn. This was followed with documentaries on Puccini, Caballe, Carreras, Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

Sievewright believed that opera, like all the arts, should be a medium for all. “I dislike intensely our media attitude to calling things elitist,” he said. “It is nonsense. Theatres are full of young people, Proms are full of young people, drama colleges are full of young people.”

In 1990 he he co-launched, with Chris Hunt, OnLine Classics. “We started with a new production of The Magic Flute live from the Vienna State Opera,” he said. “We also relayed from Salzburg Berlioz’s The Trojans. I think people should have access to things like this.”

In 2001 he was invited by Penelope Sitwell to design and construct a museum for the performing arts at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire. Among the many artefacts he provided were Ava Gardner’s costumes, sketch books of Cecil B de Mille, designs by Picasso, Oliver Messel, David Hockney, a collage panels of all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays, made by Sievewright himself, and a section on Maria Callas.

The same year he presented An Evening with Montserrat Caballe, which was filmed at St John’s Church in London’s Smith Square.

Although he had suffered from ill health in recent years he remained an ardent theatregoer. He died on January 23, 2007, aged 72.