GRANGE PARK OPERA
4 JUNE – 18/19 JULY
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Grange Park Opera began in 1998 at a country house in Hampshire that had been rebuilt in the early years of the nineteenth century. Grange Park had the appearance of a Greek temple but had been allowed – through decades of neglect – to fall apart. Then came Wasfi Kani OBE, the former Chief Executive of Garsington who set up Grange Park Opera. This festival ran from 1998 to 2016 making the most of the Grange's crumbling, Miss Havisham-like interiors where
guests could dine in the intervals.
When Wasfi's lease was up in 2016, a new management took over at The Grange but the lady wasn't done yet. She took her high-profile festival to a new venue, sixteenth-century West Horsley Place in Surrey. This country house is owned by the writer and University Challenge broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne. In 2016 Gascoigne leased part of his estate to Wasfi where she built herself a brand new “Theatre in the Woods”. With four tiers of seating in a horseshoe shape (modelled on La Scala, Milan), the Theatre in the Woods can accommodate 700 people. This summer Grange Park at West Horsley is performing La Bohème, Ponchielli's rarely heard La Gioconda, a new commission The Life and Death of Alexander
Litvinenko and musical Meet Me in St Louis.
grangeparkopera.co.uk
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Where to stay
Barnet Hill is nine miles south of Grange Park Opera