Opera in the Summer
Summer Opera, 2019 (Garsington Opera at Wormsley, The Grange Festival, Grange Park Opera Festival at West Horsley, Longborough Festival Opera, Glyndebourne Festival)
There is nothing specially summery about opera. It is not an ideal art form for outdoor performances. I remember rain interrupting play back in the early days of Leonard Ingrams’s opera festival at Garsington Manor. Was it a forgotten Haydn opera? We audience were protected from weather, but the singers on the stone courtyard (before there was much scenery at the festival) were getting drenched. At last, an imaginative performer found a broom to deal with the rainwater that was making an awning sag dangerously above him at centre stage – poking up from underneath to sweep the flood hilariously off its perch, to general applause!
Top operatic priority must be a helpful acoustic environment. Vast amphitheatres where plays also may thrive tend to need serious amplification. I once (working for The Guardian) went to Orange for a Carmen in the Roman theatre there. Before the performance all the streets around were packed with happy diners. But then rain set in and the performance was postponed – which my BA return from Marseilles could not be. (I didn’t think claiming two return airfares in expenses likely to work.) Location makes a difference, and is a large part of the draw with Country House opera. I don’t like the vast opera houses in the USA, necessitated by the funding model – from ticket prices plus the encouraging tax deals the US Revenue permits on gifts to not-for-profit.
But best of all for opera is an intimate theatre where all the audience, and not just those in top-price seats, can be close enough to see, hear and feel what the acting and singing of multi-talented performers are delivering. Opera is the most confessional of narrative art forms. To some extent,
obviously, Country House summer opera is a bourgeois social event that involves quite a lot of trouble just to be there – without considering the serious ticket prices necessary for it to happen at all. The race to be number two after Glyndebourne, which was first in the genre in 1934, has been definitively won by Garsington Opera whose prices range from £115 to £225 depending upon whether your visit is early weekdays (cheaper) or Saturdays (top-price). Next summer Garsington at Wormsley is doing Verdi’s early comedy Un giorno di regno, Mozart’s very early Mitridate, re di Ponto, Dvořák’s Rusalka and a revival of their Fidelio. These are unusual choices and show great confidence in the cognoscenti that form part of the audience Garsington can count on. But what a lot of companies there now are, promoting a few weeks-worth of operas in June and early July!
Wasfi Kani’s Grange Park Opera now at West Horsley Place, Surrey with its charming seventeenth-century facade has post haste from scratch constructed her intimate opera house there with trad horse-shoe-shape auditorium behind the ancient manor house. Next summer’s main draw is eight performances of a gorgeous rarity, La Gioconda by Ponchielli alongside a mix of popular and rare in La Bohème, Meet Me in St. Louis, and The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko (composed by famed contrarian fund-manager Anthony Bolton).
Then there’s Etonian countertenor Michael Chance’s Grange Festival near Alresford, Hants (tickets £45 - £195) which next year is doing Cenerentola, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Manon Lescaut after this year’s Marriage of Figaro, Falstaff, and Belshazzar (Handel oratorio). Chance at Northover Grange has the most beautiful location of any of the summer operas including Glyndebourne. Its theatre was built by Wasfi Kani (with millions raised apparently without effort) using the semi-ruined shell of Robert Cockerell’s conservatory or orangery. Originally a redbrick Restoration mansion, this house was disguised in the 1800s as a Greek temple by the National Gallery architect William Wilkins using Roman cement hardened with ground-up flint. The vast east-facing portico looking down on the lake copies the Theseion in Athens and each side view imitates the Choragic
Monument of Thrasyllus. So there!
Longborough is a lot less grand, its opera house substantially and cleverly adapted from a former chicken barn by owners Martin and Lizzie Graham. The high repute of their festival was established by approachable no-tricks Wagner stagings, and the skill and experience of Anthony Negus, former head of music for Welsh National Opera who is an inspired interpreter. Next year brings Die Walküre (stage 2 ot a new Ring), with Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses, Donizetti’s comic gem L’Elisir d’Amore and The Cunning Little Vixen. This year’s operas were Rheingold (seats £105 - £200, other operas half that), Anna Bolena, Don Giovanni, and La Calisto. Iford, Somerset’s operafest, is being rehomed at Belcombe Court, Bradford-on-Avon where L’Elisir this year cost £130, while Nevill Holt (tickets from £10 for children to £160) did Cosi fan tutte and Midsummer Night’s Dream, and plans Don Giovanni for 2020.
Country House opera does not really make opera more accessible with its few performances on agreeably intimate stages during the summer. But our politicians whether Labour, LibDem or Conservative are not interested in the live performing arts. Having opera is a political decision, and costs money. What has happened to British spoken theatre is no better. Actors no longer learn their trade playing in rep in the provinces – developing the ability to be heard at the back and hold a live audience spellbound. Even the Royal Opera has no ensemble and must be hand-to-mouth when it gets to casting.
The Bartered Bride is a terrific piece, and Rudolf Noelte’s infectious staging decades ago for Brian McMaster’s Welsh National Opera I still recall: rustic, authentically Bohemian, believable (young Helen Field as Mařenka). Garsington was being true to its tradition sticking to Smetana’s original Czech, and tried a change with Offenbach’s unknown Fantasio in a perky new Jeremy Sams English translation. But Smetana’s romantic peasant lifes and loves really need performers and audience totally at one – in the vernacular. Plus director Paul Curran and designer Kevin Knight updated it to the 1950s, where marriage brokers and wealthy peasants are
distinctly uncommon. Simon Heffer, new to the piece, in the Telegraph called it ‘the operatic equivalent of a Carry On film’ whereas Mozart’s Figaro was what Smetana had in mind. The 1950s style was smart and snobbish. But from the final act’s touring circus and matching energetic music, where the stammering younger brother of Mařenka’s beloved is thrilled to dress up as a bear, the charm overflowed. Jac van Steen is a very experienced conductor and knew perfectly how to pull it along. Natalya Romaniw’s Welsh-born Mařenka sang beautifully, while Joshua Bloom made a meal of Kecal, the marriage broking turned into an unusual sideline for the town mayor!
Fantasio by Offenbach was an odd choice – and its complicated silly story proved much less entertaining than Garsington’s 2014 unknown Offenbach Vert-Vert. The best music in Fantasio was reused in Offenbach’s incomplete Tales from Hoffmann with its mysterious series of love stories and devilish intervention. In 1872 Offenbach was attacked for being of German origin (after the Franco-Prussian war). But here it is the sentimental story and lack of personality in the central trouser-role character, an anonymous young man with romantic notions, that are the real problem. A royal marriage is taking place in Munich between the Bavarian princess and a prince from Mantua. The court jester has died – Fantasio disguising himself fills the vacancy to continue secretly wooing the princess. This tale has too many characters – none very engaging. But Huw Montague Rendall as the Mantuan prince (promising son of retired stars Diana Montague and David Rendall) who also adopts disguise shone a great deal more than Hanna Hipp the mezzo in the title role. Both these Garsington productions used more scenery than has here been usual, which was a good way to help the lack of focus in the Wormsley theatre’s lay-out. But this is the most successful of all summer operas apart from Glyndebourne – with more performances, selling more seats, and putting more money into what it does.
This year’s ‘Young Artist Production’ at Longborough was Cavalli’s La Calisto. Young Artist as a concept is a bit of a euphemism. Calisto is a seriously fine opera with a poetic text by Faustini based on an Ovid story that Italian friends tell me is top-grade poetry. The opera was brilliantly