PASTORAL HARMONY
Succumb to the rustic romance of Garsington Opera’s entrancing auditorium
The first notes of Mozart’s seductive aria ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ floated out into a silent, spellbound auditorium. And then, quite unexpectedly, an equally accomplished singer joined in from outside. As the song of the nightingale blended with the soprano’s, I found sudden tears pricking my eyes.
Such moments of unforgettable magic are to be expected at Garsington Opera, where the combination of exquisite music, the natural glories of the Wormsley Estate and the glamour of picnicking in evening dress beside the rush-fringed lake adds up to a potent cocktail of summery hedonism. But where Garsington has the edge over its rivals is in the way that the location itself is integrated into every production – an endeavour facilitated by Robin Snell’s ethereal Opera Pavilion, built in 2011.
‘Ours is probably the only glass opera house in the world,’ explains the artistic director Douglas Boyd. ‘For all the difficulties not having a dark stage poses, it separates us from any other experience.’
Indeed: in that self-same production of The Marriage of Figaro, Cherubino leapt out the window of the Countess’ apartment into the gardens themselves, to flee around the flowerbeds with a yokel in hot pursuit; while the first act of Fidelio, in which prisoners are released from their dark cells, becomes unbearably poignant when you watch them emerge, pallid and blinking, into a positive Eden in bloom.
‘You fight against the setting at your own peril,’ says Louisa Muller, the director of this season’s The Turn of the Screw. ‘In the first act, you’re in quite a lot of light, so the huge challenge is to make sure that you’re focusing the audience’s eyes on what’s happening on stage. But I can’t imagine a better setting for the opera itself: when the governess arrives, she’s totally seduced by the beauty of the
house, the idyllic surroundings and the charm of the children; it’s only later that it becomes darker, in every sense.’
The opportunity this offers to elide the separation between performers and audience makes for an almost surreally immersive experience, especially given the deliberately small size of the auditorium. It only seats 600, although the stage and orchestra pit are as large as that of a major opera house, able to accommodate the Philharmonia Orchestra, which plays for one production each season.
‘We could have made the Pavilion any size, but we wanted to keep it intimate,’ says Nicola Creed, Garsington’s executive director. ‘Wherever you sit, you can see the sweat on a performer’s forehead, or the lift of an eyebrow, and this fantastic sound envelops you. You’re completely connected to what’s going on on stage.’
As a result, it’s possible to stage productions of varying scale, from The Turn of the Screw, with its chamber orchestra and tiny cast, to The Bartered Bride, which requires a full symphony orchestra and chorus. This year, Garsington’s season encompasses 36 performances of four operas, and three concerts of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. ‘In a world where there’s always worry about the future of live performance, it’s an incredible success,’ observes Boyd.
It’s something Leonard Ingrams could never have imagined when, 30 years ago this summer, he and his wife Rosalind invited the Opera 80 company to perform The Marriage of Figaro for a fundraiser on the loggia of their Oxfordshire manor. Garsington Opera became an annual fixture, and visitors arrived, come rain or shine. Creed recalls how in 2009 a sudden deluge led to a river of water flooding the house, the stage and the orchestra pit. ‘It’s the only time in our history that a performance has had to be abandoned.’
More dangerous to Garsington’s long-term prospects was the necessity of changing locations after Leonard Ingrams’ sudden death from a heart attack in 2005; yet the Wormsley Estate, where the company found a new home in 2011, has proved the perfect situation – just as beautiful, even closer to London, and with a purpose-built opera house that demands no Dunkirk spirit from the audience, whatever the British summer has to throw at them. Garsington Opera (www.garsingtonopera.org) runs from 29 May to 26 July.