Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Simon Robey spends his days orchestrating mergers and acquisitions, and his evenings at the opera.

Robey is the head of Morgan Stanley U.K. and co-chairman of global mergers and acquisitions -- currently advising candy maker Cadbury Plc, which is resisting a takeover bid by Kraft Foods Inc. He also chairs London’s Royal Opera House, and goes to its Covent Garden home as often as three nights a week.

Stewardship of the 151-year-old cultural institution allows him to focus on his twin passions: music and finance. A choral scholar at Oxford University, he trained as a bass-baritone, and almost became an opera singer. In his first year as chairman, he has had a tough time fundraising, and sees no letup until 2012.

“It’s too early to call the end of the recession,” says Robey over breakfast at Franco’s restaurant in London’s Mayfair district. “We’re not remotely out of the woods.”

“The next two years, we’ll really have to work hard,” says the frank 49-year-old, whose salt-and-pepper hair is cut in a boyish fringe.

The September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., followed by U.S. and U.K. government bailouts of financial institutions, have led companies to scale back arts sponsorship. In a recent survey by the U.K. nonprofit Arts & Business, 42 percent of companies polled said they cut arts spending in the three months to July. Overall, respondents said they did not expect a rebound in their yearly spend until 2011.

Sponsorship Declines

The Royal Opera House, which generates about a fifth of its revenue from philanthropy, has seen corporate sponsorship drop “meaningfully” in the last year, according to Robey. Individual donors have helped make up for the shortfall, as have cost efficiencies of 2 million pounds ($3.29 million) made by Chief Executive Tony Hall. That will allow the opera house to break even for the 10th straight year since it reopened in 1999.

Why won’t companies get generous sooner? “Previous recessions show that giving to the arts lags other features,” says Robey, taking a bite of his beans on toast. “We don’t feel at our poorest in the first year of recession: It’s more likely in the second or third year.”

Morgan Stanley U.K. sponsored its last major arts event in 2007-8 with “The First Emperor,” a show of China’s Terracotta warriors at the British Museum. Robey says arts institutions are “not slow to come to us with requests.”

Redundancy Spending

Why not do more? “Companies, us included, have to be sure we are seen to be behaving in the right way,” he replies. “Would it have been appropriate to have a massive sponsorship at the same time as making redundant a big chunk of our workforce?”

Morgan Stanley is working to raise 10 million pounds of the 146-million-pound cost of a new clinical building at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Previously, the bank backed London’s Old Vic Theatre (2004-6) and the show “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at Tate Modern (2001-2), among others.

Robey grew up in Cambridge, and was surrounded as a child by choirs and singing. Keen to make it a career, he enrolled at Oxford, fitting in seven services a week while reading English.

One day, toward the end of his university years, he was putting up performance posters at Oxford’s Randolph Hotel when he noticed a Lazard presentation. He walked over and asked a question; what the question was, he can no longer remember. Intrigued by the young man, the group invited him to dinner.

Restaurant Gershwin

“We got on very well,” Robey remembers -- so well that he was invited to London and offered a job. To supplement his pay, he sang Cole Porter and George Gershwin songs at a West End restaurant three nights a week.

After nine months of burning the candle at both ends, Robey gave up singing, and devoted himself wholly to banking. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1987, after four years at Lazard in London.

“M&A is great,” he says with visible enthusiasm. “You get involved with companies when they’re going through moments of crisis or great opportunity.”

“As you become more senior, you become the most trusted advisers of the most interesting companies and people,” he says.

In recent years, Robey has worked on the $70 billion merger of Glaxo Wellcome Plc and SmithKlineBeecham Plc in 2000 as well as on Santander Central Hispano SA’s purchase of Abbey National Plc in 2004.

“I’m useful,” says Robey, “because there’s almost nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Robey has done little singing in the interim, besides a concert 10 years ago at a church in Suffolk that had him practicing 10 minutes a day for six to eight months. He refuses to perform unless the voice is in shape. “It really is like being an athlete,” he explains. “If I had nine months to work on it, I’d be presentable.”

Any chance of him ever belting it out on stage at Covent Garden? “I did explore the chairman’s prerogatives,” he deadpans, “and self-casting is not one.”

To contact the writer on this story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 1, 2009 19:00 EST