The sound of great opera arias will vie with summer birdsong at a record number of country house venues over the next few months, as classical performers cater to a growing taste for formal evenings of music in a rural setting.
This season two new contenders – one in Surrey, the other a reinvented opera festival in Hampshire – are challenging the busy country house scene, already well established at Glyndebourne in Sussex, at Wormsley in the Chilterns and at Longborough in the Cotswolds. Meanwhile a new, bigger opera auditorium is planned for Nevill Holt Hall in Leicestershire.
Rival conductors’ batons may not yet be clashing in combat, and it has not quite come to picnic-hampers-at-dawn, but there is a new and marked element of serious competition between the growing number of rivals.
Note the relationship between Grange Park Opera, newly moved to Surrey, and Grange Festival, now run at the former’s old Hampshire home. Last year Grange Park Opera was forced to leave the site it had used since 1998 following an argument with the owners of the Grange, the Baring family. So the company, founded by opera impresario Wasfi Kani, had to find a new base.
“We had to be quick because we had productions already set up,” said Kani. “I had to find somewhere to put on Die Walküre fast.”
Luckily for Kani and Grange Park Opera the story has a fairytale ending. In March 2015 Bamber Gascoigne, the author and former longtime host of the television quiz show University Challenge, unexpectedly inherited the vast and dilapidated West Horsley Place estate in Surrey from his late great aunt, Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe.
Kani, already on notice to quit Hampshire, swiftly approached Gascoigne with a plan and the result is the circular 700-seater Theatre in the Woods, built from scratch in 11 months in his 350-acre grounds. The theatre, put up by contractor Martin Smith, is now ready enough for singers to run through their paces in a rehearsal for Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa, although builders drilled and decorators painted around them. The company will mount its first full performance shortly: a dress rehearsal of Tosca put on for the builders. A public opening night, starring acclaimed international tenor Joseph Calleja, follows on 8 June.
The first guests will see a work in progress. Kani has raised £8m, but needs another £2m to complete the project.
“I wish someone had told me I would need to build another opera house when I was 60,” she said ruefully this weekend.While work goes on, plush seating donated by Covent Garden is protected by old backdrops, including a swirling painted staircase from La Traviata. The finished theatre will also feature some quirky detail, including a mini train track in the foyer. And Kani may display her collection of the Duchess of Roxburghe’s parasols alongside a set of footmen’s livery. She purchased both in a fund-raising auction for Gascoigne’s house.
Back in Hampshire the new Grange Festival, under artistic director Michael Chance, has hinted it may soon stage more than opera. Its first programme features popular attractions such as Carmen and the John Wilson orchestra, which includes a big band performing original jazz arrangements of MGM musicals.
It is also staging a work by the contemporary composer Jonathan Dove in September. The best tickets are priced at around £175. Chance has promised, however, that up to 76 tickets for every performance will be sold for £45 or less. “We want to be accessible to a wider demographic, a wider age group and wider degree of pocket size, while preserving the crucial core audience who are prepared to invest time and money,” he has said.
Near the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough, Carphone Warehouse founder David Ross is planning a bigger permanent 400-seat theatre in the grounds of his country mansion, home to Nevill Holt Opera for 10 years.
Kani sees all this frenzied activity in the summer opera market as part of an English tradition of decamping to the countryside. “In other countries aristocrats had their main homes in town, here in England the big family estate was in the country, so we have all these venues,” she said.
Longborough Festival Opera’s co-owner and director, Lizzie Graham, suspects the trend is down to a British love of picnicking. “In a way it is a mystery, when you think what much of our weather is like,” she said. “But it is about how we do summer. If it rains we just put up our umbrellas.”
She and her husband, Martin, set up an opera festival in the grounds of their Cotswold home in 1991, building a 500-seat theatre that welcomes more than 7,000 punters a year. This summer, with ticket prices ranging between £32 and £202, the Wagner specialists are staging Mozart’s The Magic Flute alongside Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.
Graham and Kani are both used to the claim that they entertain only the wealthy. “All of the opera festivals try not to be too haughty, and certainly here we are not stuffy,” said Graham. “Our tickets just cannot be dirt cheap though, because of the overheads with opera and most of us don’t get any subsidy, of course.”
While the talent on stage and in the orchestra pit is proudly elite, Graham argues her audience at Longborough is varied: “We have never had a dress code, but a lot of people do like dressing up in whatever way appeals to them. We have a hard core of black tie, but we get a balance.” Like any opera company, Graham says Longborough must put on its share of conventional opera hits. “You need to have at least one show from the core repertoire each season, and with opera that means one of only about 15 works. So there is a lot of Tosca done and Traviata, which Glyndbourne has this year. The thing is not to be too wacky, generally.”
In the Chilterns, Garsington Opera, where Kani also once worked, asks for £115-£180 for a good seat in its opera pavilion. Originally founded by the late Leonard Ingrams and his wife Rosalind in 1989 at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, six years ago it moved to the Wormsley Estate, home of the Getty family, where its new season, featuring Handel’s Semele and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, opens on Thursday.
Its festival also champions some lesser-known works, including this year’s Silver Birch, a “people’s opera” inspired by the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon which has been commissioned from composer Roxanna Panufnik and involves 180 community participants.
At West Horsley next week, Grange Park opera-goers – some paying £180, some £70 – will walk through an orchard of damson and mulberry trees either to picnic in a walled garden, take a seat in the Fig Tree restaurant pavilion or visit the champagne bar due to go up under a large white wisteria. Those with the deepest pockets will also “dine with the Duchess” inside the flag-stoned ground floor of the house itself.
“I don’t need to defend it, because music makes the world a better place and we will do that here,” promises Kani. “And any money we raise will feed into the other work done by our sister company Pimlico Opera, with schools and with prisons.”
