The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Out of the woods
A bitter feud, an opera company desperate for a new home, a rundown country pile in a romantic woodland setting, a formidable musical grande dame and an unlikely heir... cue a match made in heaven. Rupert Christiansen reports. Portrait by Jooney Woodward
How a bitter feud and an unlikely inheritance led to an operatic match made in heaven. By Rupert Christiansen
Describing the past two years of her life as‘ a series of small miracles ’, Was fi Kani still can’t quite believe the way things have turned out .‘ It’ s simply astonishing how quickly ever y thing has happened,’ she says, ‘and how smoothly it’s fallen into place.’ There’s a fair y-tale setting to match her wonder too – a sleeping beauty of a mouldering mansion in rural Surrey that is about to be magically awoken as a summer opera festival.
The story began in March 2015, when Kani’s boyfriend showed her an article in The Daily
Telegraph reporting that the late Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, who had died at the age of 99, had unexpectedly bequeathed her ancestral estate at West Horsley in Surrey to her nephew, the author and former University Challenge quiz master Bamber Gascoigne.
Dating back to the Middle Ages but with a Dutch-style 17 th-century façade, West Horsley Place was a lovable and rambling pile reduced to picturesque dilapidation – the Duchess had spent little time therein her old age, and damp and woodworm had done their worst. Gascoigne was delighted at his out-of-the-blue inheritance, but had never even been upstairs and didn’t know quite what to do with it: living there himself wouldn’t be practical. But Wasfi Kani knew what should be done, and the news couldn’t have come at a better time, because at that point, she was in a spot of serious trouble.
One of Britain’s most ambitious and successful opera impresarios, Kani had since 1998 been the tenant of The Grange, an uninhabited neoclassical masterpiece in Hampshire. Nominally owned by the Baring banking family, who had attempted to demolish it in 1972, its guardianship had been handed over to English Heritage.
After complex negotiations, Kani had signed a 20-year lease on the property and given it new life as Grange Park Opera, constructing a simple but beautiful theatre on the Glyndebourne model and producing summer seasons that drew glamorous audiences and won critical plaudits.
But latterly (for reasons that will be explained later) she had fallen out with the Barings and her lease was being summarily terminated. Battered but unbroken and taking all the theatre’s fixtures and fittings as well as the brand name of Grange Park Opera with her, Kani immediately spread out her maps and began consulting bodies such as the National Trust and Historic Houses Association in the hope of relocating.
Nothing she saw fitted the bill, but her curiosity was piqued by the Telegraph story. ‘Although I couldn’t tell whether it could work for us, I knew B amber a little from his visits to The Grange and we quickly arranged a meeting. I fell in love with what I saw immediately, but it was Bamber who took me through a gate in a garden wall into an ungrazed meadow and said, “This is where you should build your new opera house.”
‘A few weeks later my trustees visited and gave their approval. I’d been thinking in terms of putting up a temporary pavilion, along the lines of what Garsingt on Opera has done on the Wormsley estate owned by the Gettys, but in the end we decided to go the whole way.’
The result is that after signing a 99-year lease with the trust Gascoigne set up to safeguard the estate’ s future, and an astonishingly easy ride through Surrey’ s Green Belt planning maze, Kani has created a four-tiered theatre in brick, seating 700. Designed by architects Tim Ronalds and David Lloyd Jones, who had helped her to develop The Grange, this drum-shaped building framed by woodland will costa total of £10 million, of which £8 million has been raised within a year, following a campaign managed by the redoubtable philanthropist Vivien Duffield.
Kani is herself very adroit at winkling money out of the wealthy. ‘I never Google anyone before I meet them and I don’t spout,’ she replies, when asked about her technique. ‘It’s about empathy,
‘Visitors will be able to leave London at 4.30, enjoy the opera and dinner and be tucked up in bed by 11.30’
non-verbal communication, and engaging people in experiences that make the world a better place and you a richer human being. But you must make it clear that you can deliver the goods.’ A couple convinced by her inspirational pitch were investment banker Michael Cowan and his wife Hilary, Surrey residents who have donated £1 million towards the new theatre.
The building won’t be finished in detail when it opens this summer for a new production of
Tosca starring the tenor Joseph Calleja, but despite ‘a few rough edges’ (the loos will be in temporary buildings as they were at The Grange), it will be‘ fully functional’, and asKa ni emphasis es, it is yet another miracle that the project has proceeded with such speed and effi-
K an ii sop era ting on the assumption that Surrey is a county ‘not exactly packed with culture’ but full of well-heeled and educated people, keen to contribute to the enrichment of the community. There’s a more mundane USP as well. All the other country-house festivals suffer from access difficulties, necessitating tedious journeys through rush hour, expensive tax is for last trains or long drives down dark lanes in search of the motor way. But West Horsley offers relief from all that: it’s only 10 minutes off the M 25, eight miles from Woking, served by a station less than half an hour from London Waterloo. This will becruci alto thefe st iv al’ ssu cc ess,Ka ni believes .‘ Inaner a when mobile phones and hectic work schedules have made us all so timepoor, it’s a game changer. Most visitors will easily be able to leave London at 4.30, enjoy the opera and dinner and be tucked up in bed by 11.30 – all without last-minute panic or stress.’
The clear-eyed practicality behind this suggest san important element in Kani’s impressive set of skills and qualities .‘ I am a very hard worker and I am obsessive,’ she insists. Bamber ciency. As if in consecration, Mary Roxburghe’s ashes have been buried under the orchestra pit.
C ompetition in the summer countr y-house opera sector is intense. Within a two-hour radius, punters can choose between the market leader Glyndebourne, Garsing ton at Wormsley, Longborough, Iford, Bampton, and a new Baring-run festival filling the gap at The Grange; Londoners also have delightful al fresco Opera Holland Park on their doorsteps.
However, at West Horsley Place, Grange Park Opera (as it will be confusingly called for the next few years) will offer a wonderfully romantic sett i ng – t he maje s t ic re cept ion rooms on t he house’s ground floor are laid out for fine dining, a nd t he lushly pla nted a nd wooded 350-acre estate on which Henry VIII once hunted, open for interval picnics and strolls.
Gascoigne talks about her ‘fizz’, and friends also call her fearless, generous, intelligent, unsnobbish, amusing and inexhaustible. But there’s a downside too: she can also be very high-handed, astoundingly rude and insanely uncompromising, fuelled by a fearsome temper that has turned some of her closest friends into her worst enemies. In the opera business, she divides opinion sharply and leave sat rail of corpse sin her wake, several of them at The Grange.
Her background explains a lot: it wasn’t easy and she’s always had to fight. Her parents, upper middle-class Muslim Indians, emigrated to England at Partition where they were swiftly reduced to poverty. They had five children, of whom she is the second. ‘They wanted a son at that point, so they called me, Wasfi, a boy’s name. Perhaps I’m an alpha male in a female body.’
She was born in 1956 in the East End, where her mother did piecework and her father was a Post Office engineer. Aspirations were pitched high. ‘I had a tiger mother, who made it clear that we all had to work hard and come top.’
So when she discovered music at her grammar school behind Wormwood Scrubs, her commitment was total. ‘I practised piano and violin five hours a day, my lessons paid for by t he st ate. Music just spoke to me. I can’t explain it any other way. It wasn’t what my parents wanted, but nothing would have stopped me.’
She went onto play in the National Youth Orchestra and then read music at Oxford, where she flourished on all fronts. After graduating, however, performing was relegated to a hobby as she enjoyed great success during the 1980s in the growth area of devising computer systems for offices. ‘I was good at maths and even better at organising,’ she explains.
‘Then I turned 30 and thought that I would live to regret it if I didn’t devote myself to music. So I started Pimlico Opera, in a hall near where I lived in Chelsea. Opera is something t hat just crept up on me and I have never understood hang-ups about it. There’s no mystique – if people ask me where they should start or what to do, I just say, what the hell, come along and see what it makes you feel. There are no barriers of class or education: all this stuff about it being elitist is simply tosh.’
P imlico Opera’s small-scale but high-quality performances caught on swiftly, and the organisation expanded into pioneering projects in prisons, which continue today. ‘I’ve been fascinated by jail ever since I was at school close to Wormwood Scrubs,’ Kani says. Four years followed as de facto artistic director of the nascent Garsington Opera, before she quarrelled with its cantankerous proprietor Leonard Ingrams and decamped to start her own up market festival at The Grange in 1998– running it for several years in tandem with a satellite season at Nevill Holt, a mansion in Leicestershire owned by the Carphone Warehouse billionaire David Ross.
Responsible at The Grange for some 60 productions ranging from Fiddler on the Roof to
Tristan and Isolde, Kani’s experience makes her a leading light in the British opera world and she knows a thing or two about loos, restaurants and car parking too. Conductor Stephen Barlow, who has worked with her for many years and travels to West Horsley for Die Walküre this summer, calls her‘ a mistress of all and sundry, from choristers’ auditions to casting, the planting of borders to seating covers, super titles to programme design. It’s a tough pressurised industry, and anyone whole ads completely fearlessly from the front like Was fi deserves the right to expect others to earn her respect. Sometimes that earning leaves bruised noses and pride. But once gained, she repays with complete trust .’
So what went wrong at The Grange? Out-ofcourt settlements and uneasy truces mean that despite continuing intense mutual animosity, neither side wants to fan the flames. But the broad consensus is that as tenant Kani contributed all the planning, vision and hard work that made the place a success – she invented it. The landlord Baring st hen decided that she was overweening and wrested back control after legal istic arguments about rent and corporate governance( the grounds of whichKa ni strongly disputes). Chairman Mark Baring describes ‘an unhealthy working environment and differing opinions between me and other trustees on holding management to account’.
As someone who shoots from the hip, Kani is unlikely to have been diplomatic through the negotiations, and her removal of all the seating and equipment from ‘her’ opera house has left t he new management wit h a la rge bill a nd a throbbing headache. But the Barings seem to think that the price was worth paying: improved facilities and a re-landscaping of the park by Kim Wilkie and Alan Titchmarsh are promised this summer, as well as an enticing prog ramme of opera overseen by countertenor Michael Chance. It’s time to move on.
Although Kani likes to win, and one suspects that she privately hopes to see the Barings trampled into the dust, her view of the opera scene is generous and inclusive. ‘You can go the opera at Covent Garden, you can go to the opera in a pub, you can go to a cinema, or you can go to one of the summer festivals: if you’re an opera buff you can go to the lot. I don’t discriminate, because we all feed off each other. The more the better – competition is good for the cause. But I know that what we are preparing at West Horsley is going to be something very special indeed.’ Grange Park Opera will present Tosca , Die Walküre, Jenůfa and a gala concert given by Sir Bryn Terfel and Zenaida Yanowsky at West Horsley Place, Surrey , between 8 June and 15 July. Call 01962-737373 for tickets
‘I know that what we are preparing at West Horsley is going to be something very special indeed’