2017 Programme

AT W E S T H O R S L E Y P L AC E 1

To stay the same, we have to change GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA 1896–1957

WELCOME

TO A NEW CHAPTER AT WEST HORSLEY PLACE

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photography Richard Lewisohn

2017

RICHARD WAGNER

DIE

WALKÜRE

With generous support from DAVID & AMANDA LEATHERS with Sir Win & Lady Bischoff

LEOŠ JANÁCEK

JENUFA With generous support from SIMON & MEG FREAKLEY

GIACOMO PUCCINI

TOSCA Sponsored by NEX Group plc

BRYN TERFEL

& FRIENDS

Suppor ted by JAMES & BÉATRICE LUPTON

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Bamber & Christina Gascoigne in the unfinished opera house March 2017

BAMBER & CHRISTINA GASCOIGNE It is a very great pleasure to welcome you all to this new opera house

T

he first performance, 8 June 2017, is one of the two most dramatic days in the entire 500-year history of West Horsley Place. The other was the day when Henry VIII sat down in the 1530s to a magnificent lunch in the Great Hall, given by his cousin and childhood friend Henry Courtenay. But the ungrateful guest had Courtenay executed a few years later.

Dangerous times.

On 2 May 2015 Wasfi Kani and some Trustees of Grange Park Opera visited Christina and me at Horsley. They explained that their Hampshire lease had been brought to an end and the charity was in need of a home. Could they come to us? It is not every day that one is asked if one would like an opera house in the garden. Rather promptly we said yes.

A year later GPO received planning permission – and 386 days later the first chord of Tosca will be heard in the theatre. It is with absolute astonishment that we have watched it grow, with speed to rival a mushroom.

I unexpectedly became the owner of West Horsley Place in 2014 on July 14. I inherited it from a 99-year-old aunt, Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe. She had never made any mention of this plan. It would have been a help if she had. When I went round the house for the first time as its owner (I had been there often, but never upstairs) I was astonished by the number of buckets. Clearly for a long time the solution to a new leak had been the purchase of a new bucket.

It is a Grade I listed house of great charm, as seen already when arriving at the lovely brick facade that in about 1630 was screwed (literally) to the timbers of the Tudor house to make it look modern. There are eight Grade II listed features within the immediate vicinity, including in front of the house two early-19th century dog kennels – I like to believe the only listed dog kennels in the country – or certainly the only pair.

Anyone having a picnic in the orchard or gardens will enjoy the superb brick walls from about 1710.

The solicitor told me that Mary thought the place should be sold after her death, but Christina and I felt it seemed a bit feeble not to have a go at restoring it. Equally we felt burdened by the problems, but this was solved when we gave the entire estate to a new charity, the Mary Roxburghe Trust. It has three objects: the restoration of the buildings, the teaching of crafts and the encouragement of the performing arts. z

Everyone seems to fall in love with the place and I am sure that the opera performances will bring many new friends 9

MARY, DUCHESS OF ROXBURGHE 23 MARCH 1915 – 2 JULY 2014

Mary was a youngest child with half sisters 30 years her senior. Queen Mary, after whom she was named, was her godmother. At twenty she was married to the Duke of Roxburghe at Westminster Abbey and two years later she was there again, one of four young duchesses carrying the train of the new Queen at the Coronation.

There are operatic tales of Mary’s divorce papers arriving on her breakfast tray one morning in 1953 – delivered by the butler. The Duke demanded she leave the family home, Floors Castle, but she staged a ten-day sit-in which became a sensation in the national press. The Duke sacked all the servants, leaving only a lady’s maid, and then disconnected the electricity and water. Mary had made her point and the alimony was excellent. She came south to Hyde Park Gardens, worked for many charities and was a loyal patron of the Royal Ballet.

Mary’s father, Robert Crewe (1858-1945), died at West Horsley Place in “a room overlooking the flower garden and lined with books”. One of Crewe’s 14 grandchildren was Bamber Gascoigne’s mother and it is through Bamber and Christina’s exceptional philanthropy that West Horsley Place has come to be the new home of Grange Park Opera.

A casket containing Mary’s ashes are set into the foundations of the new Opera House deep below the orchestra pit under the fi rst violins. Mary will have music around her for ever.

SOMEHOW – IT WAS DONE THE THEATRE IN THE WOODS APPEAL JOINT CHAIR SIR DAVID DAVIES & DAME VIVIEN DUFFIELD

Our passion for the beautiful does not make us extravagant, nor does our love of culture make us weak.

As for our wealth, we do not brag of it.

Instead, we use it well, appropriately, for the good of all.

PERICLES 432 BC

THE

PIONEERS

LEAD DONORS MICHAEL & HILARY COWAN z HADRON COLLIDERS Clore Duffield Foundation Ronnie Frost & family William Garrett Michael & Sarah Spencer Geoff & Fiona Squire Foundation David & Linda Lloyd Jones Red Butterfly Foundation z SPUTNIK

PATRON JOANNA LUMLEY

Hilary Hart Andrew & Sarah Hills Harry Hyman David & Clare Kershaw Lord & Lady Marks of Broughton Mr & Mrs Matthias Ruhland The Sackler Trust Lord & Lady Sassoon Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement Ed & Lulu Siskind Martin & Lucy Stapleton Hugh & Catherine Stevenson Anthony & Carolyn Townsend z

THE FIRST ARTIFICIAL EARTH SATELLITE

David & Amanda Leathers John L Pemberton

Barlow Robbins Solicitors Rothschild & Co

Simon & Meg Freakley

z

Hamish & Sophie Forsyth

SOPWITH

Ruth Markland

SURREY AVIATOR

William & Kathy Charnley

Sir Gerald & Lady Acher John & Jackie Alexander Vindi & Kamini Banga Joanna Barlow David & Chris Beever The Buckley Family The Carole & Geoffrey Lawson Foundation Jane & Paul Chase-Gardener Richard & Frances Clarke Mr & Mrs Tim Cockroft The John S Cohen Foundation Anonymous Mr & Mrs Leo A Daly III The de Laszlo Foundation Nick & Lesley Dumbreck Judith Lawless & Kevin Egan The Ewins Family Jeremy & Rosemary Farr Sir Rocco Forte Deborah & Neil Franks Christina & Bamber Gascoigne Roger & Clare Gifford The Gillmore Trust The Reekimlane Foundation George & Caroline Goulding

Stephen Gosztony & Sue Butcher Sir Henry & The Hon Lady Keswick Tony & Sarah Bolton z TURING BREAKER OF THE ENIGMA CODE

Mr Quentin Black Ms Karen Burgess Michael & Julia Calvey David & Elizabeth Challen Samantha & Nabil Chartouni Jane & Jonathan Clarke Aidan & Colette Clegg Adam & Lucy Constable Peter & Annette Dart Sir David Davies David & Sara Delaney Peter & Manina Dicks Noreen Doyle T V Drastik Niall, Ingrid & Gabriella FitzGerald Alex & Alison Fortescue François Freyeisen & Shunichi Kubo Chris & Marjorie Gibson-Smith

Charles & Maggie Hallatt The Hon Charles Harris Malcolm Herring Dr Jonathan Holliday & Dr Gwen Lewis Richard & Pamela Jacobs Raymonde Jay Keith & Lucy Jones The Justham Trust The Kirk Family Mr & Mrs Francis C Lang Mark & Sophie Lewisohn Oscar & Margaret Lewisohn Richard & Alex Lewisohn Raphael & Marillyn Maklouf Tessa & John Manser Darcy & Alexander Munro Bruce & Pamela Noble Peter & Poppity Nutting Hamish Parker Stephen & Isobel Parkinson Cathy & Michael Pearman Lord & Lady Phillimore Mike & Jessamy Reynolds John & Pit Rink Nigel & Viv Robson Anne & Barry Rourke David & Lynneth Salisbury Victoria & John Salkeld Mark & Louise Seligman Diane & Christopher Sheridan Anonymous Sir John & Lady Sunderland Andrew & Jane Sutton Christopher Swan Ian & Tina Taylor Anonymous Adam & Louise Tyrrell Johnny & Marie Veeder Rev. John Wates OBE & Mrs Carol Wates Mr David & Mrs Alison Watson Keith & Katy Weed Anonymous Edward & Mandy Weston Linda Wilding Jane & Andrew Winch

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Singing with Grange Park Opera is life-affirming.

These are people who want to bring a new generation to opera on and off the stage.

I hope you will participate with me in this initiative to create a Theatre in the Woods.

THE

CIRCLE

OF

VIRTUOUS ENTERPRISE

PATRON SIR BRYN TERFEL 1 Sir Bryn Terfel 66 Anonymous 130 Julian G Jones 67 Mr & Mrs S R Jeffreys 2 Wasfi Kani 131 Ian & Helen Andrews 3 Alexander & Mary Creswell 68 Christopher Jack & Stephanie Sfakianos 132 David & Elizabeth Pritchard 69 Robin & Anne Purchas 4 Mr & Mrs David Ibeson 133 Anne Howells & Steve Clarke 5 Ms Nicola A Freshwater 70 Laura & Andrew Sykes 134 Hugh Fagan 6 Mr & Mrs Graham West 71 Anonymous 135 Crispin Cazalet 7 Jean & Richard Baldwin 72 Mr Adrian Knowles 136 Antoni & Caroline Daszewski 8 Hilary & James Leek 73 Mrs Tikki Adorian 137 Dr Anthony Smoker 9 Adam & Carola Lee 74 Laurence & Janey Langford 138 Mr & Mrs Max Ulfane 10 Christopher & Tineke Stewart 75 Paul Batchelor 139 Clive & Helena Butler 11 Miss Pamela M North 76 Janet Batchelor 140 Jill & Mike Pullan 141 Nick Viner & Victoria Boyarsky 12 Tony Legge 77 Miss Deborah Finkler & Mr Allan Murray-Jones 13 Anonymous 142 Mr & Mrs John Tremlett 14 Mrs Susan Lochner JP DL 78 Mr & Mrs John Colwell 143 Edwina Sassoon 15 Mr Harry & Mrs Ellen Thurman 79 Dr Jonathan Holliday & Dr Gwen Lewis 144 Christopher & Clare McCann 16 Roger & Jackie Morris 80 Sharon Pipe 145 Michael de Navarro 81 Martin & Brigitte Skan 17 Peter & Irene Casey 146 Emily, Victoria & Isobel Battcock 18 George Kingston 82 Dr Patrick Mill 147 Christian & Katie Wells 19 – 23 Gerry & Joyce Acher’s grandchildren 83 Jeanette Mill 148 Mr & Mrs Angel 24 Peter & Jacquie Homonko 84 Dr Peter Harrison & Verity Jones 149 Austin & Ragna Erwin 25 Mrs Alyson Wilson 85 The Fischer Fund 150 Charles Alexander & Kasia Starega 26 James & Helena Watson 86 Bill Bougourd & Judith Thomas 151 Alan Thomas 27 Mr & Mrs William Witts 87 Iain & Mary Rhind 152 Jerry & Clare Wright 28 Liz & Nigel Peace 88 Mrs Michael Beresford-West 153 Sue & Peter Morgan 29 Jane Poulter 89 Mr Mat Kirk & Mrs Sam Kirk 154 Sue & Peter Paice 30 Angela & David Harvey 90 & 91 The Foxley Trust 155 Dieter & Lesley Losse 31 Mrs Annabel Allott 92 Peter Kerfack & Russell Townend 156 Mr Charles Rosier 32 Ian & Clare Maurice 93 Andrew & Jane Sutton 157 Anonymous 33 Nick & Sarah Treble 94 George Meagher 158 Professor Heather Joshi CBE 34 David & Fiona Taylor 95 Jack Gardener 159 Dr Barbara Domayne-Hayman 35 Paul Drury & Anna McPherson 96 Jan & Michael Potter 160 Mr Hugh Gammell 36 Mr George & Mrs Marie Rushton 97 Mr & Mrs Henry Lumley 161 Anonymous 37 Peter & Marianne Hooley 98 Sir Michael Parker 162 Neil & Elizabeth Johnson 38 Mark & Rosemary Carawan 99 Lady Parker 163 Eleanor G Berry 39 Sir Anthony & Lady Cleaver 100 Miss Lily Bagwell Purefoy 164 Cilla & John Slater 40 Ernst Uwe Hanneck & Karin Mueller 101 Pam Alexander & Roger Booker 165 Mr & Mrs L Vine-Chatterton 41 Madeleine & Stephen McGairl 102 Dr & Mrs G M Tonge 166 – 170 Anonymous 42 Antonia Murphy & Clare Bevan 103 Simon & Rosemary Godfrey 171 Peter & Katie Gray 43 Dame Janet Gaymer 104 Rob & Felicity Shepherd 172 Mr David Gutman 44 Mr John Gaymer 105 June, Dyrol & Becky Lumbard 173 David & Alex Rhodes 45 Dr Martin Read & Dr Marian Gilbart Read 106 Janet Mernane 174 Charlie Chase-Gardener 46 Siân & Ben Tyler 107 Mr Victor Coles 175 Lucy Chase-Gardener 47 Sally Phillips 108 David & Virginia Essex 176 Mr Josh Holliday 48 Tristan Wood 109 Mr & Mrs David Blackburn 177 Mr Tom Holliday 49 Dr Carolyn Greenwood & John McVittie 110 Andrew Luff 178 Peter & Brenda Berners-Price 50 Eliza Mellor 111 & 112 Diana & Terence Kyle 179 Miss Rula Al-Adasani MBE 51 Mr Andrew & Mrs Marian Sanders 113 Mr Julian Hardwick 180 Helen Dorey & Markus Geisser 52 William & Kitty Vaughan 114 Mr & Mrs Peter Leaver 181 Mrs Tim Landon 53 David & Sarah Rosier 115 John Kessler 182 Hugh & Mary Boardman 54 John & Cecilia Gordon 116 Angela Kessler 183 Stephen & Nilda Ginn 55 David & Peta Crowther 117 Mr Habib Motani 184 Tom & Sarah Grillo 56 Liz & Mike Cooper-Mitchell 118 Miss Elizabeth Cretch 185 Dr Tom McClintock 57 Anonymous 119 Anonymous 186 Richard & Miriam Borchard 58 Dr Henry & Mrs Julia Pearson 120 David & Vivienne Woolf 187 Chris & Miranda Ward 59 Mrs Margaret Green 121 Mr Julian Stanford 188 Mr Peter Linacre 60 Helen Culleton 122 – 124 James & Béatrice Lupton 189 William & Felicity Mather 61 Peter & Marie-Claire Wilson 125 Mina & Suzanne Goodman 190 Nicholas & Jane St Aubyn 62 Mrs Margaret Bolam 126 Mrs Carolyn Conlan 191 Mr & Mrs Barry Bramley 63 Mrs Elizabeth Vyvyan 127 Dominic & Katherine Powell 192 Mr Ian Coutts-Wood 64 Mr Brian Boyce 128 Mrs Laurence Colchester 193 Oliver & Felicity Wethered 65 Mrs Judith Boyce 129 Mr Mark & Mrs Sue Luboff 194 The O’Hea family

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195 J & V Knox 196 Mr Andrew Simon 197 Anonymous 198 Anonymous 199 The One Style Tour 200 Bruce & Bridget Montgomery 201 Oliver & Rebecca Huggins 202 Ms Morfydd Evans 203 Christina & Timothy Benn 204 Prudence & Kevan Watts 205 Bobasch Joel Foundation 206 Veronica Powell 207 Anonymous 208 Sue & Graham White 209 Sir Rupert & Lady Jackson 210 Angela & Clive Gilchrist 211 Michael & Nirmala Rappolt 212 Patricia & Richard Millett 213 Mr Graham Elliott & Mrs Emma Crabtree 214 John & Susan Burns 215 Hilary & Barney II Myerscough 216 Michael & Allie Eaton 217 Lady Purves 218 Ms Carolyn Saunders & Mr Richard Ford 219 The Tickner family 220 Nigel Silby 221 Andy & Estelle Los 222 Ben & Christina Perry 223 Richard & Sally Nield 224 Mr & Mrs John Jarvis 225 Mrs Juliet Dunsmure

226 Ian & Wendy Sampson 227 Felix Appelbe 228 George & Veronique Seligman 229 Clementine Wyke 230 The Lady Heseltine 231 Adair Turner & Orna NiChionna 232 Fiona & Peter Hare 233 Peter & Rosemary Derby 234 Kathrine Palmer 235 Nigel & Johanna Stapleton 236 Mr Andrew & Mrs Jill Soundy 237 Mark & Alva Powell 238 Tamara Mitchel 239 John Derrick & Preben Oeye 240 Shirley & Brian Carte 241 Sir Peter & Lady Cazalet 242 Prof Mark & Dr Gill Britton 243 John & Trudi Harris 244 Longina Boczon 245 David & Frances Waters 246 Polizzi Charitable Trust 247 Anne & Alistair Calder 248 Nerissa Guest 249 Sally & Fraser Wilson 250 Prof Graham Layer & Dr Jenny Sillick 251 Ms Jane Jenkins & Mr Oscar Harrison-Hall 252 Paul Coleman DL 253 Mrs Jeanette Bird 254 Toby & Jennifer Greenbury 255 Anthony & Fiona Littlejohn 256 David Alan Foster

257 Dr John Grimshaw 258 Baroness Patience Wheatcroft 259 Victoria Gath & Mark Echlin 260 Peter & Angela Granger 261 – 265 Jenny Bland 266 Ms Melinda Hughes 267 Paul & Lydia Goodson 268 Bruce & Lizzie Powell 269 – 272 Anonymous 273 Sir John & Lady Hood 274 John & Elizabeth Maycock 275 Pam & John Bevington 276 Susanne & Jeffrey Nedas 277 Dr Ann Williams 278 Tony & Valerie Thompson 279 Rosie Faunch 280 Hugh & Claire Peppiatt 281 Mr & Mrs Andrew Frost 282 Sir David & Lady Normington 283 Ione Woollacott 284 Ron & Pennie Zimmern 285 Jocelin & Cherry Harris 286 Jilly Allenby-Ryan 287 Nicole Hutchings 288 The Peak family 289 Mr Michael & Mrs Julia Kerby 290 Christopher & Georgie Birrell 291 Stuart Errington CBE DL 292 Lord & Lady Woolton 293 Robert & Felicity Waley-Cohen 294 Bruce & Roma Hooper

295 Oliver & Emma Pawle 296 The McGinley Foundation 297 Zsalya 298 Jonathan & Sarah Bayliss 299 Julie Joy Jarman & Jack Pickard 300 Miranda Robinson 301 Jeremy Lewis Simons 302 Christopher & Sarah Smith

303 Nick & Anne Driver 304 Nicholas & Linda Payne 305 Mike Hendry 306 Christopher Reeves Memorial Trust 307 Derek & Lynda Rapport 308 Mr Per Jonsson 309 Mr & Mrs Haydn Abbott 310 David & Deborah Stileman 311 Robert & Judith Hart 312 Jeffrey & Vivien Sultoon 313 Olivier Bourgois & Alice Goldet 314 Mr Roderick Davidson 315 Anthony Bunker 316 Anonymous 317 Mr & Mrs Leprince Jungbluth 318 Brian, Jennifer & Ben Ratner 319 Prof Neil & Dr Jane Mortensen 320 David Buchler 321 Miss Christine May 322 Mr & Mrs L M Eagles 323 Mrs Margaret Green 324 Paul & Ursula Manduca 325 Mr Michael & Mrs Sarah Hewett

326 The Houston family 327 Roy & Frances O’Gorman 328 Handa Bray 329 Dame Sarah Goad 330 Penny Proudlock 331 Andrew & Alison Hutton 332 Alan & Sheena Kingsley 333 Lisa Bolgar Smith 334 Valerie & Peter Hewett 335 Mollie & John Julius Norwich 336 Malcolm & Gill Aish 337 Fiona & William Alexander 338 Ludlow, Fenston & Cassar Morris 339 Mr Robert G Williams 340 Barry & Dee Jones 341 Mr & Mrs Christopher Lambourne 342 Mr & Mrs Neil Donnan 343 Fran & Mike Pattinson 344 Sir David & Lady Prosser 345 Tom & Alison Baigrie 346 George & Jane Boden 347 Jean & David Poole 348 S F G Fachada & J H Breck 349 Martyn & Karen Brabbins 350 Simon & Sally Borrows 351 David & Madeleine Cannon 352 Tulchan Communications LLP 353 John & Jane Harrap 354 Malcolm & Anita Paul 355 Martin & Sarah Young 356 Richard & Patricia Holden

357 Peter & Carol Cordrey 358 Chris & Clare Mathias 359 & 360 Gay Huey-Evans 361 Peter & Rita Gray 362 Jutta & Josef Brinkhaus 363 Lady Green 364 Jill & Martin Stringfellow 365 Alex Ruggeri 366 Edward & Debbie Speed 367 Jeremy & Julie Llewelyn 368 Bruce & Maaike McInnes 369 James & Caroline fforde 370 & 371 Christopher & Anne Saul 372 John & Gilly Baker 373 & 374 Lady Gavron 375 Anonymous 376 Claire & Edward Bailey 377 Mr & Mrs Ian Field 378 Alison Samuel 379 Martin & Alicia Herbert 380 John W Newman 381 Gordon & Mary Lee-Steere 382 Andrew Burgess 383 Charles Smart 384 Clapton Family 385 Mr Douglas Lamont 386 Spirit of Genie 387 Spirit of John

There are 113 vacant places in Bryn’s Circle Book now to avoid disappointment contact jack@grangeparkopera.co.uk

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Laurent-Perrier chosen by

The Ritz London.

Illustrated by Quentin Blake

Photo credit: Iris Velghe / Illustrator credit: Quentin Blake

CUVÉE ROSÉ CHOSEN BY THE BEST

Š NEX Group plc 2017. NEX and other service marks and logos are service marks of NEX Group plc and/or one of its group of companies. All rights reserved. Group companies of NEX Group plc are registered as applicable.

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Detail from a George III side table decorated with musical instruments and sheet music, for many years a feature of the Rothschild & Co buildings at New Court.

Courtesy of The Rothschild Archive.

Rothschild Private Wealth is proud to support Grange Park Opera Rothschild Private Wealth provides an objective long-term perspective on investing, structuring and safeguarding assets, to preserve and grow the wealth of some of the world’s most successful families, entrepreneurs, foundations and charities.

Helen Watson CEO, UK Wealth Management 020 7280 5000 or helen.j.watson@rothschild.com rothschild.com

CHAIRMAN’S FOREWORD SIMON FREAKLEY

W

elcome to the 2017 festival and our mostly built and extraordinarily special new opera house – a Theatre in the Woods. We are very grateful to Bamber and Christina Gascoigne for granting us a 99-year lease, thereby securing a permanent home for Grange Park Opera and the many festivals to come. Alexander Graham Bell famously said ‘As one door closes, another opens’. The transition from Hampshire to West Horsley Place could not be a better illustration of that truth.

sponsors, our project manager David Lloyd Jones and our builder Martin Smith, all of whom have been invaluable at every step of the journey. And of course, nothing would have been possible without the inspiration of Wasfi and the extraordinary hard work of the whole GPO team. They have worked tirelessly in the last year to build the theatre, raise money to pay for it, plan the festival itself (and future festivals), communicate with the world and all without missing a beat! I admire enormously what they have achieved.

I first met Wasfi Kani under the stage at Garsington Opera. I had arrived late to a performance of Strauss’ Die Agyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen).

Keen to get out of the rain, I sheltered under the stalls pending a break in the performance and realised that if I walked into an area below the seating and behind the orchestra pit I could see the opera. I had only just taken up this position when I was accosted by a woman who asked curtly what I was doing there. I explained and then, quick as a flash, the woman (who turned out to be Wasfi) asked me if I read music. I was slightly bemused, but before I knew it, she had me sitting next to her turning pages as she played an organ part for the opera. We have never looked back.

I am delighted that Sir David Davies and Dame Vivien Duffield joined our board and agreed to be co-chairs of our Appeal. They and Wasfi have made exceptional progress during the year to raise funds in support of building the new theatre.

Joanna Lumley and Sir Bryn Terfel have been brilliant Appeal Patrons and we are well on the way to achieving our fundraising goal. Looking around the theatre, you will see that there is still work to do – and ample opportunity for you to lend further support to the Appeal. Any of us would be delighted to talk with you about how you can help.

Oxfordshire led to Hampshire, and now to Surrey.

With the trustees, I could not be happier with our new and very solid home.

While the majority of our members and donors have followed us from Hampshire, our membership is now substantially greater than it was before we relocated. This is clearly a strong endorsement from our new audience as well as a testament to the loyalty of our existing audience. The proximity to London is obviously a big help, but we feel enormously privileged to have enjoyed the support of so many of our existing and new members.

I and the trustees are extremely grateful to all the people who have made possible the move to West Horsley Place and the building of the new opera house.

There is simply not space here to list everyone who has played a meaningful role in the move. In addition to members, I would also like to thank our

22

Finally, I would like to thank all of the trustees of Grange Park Opera for their extraordinary support during our period of transition from Hampshire to Surrey. I would like especially to thank my Deputy Chair Hamish Forsyth, who has been an exceptional partner as we have worked with Wasfi to guide Grange Park Opera to this wonderful new chapter at West Horsley Place.

Having started with a quotation, I would like to conclude with another from Aristotle: ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit’. This is Grange Park Opera’s 20 th consecutive annual festival and each and every one has been very special indeed.

I am thrilled that we can all look forward to many more excellent Grange Park Opera festivals.

T H E F O U N D AT I O N S June–July 2016 Digging 146 concrete piles of 19m depth, upon which rests the steel frame

Work star ted on 20 June 2016 and the sun shone

343 DAYS TO OPENING NIGHT 23

KEY FESTIVAL SUPPORTERS

2017

Tickets cover roughly two-thirds of the costs of putting on the operas. £1m+ comes from generous donors acknowledged here and on the following pages.

NEX Group plc David & Amanda Leathers Simon & Meg Freakley François Freyeisen & Shunichi Kubo Judith Lawless & Kevin Egan James & Béatrice Lupton John L Pemberton Elm Capital Associates Laurent-Perrier Champagne Noreen Doyle Jeremy & Rosemary Farr Rothschild Wealth Management Mr & Mrs Grant Gordon David & Clare Kershaw Anthony & Carolyn Townsend Sue Lawson Diane & Christopher Sheridan John & Carol Wates

Katie Bradford Stephen Gosztony & Sue Butcher Financial Express Sandbourne Investment Advisers Brian & Jennifer Ratner Anonymous Adam & Lucy Constable Mrs T Landon Sir Win & Lady Bischoff The Dyers Company (young singer scholarships) Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust HardHat Contributions to the new opera house The John Coates Charitable Trust The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation The Golden Bottle Trust Albert Van den Bergh Charitable Trust The Drapers’ Charitable Fund

June–July 2016 Digging 146 concrete piles of 19m depth, upon which rests the steel frame

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Martin Smith of R J Smith Martin built GPO’s theatre in Hampshire in 2002. It was clear he was the only man who could accomplish the miracle of this opera house in the tight time-frame. Here he discusses dressing rooms with GPO Operations Director Helen Sennett

Tuesday 13 September 2016 at 4pm The steelworkers stopped work to join in the ceremony at which the casket containing the Duchess' ashes was placed in the orchestra pit under the first violins

THE STEEL FR AME

Work star ts 5 September 2016. It was fabricated in Romsey by Jerry Ellis of M J Ellis

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Stewart Robertson, Project Manager, has worked with Martin for 30 years. He set out the site, checked every measurement and swears that the steel frame is correct to a millimetre.

Every day he arrives before 6am and leaves as late as 9pm

10 October 2016 Looking towards the stage, the auditorium balconies are appearing

GLASS CEILING SOCIETY

Mrs Susan R Barr Christina Benn Mrs Michael Beresford-West Andrew & Carol Bogle Mrs Sophie Brand David Bulman & Rosamond Borer Anthony Bunker Mark & Rosemary Carawan Edward Chandler Samantha & Nabil Chartouni Sir Christopher & the Reverend Lady Clarke Ron & Jane Cork Anonymous Rosie Faunch Jacqueline & Michael Gee Trust Janet Grenier David Grenier Anonymous Malcolm Herring Brian James & Jean Hazel Anonymous

2017

Anonymous Janey & Laurence Langford Anthony & Fiona Littlejohn Andrew Luff Henry & Sheena Lumley Louis Tan & Gordon Martin William & Felicity Mather Ian & Clare Maurice Madeleine & Stephen McGairl Chris & Hilary Mitchell Roger & Jackie Morris Mr Howard Page QC Michael & Amanda Parker Sir Michael & Lady Parker Mr John C Pearson III Mr Graham Richardson Mr Derek Robinson David & Lynneth Salisbury Dr Anthony Smoker Fiona Squire & Geoff Squire OBE

To the west of the opera house is a carp pond

THE

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mid October 2016 The steel frame is complete. The gibbets give access to the roof and avoid the need to scaffold the exterior. Around this time, Martin Smith promised that, barring biblical storms, the theatre would be usable by June 2017

THE

SCHOOL OF HIPPOCRATES Mr & Mrs H Houghton-Jones Mrs Merlin Hutchings Mrs & Mr Iannuzzi Judith & Peter Iredale John & Jan Jarvis Derek Johns Dr Ingo & Dr Maria Lucia Klรถcker A & Z Kurtz Diana & Terence Kyle June, Dyrol & Becky Lumbard Kathryn & Sarah McLeland Julia Medcalf Mr & Mrs E Michotte William Middleton-Smith Colin & Helen Mills Fergus & Sally Mitchell Christopher Mitchinson Sue & Peter Morgan David & Angela Moss Allan Murray-Jones John & Carolyn Naunton Davies Mr & Mrs Parkin Liz & Nigel Peace

Mr & Mrs Hugh Peppiatt Sally Phillips & Tristan Wood Anonymous Veronica Powell Hugh & Caroline Priestley Shirley & Grant Radcliffe Dr Martin Read & Dr Marian Gilbart Read Hilary Reid Evans Tineke Dales David & Hilary Riddle Gareth Robertson Peter Rosenthal Dr Angela Gallop CBE & Mr David Russell

Nigel Silby Andrew Simon Mr & Mrs Slater Richard Sparks & Jenny Okun Nick & Sarah Treble Mr & Mrs John Tremlett Miss Siobhan Walker Mrs Jacquie Waller Pippa Hugo & Nigel Williams

The steelwork of the dressing rooms (behind the stage)

Mr David & Dr Michele Badenoch Miss Elaine Best Roger Birtles & John Hayward Mr & Mrs David Blackburn John A H Bootes Nan Brenninkmeyer Roy & Carol Brown David & Julia Cade Paul & Suzanne Clarke Ian Clarkson & Richard Morris Mr & Mrs John Colwell Mrs Carolyn Conlan Anonymous Caroline Doggart Paul Drury & Anna McPherson Nick & Lesley Dumbreck Jeremy & Rosemary Farr Rosie Faunch Geoffrey & Liz Fuller Lynne Gillon Mr David & Mrs Diana Hales Simon & Helen Hill Christopher & Jo Holdsworth Hunt

2017

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31 October 2016 Pre-cast shaped concrete is dropped by crane to form floors

Joanna Lumley greatly excited at the Topping Out

TO P P I N G O U T

12 November 2016

208 DAYS TO OPENING NIGHT 35

25 November 2016 looking towards the auditorium

THE

SCHOOL OF ARCHIMEDES

Mrs Teresa Allen Anonymous Priscilla & Mark Austen Robert Ballantyne Dickie & Susan Bannenberg Anonymous Mrs Isla Baring OAM Ray Barrell & Ursula van Almsick Robin Barton Paul & Janet Batchelor John & Jennifer Beechey David & Chris Beever Clare Bennett Dr Patrick & Mrs Rosemary Bennett Anonymous Anonymous B Boesch Mrs Margaret Bolam Graham & Julia Bourne Malcom & Susan Brenton Mrs Elie Brihi Anonymous Dorothy & John Brook Ms Diana Brotherton Nicholas Browne & Frederika Adam Russ & Linda Carr Mr & Mrs Carrington Lord & Lady Carter of Coles Peter & Irene Casey Max & Karina Casini Mr & Mrs Peter Cheese Mr & Mrs Jeremy Chubb Anonymous Peter & Jane Clarke Sir Anthony & Lady Cleaver Roy & Jackie Colbran Dr & Mrs Peter Collins Johnny & Liz Cowper-Coles Alan & Heather Craft Lady Curtis Roland Cornish & Luci de Nordwall Cornish Mr & Mrs A Dennis Mr Brian Divett Anonymous Anonymous Elaine Elliott Martin & Maureen Farr Miranda Filkins Mr & Mrs Jack Galaun Ms Jillian Ede Gendron Peter Gerrard

2017

David & Anne Giles Nigel Goodenough John & Cecilia Gordon Mr Robin Gourlay Peter & Katie Gray Mrs Patricia Grayburn Nicholas & Louisa Greenacre Ian & Tricia Grice Mr & Mrs Alistair Groom Pamela Gross Marcus & Susan Grubb Mr & Mrs Gerard Guerrini Jennifer Hardy Tim & Geli Harris Robert & Judith Hart Maureen & Peter Hazell Dr Joan Hester Mr & Mrs Will Hillary Mr R E Hofer Sophie & Guy Holborn Lady Holdsworth Mrs Beatrice Hollond H R Holland A P Hook Peter & Marianne Hooley Anonymous Judi Jones Julian G Jones Mr Michael & Mrs Julia Kerby John & Angela Kessler Mr & Mrs Patrick Hofmann George Kingston Kevin Kissane Anonymous Mr & Mrs Leprince Jungbluth Count Nicholas Breisgau Sonya Leydecker & Steven Larcombe Mrs Roger Liddiard Lindsay & Bill Logan Lizzi & Alex Maddox Mrs Ita Major Mr A Philip Marsden Gill & Douglas McGregor

Barry & Sue O’Brien Janet & Michael Orr Mr Alan Parker CBE Dr Henry & Mrs Julia Pearson Matthew Pintus & Joanna Ward David & Christina Pitman Tricia Guild & Richard Polo Mrs Sally Posgate Mark & Alva Powell Neil & Julie Record David Rendell Mike & Jessamy Reynolds Mr & Mrs Andrew Robb Anonymous Lionel & Sue Rosenblatt David & Sarah Rosier Mr M Ross & Mrs J Cochrane Mrs Ann Salter Jonathan & Sarah Scheele John & Tita Shakeshaft Caroline & Mark Silver Andrew & Maggie Simmonds Ms Serena Simmons Anonymous Eiluned & Peter Slot Christopher & Sarah Smith C N Smith Jean-Philippe Snelling Mr Julian Stanford Mr John Stebbing Johnny & Jane Stonborough Mr John Strachan Duncan & Natalie Straughen Anonymous David & Christine Thorp Dr & Mrs G M Tonge Dr Michael Toseland Roger Vaughan-Stanley Ken Watters J Anthony Wechsler Christian Wells Mr & Mrs Graham West Graham Westwell Dr Carolyn Greenwood & John McVittie Mrs Margaret E Westwood Jane & Ian White Mr & Mrs R Miles Isobel Williams Gillian Milton Penelope Williams Graham & Sally Moore Leslie & Jane Wood In memory of Patrick Neill Ginny & Alastair Woodrow - a loyal supporter of GPO David & Vivienne Woolf Annie & Christopher Newell Ms Christina Zandona Lady (Bridget) Nixon Graham & Wendy Ziegler John & Dianne Norton

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THE

SCHOOL OF PLATO

2017

Ken & Diana Dent Krystyna Deuss Mr Hugh Devenish-Meares Frank & Bobbie Dewar Mrs Sally B Dewey Mr Peter & Mrs Joan Dixon Mr David Dodd Dr Barbara Domayne-Hayman A J Allen CBE & Mrs Helen Allen David & Mary Douglas Lady G Alun-Jones Philippa Drew Professor David Ames Peter & Jill Drummond John Andrews Mr & Mrs Stephen Drury C R Argent Mrs Reginald Drury Mr & Mrs Jeremy Arnold Rt Hon Baroness D'Souza CMG Angela & Rod Ashby-Johnson Mrs Ann Dunbar Katherine Ashton Young Saskia Dunlop & Brian Young David Dutton Dr Richard Ashton Mrs Dickie Dutton Mr & Mrs J Asquith Jennifer Edwards Ian & Jan Assersohn Julian & Eileen Ellis Eufi & Kent Atkinson Mr & Mrs Peter Ellis Mrs Joan Attewell Jane Miles Elliston Jane & Robert Avery David & Jane Elmer Jenny & Paul Aynsley Miss Jill Elsworthy Dr Helen Bach Mr & Mrs Hugh Elwes Nick & Audrey Backhouse Michael Ewing Felicity Bagenal Steven F G Fachada Simon Bailey Michele Finch Mr & Dr Bakowski Mrs Joan Findlay John & Liz Ball Peter & Glen Firth Mr & Mrs Andrew Bano The Fischer Fund Mrs Caroline Barber Deborah Flood Peter & Ruth Bareau Dr John Flower Cara & Oliver Barnes Mrs Hiroko Hashimoto B Barttelot Patrick & Sue Foley Mr Robert David Mrs Heather Forrester Christine Bass Victoria Franklin Pat Stewart & Nick Bates Mrs A Frears Mr Christopher Bathurst Andrew French Thomas Baxendale Mrs Judith Frost Sir David Bean Mrs Anne Fulton Lady Beaumont James Garlick Mr Stephen H Bellamy-James QC Racheline & Clive Garston Michael Bennett Mr & Mrs Rod Gavshon Mr & Mrs R Benson Nicholas Gent Mr Paul Bentley Mrs A Benzecry Edward & Antonia Cumming-Bruce Alan & Mary Gibbins Mrs Irina Berger Mr & Mrs Andrew D Cummins Michael & Michèle Gibbs Mr Alan & Mrs Jill Gilbertson Jill & David Berliand Rosemarie Cundy Brett & Caroline Gill Adrian Berrill-Cox Richard Czartoryski Mrs Jacqueline L Gill Mrs Joan Bird Mr & Mrs Peter Dale G W Goad Paul & Avril Blagbrough Mr Clifford R Dammers Michael Godbee Mr & Mrs David Bonsall Denise Darling Drs Godwin-Austen David & Alison Boothby Gavin Darlington Ros Borkowski & Hilary Bridgman Antoni & Caroline Daszewski Mr & Mrs John Goldsmith Mr Alan R Goodfellow Peter Davidson Mrs B Borthwick Colin & Letts Goodwin Bill Bougourd & Judith Thomas Morys L Davies Cathy Gordon Professor Peter Dawson Richard & Fiona Boulton Cecile Gordon Dr Claire & Mr Charles Brasted-Pike Amanda de Haast Dr & Mrs Gostick Michael de Navarro Dr A Britton & Dr L Barker Mr & Mrs David Goy Mr Richard Deacon Robin & Jill Broadley Mr & Mrs B J Dennis-Browne Peter Granger Adam & Sarah Broke 58 anonymous donors & Mr Michel Abbink Dino Adriano Drs Charles & Anu Alessi Mr Norman & Mrs Beryl Alexander

Therese Brook Alison Brown Mrs Deborah Brown Hugh Burkitt Mr & Mrs Ken Burrage Mr & Mrs Andrew E J Burton Myrna Bustani Donald Campbell Mr Angus Carlill Mary Caroe Ann Carrington Brook Brian & Jean Carroll Sir Bryan & Lady Carsberg Francesca & John Carter Mr & Mrs Carter Derek & Brenda Carver Graham Cawsey Dr J D H Chadwick Alan & Clare Chalmers Guy Chapman & D Cullen Mr Stephen Chater I H Chisholm Mrs Sarah Christiansen Mrs Ailis P Clarke Mr Brian Clarke Mrs Ann Clarke Adam & Noreen Cleal Alex & Suzy Clode Michelle Cockayne Mr P & Mrs A Collett Mrs Laurence Colchester Professor Richard Collin Mr Robert Colvill Dr Neville Conway Mrs Ann Cook Mr Mark Cook Professor Chistopher Cordess Mr & Mrs Brian Cornish Annie Cosh Matt Coupe Anthony Cove Peter Crisp & Jeremy Crouch Ed & Romey Criswick Tom Cross Brown Mr & Mrs Crouch

Robert B Gray Mr & Mrs A M Green Canon John Green David & Barbara Greggains Tom & Sarah Grillo Denis & Sally Gross Carol & Edmund Grower Angelika & Klaus Guenther Paul & Miranda Gunn Mr Mervyn Hadden CBE Richard & Judy Haes Allyson Hall Jane Halliwell Mrs Jane Halsey Sir Philip & Lady Hampton

Mr Chris & Mrs Margaret Handley

Benjamin Hargreaves John & Margret Harkins Stephanie & Julian Harley Bruce & Carol Harrison Mr & Mrs Stephen Hartigan Martin & Eily Harty Mrs M Harvey Mr Steve Harvey Jane Haslam Helen & Kevin Hayes Mrs Lucy Hayward

Mr David & Mrs Ginny Heffernan

Elizabeth Hewitt John & Catherine Hickman Patrick & Sue Higham Mr Peter Hildebrand Mr & Mrs R H T Hingston Mr Chris & Mrs Jenny Hipwell Mr & Mrs Peter Hobbs Daniel & Diana Hodson Andrew & Elinor Hogarth Robin Holmes Linda Hopkins BuzznPooh Denzil & Kate How Diana Howorth & Patrick Giles Iain & Claudia Hughes Michael & Virginia Hughes Diana Humphrey Mrs Marie-Josee Hunter Mrs Jane Hunter Mrs Juliet Huntley Tim & Christine Ingram Ramsay Ismail & Boris Stankevich

Sir Barry & Lady Jackson Mrs Allan James Mr & Mrs Paul Jameson Diane Jayasekara Mr Charles Jillings Neil & Elizabeth Johnson Mr & Mrs R Johnston Barry & Brenda Jones Diana Jones Douglas Jones Keith & Patricia Jones

25 November 2016 Work has started on the blockwork walls, the inner skin of the opera house. Work stops when the temperature drops below 5ห as mortar doesn't dry. The goal is to have the building watertight by Christmas

Pauline & Geraint Jones Mr David Cunningham Judd Alison & Jamie Justham Dr & Mrs Douglas Justins Dr Catherine Katzka & Dr Swen Hรถlder Vincent & Amanda Keaveny A Ardic Mr & Mrs G R Kellett Judith Kelley Mr Angus Kennedy Mr Peter Kinloch Oliver & Sally Kinsey Leonard Klahr Mr & Mrs J Klein-Velderman Sarah & Christopher Knight Rear Admiral & Mrs John Lang Mrs Patricia Latham David & Madi Laurence

Richard Law James & Jan Lawrie Mr & Mrs T M Lazenby Mark & Lucy Le Fanu Mrs Charles Lea John & Gayle Leader Maria Leader John Learmonth Mr John Lebus Hilary & James Leek Mrs J Lees Jan Leigh & Jan Rynkiewicz Ruth & Brian Levy Polly & Jeremy Lewis Eric & Pauline Leyns Mrs Jane Lines David & Angela Little Mr & Mrs Brian Lloyd Brigadier & Mrs

Desmond Longfield Mr & Mrs Louveaux Mr Chris Loynes Mr & Mrs Andrew Lutley Dr Graz Luzzi Mr & Mrs Julian Lyon Derek Mackay Mrs Tom Mackean Mr & Mrs P Macklin Andrew MacKrill & David Wills Bill & Sue Main Mrs J Marsden Charles & Sue Marshall Mr & Mrs S Marshall Mr Ken Massey Teresa Mathers Nancy Wynne Mattison Mr & Mrs J A McCormack Melissa & Sean McGuire

Jinny McLeod-Hatch Mr & Mrs Ian McNeil Richard & Natasha Metcalfe Dr & Mrs P J Mill Brenda & John Millard Charles Miller Peter Miller & Hilary Kingsley Roger & Sylvia Mills Miss Gursharan Minhas E A LL Morgan Upper Crust Crackers Mrs & Mrs Mostyn Dr Georges Mouton Brian & Claudine Muirhead Mrs Caroline Murphy Dr Stefano Nappo Mr John Nichols Graham & Berendina Norton Sir Charles & Lady Nunneley

39

The Hon Mr & Mrs Michael O'Brien John & Christine Rhodes

Alan Richardson Paul & Jill Rimmer Mr & Mrs L P H Rittner Christopher & Zosia Road Diane Roberts Judith Roberts Miss Anne Robertson Catharine & James Robertson Mr Christopher Robinson Paul & Denny Roffey Mr Alan Roxburgh Barbara Rubenstein Martin Rumbelow Ken & Lesley Rushton Mrs S Russell Flint Patricia Rutter Mr Bertil Rydevik Ginny & Richard Salter Lorraine Samuels Mr & Mrs Sandars Mr & Mrs Adrian Sanders Simon & Abigail Sargent John Schofield Mr & Mrs Charles Scott Anne & Mark Sebba Prof Lorna Secker-Walker Anna & Alan Selwyn Rob & Felicity Shepherd David Sheraton Dr Daniela F Sieff Judith Prickett & Raymond Sutton Jeremy Simons Christopher & Lucie Sims David & Judith Pritchard Mr & Mrs Peter Singer Penny & Robin Privett Mark Slater & Lucinda Osmond Probus Club of Cobham Richard & Amanda Slowe Stephen Proctor Adrian & Sara Smart Lamar Raine & David Eliades Robin & Phyllida Smeeton Mike & Mala Rappolt Margo Rappoport & Michael Emont Barry & Gill Smith Dr & Mrs G M Smith Mr & Mrs Rawding David & Becky Smith Mr Richard Raworth Dr Howard Sowerby Nigel & Elizabeth Reavley Charles & Lucy O'Donnell Janet & Martin O'Hara Roy & Carole Oldham Mr Fred Onslow Jenny Openshaw His Hon Sean K Overend Mr & Mrs Page Mrs Christine Palmer Penny Panman & family Raj & Penny Parker Stephen & Susan Parker Mr & Mrs Jeremy Parr Miranda & Oliver Parr Mrs Margaret Parry Mr C B Patrick DL Jim & Anne Pearce John & Jacqui Pearson Penny & Giuseppe Pecorelli Placido Carrerotti Mr & Mrs C Penney Bryony & Jeremy Pett Tony Pickering Mr & Mrs Charles Pike Carolyn & George Pincus William & Penny Plant Mr & Mrs Adrian Platt Mr & Mrs M Possener David & Jill Potter Mrs Jane Poulter Mr & Mrs M A Preiss

Meg Sparks Gregory & Susan Spence David & Unni Spiller Peter William Stansfield Dianne Steele Auerbach & Steele Ruth Steinberg Christopher & Tineke Stewart Angus Stirling Jeremy & Phyllida Stoke Judith Strong Helen Tarsh Simon & Kate Tate Mr & Mrs R Taylor Karen Taylor Jane Lazenby-Taylor Mrs Patricia Taylor Richard & Lynne Taylor-Gooby Mr G T Teague Dr Davina A Tenters Miss E Thacker & Mr J Goddard Jean & Tom Thistleton Nick Thomas Mr & Mrs Tim Thornton-Allan Diana Thrush Valerie Thum Mr Rupert Tickner Mr & Mrs Hugh Tidbury Mr Bruce & Mrs Sibylla Tindale Mrs Harriet Tupper Mr Mark Turner Dr & Mrs James Turtle Paul Tuvey John Uzielli Lesley de Blocq van Kuffeler L C Varnavides Mrs Susan Vega Mr & Mrs W Venables Mr James L Vernon

Dr Phillip & Mrs Elizabeth Vessey

Mr & Mrs A Veys Mr & Mrs Niko Vidovich

X N C Villers Penny von Spreckelsen Richard & Judy Wake Mr Tony Walker George & Pat Wallace Heather & Andrew Wallis T & S Walters Mr Andrew Waltham & Mrs Connie MacKechnie Peter Ward Jennifer Wardell Roger & Jenny Wardle Mr Guy Warrington Mrs Susan Watson Katherine Watts Mr & Mrs John Way Mr & Mrs Simon Webber Mrs Noreene Weir Stephen West & David Tarry Michael Whalley & Karen Goldie-Morrison Patricia Wheeler Donald & Audrey White Mrs Maud Whitting Janek & Sue Wichtowski Michael & Gerti Wilford Mr & Mrs Howard Wilkinson Louise Williams Philip B Williams Prof Roger Williams CBE Mr & Mrs Richard Wills Dr Adrian Winbow Abu Khamis Mr & Mrs William Witts Fiona & Nicholas Woolf Roger Woolfe Mr & Mrs R Wynne-Griffith Rupert Yardley & Jane Dockeray

Mr Nicholas & Mrs Rebecca Yates

Fiona & John Yeomans

HALF-HEARTED SNOW

Bamber and Joanna

J A N U A RY 2 017

41

145 DAYS TO OPENING NIGHT

THE

GPO 1998 FOUNDING DONORS

SYSTEMS UNION Group Ltd ASHE PARK MINER AL WATER • BARING ASSET MANAGEMENT • BRITISH STEEL • BT ALEX BROWN • HAYS plc • WILDE SAPTE

Mr Mark Andrews Mr Felix Appelbe BSc FRSA Mr Peter Arengo-Jones OBE Mr David Buchler Mr William F Charnley Professor Ian Craft Lydia & Miles d’Arcy-Irvine Sir David & Lady Davies

Mr Peter Foy Mr Simon Freakley Mr William Gronow Davis Mr Michael Hoare Mr & Mrs Donald Kahn Mr T Landon James & Béatrice Lupton Mr & Mrs Charles Mackay

Mr Harvey McGregor QC Greg & Gail Melgaard Mr & Mrs Hugh Peppiatt Mrs Lucinda Stevens Mr & Mrs Anthony Townsend Mr & Mrs Max Ulfane Mrs Marie Veeder Mr & Mrs Graham John West

BANKERS TRUST • BARCLAYS PRIVATE BANKING • CATERING & ALLIED • COUTTS & CO Biddle • Denton Hall • Houston & Church • Knight Frank • Leopold de Rothschild Trust • Well Marine Reinsurance Brokers

Mr & Mrs James Airy John & Jackie Alexander Mr & Mrs R Atkinson-Willes Miss Anne Beckwith-Smith Mr & Dr J Beechey Sheila Lady Bernard Mr Robert Bickerdike Mrs M R Bonsall Mrs Cherida Cannon Mr Patrick Carter Mr & Mrs Bernard Cazenove Mrs Justin Clark Mr & Mrs M Cooper-Mitchell Mr & Mrs R G Cottam Mr David Crowe Mr Nicholas de Zoete Ms K Deuss Gillian Devas Mr & Mrs Gerald Acher Richard & Delia Baker Mr & Mrs Nicholas Baring Mr & Mrs Tom Bartlam Dori Bateson Mr Peter Bedford Mr & Mrs Robin Behar Mr Alan Bell Mr Keith Benham Mrs M Bennett Sir Christopher & Lady Bland Mrs Gerald Bland Mr & Mrs Simon Borrows Mr Graham Bourne Mr Peter Braunwalder Mr & Mrs Keith Bromley Mr Robin W T Buchanan Mr & Mrs Mark Burch Mrs James Butler Sir Euan Calthorpe Bt Mr & Mrs Michael Campbell Mr Maximilian Carter Sir Peter & Lady Cazalet David & Elizabeth Challen Mr Oliver Colman Cynthia Colman Dr P M de Z Cooke Mr & Mrs Brian Cornish Mr Peter Davidson

Mr Anthony Doggart Robyn Durie Mr & Mrs W L Eddlestone Stuart & Anne Fowler Archie & Henrietta Fraser Gen Sir David Fraser GCB OBE Mr & Mrs Wyatt Gates Lt Col David R Gilbert His Honour Martin Graham QC

Mr Robert B Gray Mr & Mrs J C Green Mr John Hammond Mr & Mrs Peter Hobbs Mr & Mrs G Hollingbery Mr Charles Irby Mr & Mrs Malcolm Isaac Mr Barry Jackson Mrs Julian Jeffs

Guy Boney & Bente Dawkins

Mrs Lynette G Joly JP Mrs Z L Kelton Mr John Learmonth Mr Gerald Levin Mr & Mrs Mark Lomas Mr & Mrs David Maitland Anonymous Gordon & Julia Medcalf Lord Montagu of Beaulieu Mrs Jonathan Moore Mr Barry O’Brien Mr Laurence O’Mara Mrs Deidre Pegg Miss Mahtab Pouria Mrs C H Powell Mrs Joan L Prior Mrs Thomas Redfern Mr John A Rickards

Robin & Pat Ilbert The Countess of Iveagh Mr & Mrs Evan James Mr Martin Jay Mr & Mrs David Jervis Mr J T L Jervoise Neil & Elizabeth Johnson Mr & Mrs A N Joy Ms Walia Kani Mr Vincent Keaveny Maureen & Jim Kelly

Dr Janet Ritterman Mrs Martin St Quinton Mr Anthony Salz Anne, Lady Scott Mr & Mrs Philip Snuggs Mr David F M Stileman Mr & Mrs Ian Streat Mr R H Sutton Mr Peter Tilley The Hon Mrs W Tufnell K Sandberg & T Watkins Mr & Mrs T Wightman Andrew & Emma Wilson Olivia Winterton Dr Nicholas Wright Mr Tim Wright Mrs Paul Zisman

Mr & Mrs Patrick Mitford Slade

Mr & Mrs James Sabben-Clare

Miss Charlotte Moore Elizabeth Morison Mr Michael J Morley Dr & Mrs Julian Muir Lord Neill of Bladen QC Sir Charles Nicholson Bt John & Dianne Norton John Julius Norwich Mr & Mrs Michael Orr Maj Gen & Mrs Simon Pack Peter Kerfack & Russell Townend Mark & Rachel Pearson Mr & Mrs David Leathers Ron & Lyn Peet Mr & Mrs Adam Lee Mr & Mrs Nicholas PhelpsDavid & Linda Lloyd Jones Brown Mr Simon Lofthouse The Countess of Dr Peter Lyndon-Skeggs Portsmouth Mrs Stuart Macnaghten Mr & Mrs David Potter Mr & Mrs Charles Haddon-Cave The Hon Dwight Makins Bruce & Lizzie Powell Mr & Mrs Philip Hallett Mr & Mrs Charles Marriott Mark & Veronica Powell Mr Clifford Hampton Mr John Marden Mr & Mrs Richard Priestley Mr Alan H Harrison Mr William Mather Mrs Barbara Rait Sir Peter & Lady Ramsbotham Angela & David Harvey Wendy & Michael Max Mr Myrddin Rees MS FRCS The Bulldog Trust Mr & Mrs P N J May Mr David Reid Scott Dr & Mrs James F Hill Mr & Mrs T McMaddy Mr & Mrs Hansgeorg Hofmann Mr Nigel McNair Scott David & Alex Rhodes Mr Peter Holland Anonymous Mr & Mrs A S McWhirter Dr Jonathan Holliday Mrs Eric Robinson Mr James Meade Mr J P Hungerford Clare Rowland Leni Lady Miller

Sir Timothy Sainsbury Mrs John Salkeld Lady Salomon Mr Richard Scopes The Countess of Selborne Mr & Mrs Mark Silver Mr Paul Skinner Mrs David Smith

Mr Peter Dicks Mr & Mrs Malcolm Edwards Austin & Ragna Erwin Mr T Alun Evans CMG Alastair & Robina Farley Mr & Mrs J fforde Mr & Mrs Roger Fidgen Hamish & Sophie Forsyth Mr & Mrs Robin Fox Mr Andrew Frost Mr Stephen Frost Mr Nicholas R Gold Lady Shauna Gosling Mr & Mrs George Goulding Mr Verne Grinstead Mr Michael Gwinnell Mr Philip Gwyn

The Hon & Mrs Jeremy Soames

Mr J G Stanford Mrs Donald Stearns Mr R Kirk Stephenson Mr & Mrs Richard H Sykes Mr Anthony John Thompson

Professor & Mrs G M Tonge Adair Turner & Orna Ni-Chionna Bill Tustin Mr & Mrs David Vaughan The Hon Mrs Lucy Vaughan Mrs Peter Vey Caroline Vroom Mr Hady Wakefield Lady Jane Wallop Dr & Mrs Oliver Wethered M Whalley & K Goldie-Morrison

Mr F E B Witts Mr Charles Young

43

THE

GPO 2002 APPEAL

DONALD KAHN & FAMILY Ronnie Frost & family Geoff & Fiona Squire Lydia & Miles d’Arcy-Irvine Carphone Warehouse Clore Duffield Foundation Lord Harris of Peckham John & Anya Sainsbury Simon & Virginia Rober tson Anonymous James Cave David & Amanda Leathers Sir David & Lady Davies EFG Private Bank William Garrett Corus Mark Andrews Mr & Dr J Beechey David & Elizabeth Challen Mr & Mrs William Charnley Mr & Mrs Peter Dicks Simon Freakley David Gilgrist & Bobbie du Bois Philip Gwyn Mrs Ian Jay James & Béatrice Lupton Donald & Jill Mackenzie Nigel & Anna McNair Scott P F Charitable Trust Richard & Victoria Sharp Mrs Timothy Syder Richard & Cynthia Thompson Anne Veeder The Band Trust

Mr & Mrs Gerald Acher Mr & Mrs David Anderson Mr & Mrs R Atkinson–Willes Tom & Gay Bartlam Rupert T Bentley B G S Cayzer CharitableTrust Kevin & Corinne Bespolka William & Judith Bollinger Douglas Guest Bollinger James Philip Bollinger Sarah & Tony Bolton Mr & Mrs Paul Brewer Rory & Elizabeth Brooks Mr & Mrs Tony Bugg The Bulldog Trust Sir Euan Calthorpe Bt Christopher & Katie Cardona Nigel & Elisabeth Carrington Sir Peter & Lady Cazalet Mr & Mrs Bernard Cazenove The Chase–Gardener family Pam Clarke Alastair & Tiana Collett Oliver & Cynthia Colman Michael Cuthbert Peter & Annette Dart Mr & Mrs Geoffrey de Jager Sandra & Damon de Laszlo Mr & Mrs Lionel de Rothschild Alun & Bridget Evans Iain R Evans Mr & Mrs James fforde Mr & Mrs T Floyd Hamish & Sophie Forsyth The Misses Ismay, Ottilie & Cecilia Forsyth Peter & Judith Foy Mr Mark N Franks Reita Gadkari Janet & John Gaymer Jacqueline & Michael Gee Trust Enrique Biel Gleeson Lady Shauna Gosling Mr & Mrs George Goulding Stephen Gosztony & Sue Butcher Nigel & Diana Grimwood William Gronow Davis Mr & Mrs Charles Haddon–Cave

Hayden Trust

44

Mr & Mrs Raymond Henley Malcolm Herring Mr & Mrs John Hewett Dr Jonathan Holliday & Dr Gwen Lewis George & Janette Hollingbery The Holmes Family Hugh & Tamara Hudleston Nicholas & Jeremy Hunter Mr & Mrs David Hunter Mr & Mrs M J Isaac Hannah Jacobs Harriet Jervis Mr & Mrs J Jervoise Neil & Elizabeth Johnson Andrew & Caroline Joy Mr & Mrs Colin Keogh Dr R Hubert Laeng–Danner Rufford Foundation Mrs T Landon Barbara Yu Larsson Mr & Mrs Malcolm Le May Peter Leaver & Thomas Sharpe Mr & Mrs Adam Lee Jeremy Gardner Lewis Susie Lintott & Louisa Church David & Linda Lloyd Jones Joe & Minnie MacHale Charles & Annmarie Mackay Mr & Mrs Michael Mackenzie Tessa & John Manser J P Marland Charitable Trust Wendy & Michael Max Mr & Mrs Peter May Harvey McGregor QC Thomas Monk Martin & Caroline Moore Elizabeth Morison Mr & Mrs Richard Morse Dr & Mrs Julian Muir The Nawrocki family The O’Hea family Sue & Peter Paice Tim & Therese Parker Alexia Paterson William & Francheska Pattisson Mark & Rachel Pearson Peter Tilley in memory of Nigel Perfect Lord & Lady Phillimore

Sir David & Lady Plastow Jan & Michael Potter Bruce & Lizzie Powell Mark & Veronica Powell Benjamin Pritchett–Brown Mr & Mrs Gary Ralfe Mrs Christopher Reeves David & Alex Rhodes Ros & Ken Rokison Mrs Faanya Rose Mrs Antony Rowe Mr & Mrs John Salkeld Mr & Mrs Anthony Salz Christopher & Anne Saul Mr & Mrs Richard Scopes Mr & Mrs Roderick Selkirk Mrs Christopher Sheridan Lord & Lady Simon of Highbury Edward M Siskind Paul & Rita Skinner Mr & Mrs Martin St Quinton Nicholas Stanley Donald & Rachael Stearns Steel Charitable Trust Stevenson Charitable Trust John & Lesley Stuttard Mr & Mrs R H Sutton Mr & Mrs Bernard Taylor Gordon & Sue Thorburn The Titchmarsh Family Mr & Mrs Anthony Townsend Wendy & John Trueman Adair Turner & Orna Ni–Chionna The Hon Lucy & Michael Vaughan

John & Lou Verrill Lady Jane Wallop John & Carol Wates Miss Clare Williams Hamish & Elisabeth Williams Mark & Jane Williams

The Hon Geoffrey & Mrs Wilson

The Wolf Family Mr & Mrs C H R Wunderly Caroline Wyld

and five anonymous donors

145 DAYS TO OPENING NIGHT

45

83 DAYS TO OPENING NIGHT ARCHITECT Tim Ronalds Architects STRUCTURAL & DRAINAGE ENGINEER Price & Myers MECHANICAL & ELECTRICAL ENGINEER Max Fordham ACOUSTIC CONSULTANT Ramboll Environ LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT Ibbotson Studios QUANTITY SURVEYOR Bristow Johnson PLANNING CONSULTANT Lichfields BUILDING CONTROL J M Partnership BUILDING CONTRACTOR R J Smith & Co LAMINATED STAIRCASE ENGINEERING Robin Nicholson of Buckland Timber CONSULTANT ARCHITECT David Lloyd Jones

R J SMITH’S BRILLIANT MEN DIRECTOR Mar tin Smith

PROJECT MANAGER Stewar t Rober tson

Mike Prevett Nick Oddy Paul Richardson Roy Fontana Roy Noller GROUNDWORKER Saulivus Augonis Neil Haydon Groundwork Simon Davis & Formwork Supervisor Simon Wellesley-Davies Arron Moore Steven Freshwater Ciprian Albu Tucker Whatmore Darren Chivers c David Lovejoy Dean Wiseman SAFETY NETTING John Cliff Anthony Man Les Bishop Chris Cook Lucian Ivanescu Mark Jones Paul Townsend Marc Elliman Pete Goodenough Paul Christopher Rob West c Stewar t Horgan SCAFFOLDER Swandon Bishop Jeff Smith Director c Carl Bellows PILING OPERATOR Connor Dashwood John Garner Manager Danny Phillips Dan McIntyre Dion Dalipe Neil Watts Gareth Sharp Nevil McLetron Jay Griffin Rob Coles Scott Walsh c c ASSISTANT MANAGER

John Snazell Peter Wootton c

FORKLIFT DRIVER

Billy Pike c CRANE DRIVER

Andrew Bee Ian Gray Jez Smith Rick Markwick Adrian Anisier c STEELWORK

M J Ellis Manufacturer Chris Parker Manufacturer Aaron Fontana Aidan Wyatt Aleksander Bagin Danny Freshwater Dave Moore David Holmes Graham Saunders Ian Bruma Jack Marden Jack Thomas Jamie Miller Jerry Hooper Jimmy Cooper Lee Fontana Mark Horbus Michael Silke Mickael Grix

PRECAST CONCRETE

Dan Young of Sufix Designer Adam Smith Supervisor Benjamin Talbot David Reading Josh Skinner Matt Freemantle Michael Tickner Samuel Purkis c BASEMENT TANKING

Steve Payne Supervisor Dean Willetts John Vaughan Tom Payne c BRICKLAYER

Conservation Bricklayers John Howell Mar tin Lawton Steve Maryon Foreman Alex Cook Alister Wynne Chris Gould Dane Sheridan Daniel Kear Harry Dixon Jay Reynolds

CONSULTANT David Lloyd Jones

Lee Wright Paul Maryon Steve Corrigan Joe Oram Paul McLoughlin Daniel Sherfield assistant c ROOFER

Anthony Hall Clive Page Douglas Hannah Kevin Fordham Luke Humphreys Mikey Keel Nathan Gourley Ollie Abby Stephen Hall Stuar t Richens Thomas Hannah c CARPENTER

Conservation Carpenters Dan Lambell Phill Smith Tony Smith Steve Crabbe Joiner Christopher Haynes Master Carpenter Daniel Clarke Daniel Shillingfield Lucian Ledor Simon Bird Stewar t Green Andy Cook Alex Ruff Anthony Swimmer Iosif Mar timica Laimis Bar tkevicius Lucian Tutulan Andy Semrav Foreman Alex Whitmarsh Arran Leniman Aston O’Connell David Trainer Elliott Webb Ian James Lowery Konrad Mital Matt Turnoll Paul Wakem Rhys Millingham Richard Penn Saulius Starkevilius Steven Voller c ELECTRICIAN

Mark Crame Director Dave Hastings Foreman Brandon Piggott

Brian Mills Chris Harman Connor Harding Gary Spencer Jake Peters Jason Cox Luke Fewtrell Mitch Healy Phill Law Zack Crame c PLASTERER

Jurgen Murphy Luke King Master Plasterers Ash Hatton Damien Lander Joshua Wood c PAINTER

Tim Cannons Trevor Mangon Joe Stratlen Emmanuel Holali Amedor Michael Lockyer c PLUMBER

Deric Nobbs Mark Kinchlsa c Jack Charman Lightening Conductor Steve Butt Fire Alarm c TECHNICAL FIT OUT

Nicholas Ewins Director Richard Chave Gary Burrows Andy Booth Dan Chapman David Baker Tony Evans Harry Worsell Sam Green Ciaran Por ter Gerald Por ter Mar tin McCole Aiden Croker Matt Turner Ryan Cunwood Steve Cuthber t Mark Fairless Jon Flay c THEATRE CONSULTANTS

Alison Ritchie Declan Costello

47

S P R I N G 2 017 Scores of people working on site

49

9 May 2017 David Lloyd Jones, Martin Smith. Wasfi Kani

A HECTIC PRIVILEGE WASFI K ANI, CHIEF EXECUTIVE

H

enry VIII and Henry Courtenay loved nature – especially the killing and eating thereof.

Courtenay kept hawks at West Horsley Place and among his 103 yeomen and grooms of the chamber were Roger Eleys, a stannary bailiff who shot well with a handgun; William Boothe, who could sing three-man songs; and William Tremayle, his fool. Several of his yeomen were good Cornish wrestlers.

Courtenay also loved music. On his death his possessions

included a double virginal (harpsichord), three pairs of regals (a kind of small organ), and nine viols.

It is a shame he didn’t build a theatre and save us the trouble.

There has been a jot of trouble (the juice of which is saved for a Netflix series) but largely privilege.

Casting aside courtly waffle, I am flinging my pen at the Oscar moment and I would like to thank . . .

i The trustees for standing by the charity. When spanners were thrown into the works they fished them out and deployed them to tune the gleaming engine of our new adventure i All my clever compatriots in the GPO office especially Helen Sennett, Director of Operations. She has been with GPO for 13 years, is hard work personified and, chameleon-like, becomes whatever the day requires (this year she became a removals expert) i Ivano Ruggeri, the laziest person in the world, whilst lounging on his mother’s sofa in the Emilian Appenines (21 March 2015), for spotting on Twitter a Telegraph tweet about West Horsley Place i Bamber and Christina for utterly embracing this GOOD THING i Mary and Alex Creswell for pinpointing the magical woodland location i Martin Smith, the hero of the day, who looked at it and saw it WAS GOOD i David Lloyd Jones who rushed forth building whilst I rushed forth begging for cash i Iain Rhind and Sophie Hitchins for winning planning permission i Joanna Lumley and Bryn Terfel for pressing flesh and allowing us to use their names shamelessly i Iain Burnside, artistic brainbox, for offering me a chocolate biscuit in 1975 in Merton College bar i Stewart Robertson, the good Cornish wrestler of the project, for measuring, checking and teaching me to abide by the motto “Get as much as you can out of each day” i Richard Lewisohn, whose photographs adorn these pages, for chronicling the enterprise i David & Amanda Leathers for dinners and being the first to pledge to the new theatre i John Pemberton, who was GPO’s biggest donor in 1998 and who again rode to the rescue with dinners, guidance and cash i Lucinda Bredin for more dinners, and utter brilliance i Sally Clarke for dinners dinners dinners and gentleness i 22 people who pledged in the first month giving the project credibility i The Cowans, Hilary and Michael, who were speedy and charming about dishing out £1m i Everyone else who has given money (if you haven’t, then you are in my sights) As Glyndebourne chair John Botts said (in an American accent) to an assembly of GPO staff “Guys – you have pulled off quite a stunt”.

Yes. Somehow, we did it. Phew.

When I was six, the family (five children) moved from two rooms in the East End to a brand new council flat in Kilburn. It had curtains on Easyglide rails which swished (the curtains in Cable Street were on string). In KiIburn I put on my first show. Four children would stand on a 9 inch window sill behind the curtains on Easyglide, swish, jump down onto a bed and the show started.

Beatles’ numbers topped the bill: we knew every word.

These were variety performance and included daredevil acrobatics: flinging about the baby, a balancing pyramid etc.

It is a huge privilege to have been able to develop this interest in Surrey.

Now I must lie down on a mountain within a ring of fire.

44 DAYS TO OPENING NIGHT CHARITY TICKETS Cherry Trees CHARITY PARTNER Southampton Children’s Therapy Tommy’s Swaps Ball Army Benevolent Fund The Soldiers’ Charity Joe Glover Trust Cancer Research UK David Nott Foundation Childline & NSPCC Help for Heroes Royal College of Music

DONATED BY GPO

Barbican Centre Trust English Touring Opera The Passage RNLI in British & Irish Waters Watts Gallery Key4Life Lewis Manning Hospice XLP Charterhouse (Mellon Educate) Seenaryo arts & training Lebanon refugees

2017 The Prisoners’ Education Trust South London Group Global H2O Guildford Arts Cellos for Peace Care4Calais Concert & Auction Robert Poulton Foundation Ewhurst School Anthony Nolan Trust Bright Cancer Care Reed’s School Foundation

51

THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES . . .

DAVID LLOYD JONES, ARCHITECT OF PHASE 2

B

uildings acquire their own dynamic. Architects and builders tend to think that their achievement lies in the pristine, photogenic building standing for all to see on the opening day. Our opera house will evolve over time. This first phase sets the basics: a robust design resulting from location, immediate needs and timeframe, but it allows for elaboration.

The second phase, commencing immediately the final 2017 curtain call is taken, will complete the unfinished elements of the original concept and then venture further to include:

i A landscaped forecourt allowing opera-goers to foregather and linger for the passaggiata in a broad colonnade i A Rotunda-in-the-Woods – a tiny opera house offspring – full of permanent toilets. It is named the Lavatorium Rotundum i A spiral outdoor descent from the upper levels giving spectacular Surrey views i Enrichment of the building’s outer skin i The completion of finishes to the auditorium interior

including a showpiece ceiling i Elaboration of the balcony fronts i Individually designed opera box interiors i The GPO signature model railway with stations at Bayreuth,

Milan, Horsley and less well-known Esterháza, Hungary – where Joseph Haydn worked for close to 40 years in the service of the Esterházy family, writing many operas There is a glorious history of country house entertainment and performance, maybe achieving a high point in Tudor and Stewart times, sometimes with elaborate structures built in the grounds.

Is it possible that this is not the first time that West Horsley Place, with its courtly lineage, has seen such an endeavour?

The view from Schloss Esterházy 1807 Alber t Christoph Dies (1755-1822). It remains largely unchanged though more heavily wooded

䔀䰀䴀 䌀䄀倀䤀吀䄀䰀 䄀匀匀伀䌀䤀䄀吀䔀匀 䰀吀䐀

倀刀䤀嘀䄀吀䔀 䔀儀唀䤀吀夀 䄀䐀嘀䤀匀䔀刀匀

眀眀眀⸀攀氀洀挀愀瀀椀琀愀氀⸀挀漀洀 䌀漀渀琀愀挀琀 唀猀 ㈀㘀 匀琀 䨀愀洀攀猀ᤠ猀 匀焀甀愀爀攀Ⰰ 䰀漀渀搀漀渀Ⰰ 匀圀㄀夀 㐀䨀䠀 吀攀氀㨀 ⬀㐀㐀⠀ ⤀ ㈀ 㜀 㤀 ㄀ 㠀㤀㐀 䔀洀愀椀氀㨀 椀渀昀漀䀀攀氀洀挀愀瀀椀琀愀氀⸀挀漀洀 53

JOANNA LUMLEY TALKS LOOS PATRON OF THE PIONEERS WHO ARE BUILDING THE NEW OPER A HOUSE

‘Imagine the ecstasy of entering the Lavatorium Rotundum and behold . . . a circus of lavatories.

The Gents includes a communal octagonal ceramic washing trough . . . so you can catch up on world affairs.

Help us complete this opera house and also build the loos.

It couldn’t be simpler and I will personally make sure you adore it.’

SU PPORT 2018 7 JUNE – 14 JULY 2018

VERDI UN

BALLO

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Libretto by Illica & Giacosa, based on the play La Tosca by Victorien Sardou First performance 14 January 1900, Teatro Costanzi, Rome Performances in the new opera house at West Horsley Place on June 8, 10, 15, 18, 22, 24, 28, 30, July 2

ANGELOTTI a political prisoner ∙ JIHOON KIM ≈ Jeremy & Rosemary Farr MARIO CAVARADOSSI a painter ∙ JOSEPH CALLEJA ≈ François Freyeisen & Shunichi Kubo Aria E lucevan le stelle ≈ Diane & Christopher Sheridan The firing squad ≈ Adam & Lucy Constable The Attavanti Fan ≈ Rosemary Faunch

FLORIA TOSCA a celebrated singer ∙ EKATERINA METLOVA ≈ Anthony & Carolyn Townsend, Sue Lawson Aria Vissi d’arte ≈ David & Clare Kershaw

BARON SCARPIA Chief of Police ∙ ROLAND WOOD His head ≈ Brian & Jennifer Ratner His body and legs ≈ John L Pemberton

THE SACRISTAN ∙ SIMON WILDING ≈ Noreen Doyle SPOLETTA a police agent ∙ ADAM TUNICLIFFE SCIARRONE one of Scarpia’s men ∙ LANCELOT NOMURA JAILER ∙ LOUIS HURST SHEPHERD BOY ∙ ROSEMARY CLIFFORD CHORISTERS ∙ Charlie Barklam, Jenson Churchward-Steel, William Dow, Jonty Durie, Charlie Elson, Adrian Groenewald, Teddie Jamison Monty Lewis, Charlie Maskery, Thomas McLean, Georgie Paulson, Camillo Tellenbach, Alexander Wood CARDINAL ∙ Tony Thompson

61

TO SC A Celebrated opera singer Floria Tosca and painter Mario Cavaradossi are lovers. Cavaradossi, a political rebel, is an enemy of Baron Scarpia, Chief of Police.

Scarpia is bewitched by Tosca.

Act 1 The church of Sant’Andrea della Valle Angelotti, a political captive, has escaped from the prison at Castel Sant’Angelo. He plans to hide in the Attavanti chapel and his sister, the Marchesa Attavanti, has left the key at the foot of the Madonna and some clothes as a disguise.

The Sacristan arrives and sees that the painter Cavaradossi is not at work and his food is untouched. The Angelus sounds as Cavaradossi arrives. He admits that the portrait he is painting of Mary Magdalene is inspired both by his lover, the singer Floria Tosca, and the Marchesa Attavanti.

Angelotti appears from the chapel. Cavaradossi is of the same political persuasion and promises to help him when it gets dark. He gives away his food.

Tosca thinks Cavaradossi has been talking to a secret lover and begs him to take her to his villa. She looks at the portrait and is incensed that it bears a likeness to the Marchesa Attavanti.

There is a cannon shot announcing Angelotti’s escape has been discovered. Cavaradossi suggests he hide in a disused well in the garden of his villa.

The Sacristan returns with the news – later to be proved false – that the enemy has been defeated at Marengo. To celebrate the victory a Te Deum will be sung and, at the Palazzo Farnese, Floria Tosca will perform.

Scarpia, the brutal Chief of Police, and his agent Spoletta, have tracked Angelotti to the church. They find the food basket and a fan with the Attavanti coat of arms. Scarpia suspects that Cavaradossi has assisted Angelotti to escape.

Tosca returns and Scarpia inflames her jealousy by showing her the fan – suggesting that Cavaradossi is having an affair with Marchesa Attavanti. When Tosca leaves, Scarpia

sends Spoletta after her, assuming she will lead him to Cavaradossi and Angelotti.

To the accompaniment of the glorious Te Deum, Scarpia anticipates the execution of Cavaradossi and his possession of Tosca.

DINNER INTERVAL ACT 2 The Palazzo Farnese Scarpia sends Tosca a note demanding she visit him. Spoletta returns. He was unable to find Angelotti but has arrested Cavaradossi.

Scarpia questions Cavaradossi but extracts no information and he is taken off to be tortured. Tosca cannot bear his cries of pain and tells Scarpia where Angelotti is hiding.

Scarpia stops the torture and Cavaradossi is brought in. Tosca assures him that she has given nothing away.

Scarpia orders Spoletta to go to the well in the garden, and Cavaradossi curses Tosca for the betrayal. Sciarrone, a police officer, rushes in with the news that it is the enemy who triumphed at Marengo. Cavaradossi exults and is dragged away.

ACT 3 The Castel Sant’Angelo It is just before dawn; church bells are ringing and a shepherd boy is passing with his flock.

Cavaradossi offers his jailer his ring as a bribe so that he can write a final farewell to Tosca. He is overwhelmed by memories of an evening spent with her.

Tosca arrives with the safe conduct pass and tells him that she has killed Scarpia. She explains the plan: the firing squad will use blanks, he must fall to the ground as if dead and remain there until she tells him that everyone has departed.

The firing squad and Spoletta arrive.

Cavaradossi refuses to be blindfolded. The soldiers take aim – Cavaradossi falls.

Tosca rushes from her hiding place but the execution was real. Her lover is dead.

Scarpia’s murder has been discovered.

Before Tosca can be arrested she leaps to her death.

Tosca is left alone with Scarpia. She pleads for mercy and finally promises to give herself to Scarpia in exchange for Cavaradossi’s freedom. Scarpia seems to instruct Spoletta to arrange a mock execution, after which the lovers will be free. He writes a safe conduct pass for them.

Tosca finds a knife and stabs him.

Small gap but don’t move…

63

FIRST NIGHT BOMB

There was much nervousness around the first night of Tosca and critics did not hear immediate confirmation of the greatness exhibited with Bohème.

Puccini alone felt sure of himself and his work.

I

t is 1896. Bohème has premièred and Puccini decides on his next project: Tosca.

He writes from Milan to his sister: “I am busting my balls on the opera working almost all the time”. Progress was slow, he had a cold, the weather was terrible and “Milan makes me vomit.”

From the proceeds of La Bohème Puccini bought a house at Torre del Lago and Chiatri, a few kilometres from Lucca.

“For me, the country is a necessity, something urgent, as when you are desperate to go to the bathroom and there are people there and you cannot go. Torre is ideal for me . . . because I can have it all for myself ”.

May 1898 Paris “I am panting for the woods with their sweet smells and fragrance, I am panting for the free movement of my belly in wide trousers and with no waistcoat; I pant for the wind . . . I savour with dilated nostrils the iodic, salty air and inhale it with wide open lungs.

I hate pavements !

I hate palaces !

I hate capitals !

I hate columns !

I love the blackbird, the blackcap the woodpecker. I hate the horse, the cat, the starlings and the lapdog. I hate the steamer, the silk hat and the dress coat!”.

December 1899 A month before opening night Puccini writes to his priest friend Don Pietro Panichelli “After the sacramental three perfs (if I am not hissed at the first) I am going into hiding in the woods . . . There I shall vent my sportsman’s rage on the birds and compensate myself for the sufferings experienced during 30 or 35 days of rehearsals.

Yes, in the green rustic wilderness of the wonderful Maremma, where nice people go, I shall pass the best days of my life. To be out

shooting – where there is really something to shoot – and after a success! It is the moment – the supreme moment – when the mind is really at peace! I want to make the most of it and I shall abandon myself to it. What do I want with banquets, receptions and official visits?”

The first night: 14 January 1900 Rome A rumour spread that a bomb would be thrown in the theatre that night. Parliament had been dissolved by Royal Decree in the previous year, and there had been attempts on the King’s life. (Six months later he was assassinated at Monza.)

Queen Margherita and senior government figures were expected to attend – and a contingent of Puccini’s rivals. (The Queen arrived late and missed the first act).

Gazzetta Musicale ‘Last night first performance of Tosca. Enormous crowd at theatre doors from 11am. Orchestra hardly begun when, stopped by shouting and stampeding of people unable to enter, forced to drop curtain and begin again when silence restored.

Act 1: Aria of Cavaradossi – encored, two calls.

Te Deum finale magnificent effect. Repeated.

Wild enthusiasm. Five calls Act 2: Torture scene, very moving. Tosca’s prayer, Vissi d’arte, encored. Four calls.

Act 3: Completed the success. Ten calls end of opera of which six clamorous for Puccini. Total, 21 calls, five encores.

Whole execution extremely nervous, partly from first-night excitement, partly from panic caused by letters sent to members of company threatening probable violence.

These are the arts to which those jealous of the composer’s fame vainly resort.’

Palazzo Farnese, Rome

August 1900 Torre del Lago To Giulio Ricordi, his old friend and publisher “I am bored to death because I have no work to do. I am nothing more nor less than an unemployed workman of yours [operaio: a pun on the double sense of opera]. I am eating my heart out in this inactivity. My best years are passing [he is 41]. It is a shame. It is very comfortable here. No mosquitoes, thanks to the zinc screens in all the windows.�

65

THREE LOVE RATS Michael White imagines how it might have been if the composers for this season had been dumb enough to open up their lives to readers of a certain glossy magazine.

G

IACOMO PUCCINI’s natural zest for life took a decisive knock when his spectacular new purchase, a De DionBouton single-cylinder with all the trimmings (only just released in Italy) misjudged a sharp bend on the road from Lucca, badly injuring the chauffeur and leaving Maestro Puccini with a broken shinbone and multiple contusions.

Since then, the great composer has been laid up in his lovely home at Torre del Lago, tastefully recrafted from the modest cottage that was there before, and unable to continue work on his latest opera – which we understand to be a brilliant piece about a single mother from the Orient with delusions about being married to a handsome westerner.

Apparently she kills herself, which is a shame because there’s always therapy.

The Maestro’s progress with this score has been impeded by a plaster cast around his leg, which means he can’t sit at the upright piano where he likes to write: he’s waiting

for a grand to be delivered, which should make things easier.

But if nothing else, the wait will give him time to ponder the irregularities of his domestic life which, as it stands, is complicated. For a long while now he’s lived with the enchanting, if a touch vindictive, lady he first met when he was 26 and she was 24, Elvira Bonturi.

And it’s together, as man and wife, that they’ve made Torre del Lago the delightful home it is – a relaxing retreat where the Maestro can indulge his favourite pastime of shooting birds without a licence, and Elvira can do whatever it is that might occupy her in such an out-of-the-way place with nothing but fishermen for company.

But man and wife, alas, they’re not. The Maestro swept her off her feet when she was married to a greengrocer in Lucca. And although there was a scandal, there was no divorce – which meant Elvira and her dashing lover have been living all this time in sin.

Teatro Regio, Torino before it was destroyed by fire in 1936

As luck would have it, on the day after the car went off the road the grocer died, leaving Elvira free at last. But there’s a problem.

Focused though he may be on his music, when the need arises, Giacomo Puccini has in other ways a wandering eye. Blessed with good looks and an expensive tailor, he knows how to charm the ladies – to the consternation of Elvira who is said to put her own, distinctly Evil Eye on them when things get close to being out of hand.

More practically, she has been known to slip anaphrodisiacs into the Maestro’s coffee when attractive women are around, and daub his trousers with offputting smells. But neither remedy sufficed a year or so ago when he encountered a young lady we know only as Corinna and believe to be a law student, though her exact identity remain a mystery.

What’s certain is that since he met her, Maestro Puccini has become one of the Italian rail network’s best customers, with frequent trips to Pisa, Turin, Brussels and Bologna where he gets habitually spotted with Corinna in the station buffet.

There has also been a somewhat lurid

correspondence, using Signor Pagni, a distinguished painter formerly engaged to decorate Villa Puccini, as a sort of courier.

Regrettably some of these letters found their way into Elvira’s hands and then (still worse) into the hands of lawyers. So now everybody knows about them.

Debonair and smiling as he always is, Maestro Puccini has made light of the affair, insisting that it’s just another of the ‘little gardens’ that a man must cultivate during his time on earth. But friends and family take a less forgiving view. His celebrated publisher Ricordi calls Corinna a ‘foul vampire’. And his sister – a devoted Catholic now living as a nun – believes the car crash to have been a sign of heavenly displeasure. ‘Jesus has not dealt this blow in vain’, she tells us from her pleasingly unostentatious cell in Lucca (everything about this story starts or ends in Lucca).

We can only hope that, as the Maestro puts the final touches to his oriental opera, he’ll see sense and make an honest woman of his not-quite wife. There seem to be connections that relate the story of the former to the hard facts of the latter.

67

F

rom the windows of his lovely home on Lake Lucerne – the handsome Villa Tribschen furnished in luxurious pink and yellow satins from the Viennese couturier Bertha Goldwag (By Appointment to Crowned Heads etc) – international composer Richard Wagner contemplates the sweeping view, a rose-pink housecoat (matching the upholstery) draped about his short but manly frame, a pen poised to receive some new outpouring of creative genius, and on that noble head . . . no, not a crown, not even laurels, but a humble beret, artfully adjusted to a pleasing angle for our camera lens.

The master is at work and we must not disturb him. But he generously grants us several minutes of his precious time to share his thoughts, which focus at the moment on a beautiful new opera set in olden days with dashing knights and honest if small-minded tradesmen finding a commendable rapport in culture. How we long to see the costumes.

His Majesty King Ludwig II of Bavaria: wealthy recluse, gay icon, widely thought to be unhinged

But we fear there may be other matters burdening the master’s sprightly mind:

matters relating to a certain visitor seen recently to grace the doorstep of this fine house with his royal presence – dressed up like an operatic knight, in white from head to toe. A dazzling look if less than practical.

We hesitate to name this royal person . . . but as several of the Munich papers have already done so we are bold to say it was His Majesty King Ludwig II of Bavaria: wealthy recluse, gay icon, widely thought to be unhinged, who turned up here on Maestro Wagner’s birthday, unexpected, to declare undying love and a desire to abdicate his throne in favour of a life of simple domesticity. Just him and Richard, boys together clinging.

This astonishing announcement was apparently received without enthusiasm by the Maestro (a) because the Maestro’s operatic vision, not to say his rosepink lifestyle, is financially dependent on disbursements of a magnitude that only kings can generate, and (b) because although the Maestro might be said to have encouraged Ludwig’s love with letters of a similarly loving nature, he is actually holed up at Tribschen with a lady. Of whose presence in the house the King was sadly unaware.

This lady we can now reveal as Cosima von Bülow – lovely, lonely, unfulfilled wife of the competent conductor Claus (who doesn’t seem to understand her need to grovel at the feet of genius), and daughter of the wonderful composer Franz Liszt (many of whose tunes still entertain the hard-of-hearing). Maestro Wagner calls her his ‘assistant’, which we fear may be a tad short of the truth since she is pregnant with his child. Allegedly.

In Munich Madam Bülow’s efforts to ‘assist’ have brought her notoriety. It was she who went to the State Treasury demanding Maestro Wagner’s massive stipend, and was given it by scornful clerks in sacks of smalldenomination coins that she could only carry off in horse-drawn carts. Oh how we laughed.

But it’s no laughing matter any more. King Ludwig’s credibility has virtually collapsed because of his extravagant, and frankly mad, support for Maestro Wagner (who, should anybody ask, is only living in Lucerne because

Villa Tribschen Lovely, lonely Cosima von Bulow, wife of the competent conductor Claus and daughter of the wonderful composer Franz Liszt, with Maestro Wagner who has appointed her as his assistant. The Ring is a long opera – he needs one

the Munich government has banned him from Bavaria as a trouble-making leech). And running off to Tribschen dressed in white was a regrettably bad move, since Ludwig’s realm is on the brink of war and he was meant to be in Munich for emergency deliberations with his cabinet.

No good will come of this, we fear.

And it’s a terrible distraction for a Maestro who has Holy German Art to bring into existence. Not an easy task. It’s just as well that, given time, those fine examples of Teutonic manhood with the arm-bands and smart uniforms will make sure that his efforts are rewarded. And as Tribschen is in neutral Switzerland, it wont get bombed. So we can carry on enjoying the delightful view.

69

C

reative artists live a life of fantasy; and rarely has the fantasy been more pronounced than in the life of Leoš Janáček, the Czech composer to whom fame has finally arrived after a long wait.

Maestro Janáček likes nothing more than spending idle moments in the charming spa town of Luhacovice where he mischievously flirts with married women. Sly old dog. Of course, he really shouldn’t. But before you wag a finger, you should know that he has never had the blessing of a happy marriage – though it’s arguably his own fault for first seizing on a child bride.

Zdenka, Mrs Janáček, was all of 15 when she entered into wedlock. He was 27. And to no one’s great surprise, within a year or two the marriage was in breakdown. They divorced, and Zdenka’s angry family claimed back the furniture (her dowry). It included the piano, which was probably the greatest loss that the composer suffered from the whole affair.

The real surprise was that, after another year, Leoš and Zdenka mutually forgave, forgot, and were apparently in love again, annulling the divorce! You couldn’t make it up, and we just wish they’d come to us for the exclusive coverage. But then – you’ve guessed – this rediscovered happiness proved brief. Luhacovice intervened.

Janáček (1920s)

Being a creature of habit, the composer not only tends to find his fantasy lovers

in the same, small spa town, but tends to find them with the same name. Kamila. Not so long ago there was Kamila Urvalkova, a delightful former actress. Married, naturally.

But more recently, and seriously, there’s been a lovely lady called Kamila Stosslova, first spotted by the Maestro on Luhacovice’s main street when he was a distinguished if slightly grizzled 63 and she in the full flower of young womanhood at 25. Pushing his luck you might think, he sent her flowers. She, with more innocence than a young woman in full flower should have, accepted them – but then took care to introduce the Maestro to her husband David, who was trying to set himself up in the antiques trade and needed a loan. Which we believe the Maestro generously supplied.

A friendship formed. The Stosslovs visited the Janáčeks at their delightfully unpretentious hideaway at Hukvaldy in the depths of the Czech countryside. And a substantial correspondence started, on entirely proper terms that none but a malicious mind could question. They were, in Kamila’s words, ‘such good friends’. And she always called him Maestro. A polite girl.

Then, alas, it all got out of hand. The Maestro took Kamila as his muse. He dedicated major works to her. He begged her to attend the premières, which she declined. He rapturously wrote about her gypsy raven hair, imagining that they were lovers, which they weren’t.

And now she has been forced to tell him that his letters cause her ‘great anxiety’.

How poor Zdenka copes with all this, we can only guess. It can’t be easy. One of Leoš’ past love affairs – less cerebral, more physical than this it must be said – drove her to attempted suicide. And loathe though anyone would be to stifle the essential freedoms that great genius needs to flourish, we can only add that Maestro Janáček hasn’t been tactful in the way he’s handled this affair. In one of his abortive efforts to persuade Kamila to accompany him at the première of a new work, he suggested it could all be made to look respectable by passing off the eversuffering Zdenka as her mother. Not a kind thought but indicative of how things are. To be continued . . .

MICHAEL WHITE has has been a music critic for The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Times, and presented the long-running Opera in Action series for BBC Radio 3. His Introducing Wagner is an entry-level guidebook for the curious but wary.

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CONDUCTOR ∙ WILLIAM LACEY DIRECTOR ∙ KATIE MITCHELL REVIVAL DIRECTOR ∙ ROBIN TEBBUTT BASED ON AN ORIGINAL DESIGN BY VICKI MORTIMER ORIGINAL LIGHTING DESIGN ∙ NIGEL EDWARDS REVIVAL LIGHTING DESIGN ∙ PAUL KEOGAN ORIGINAL CHOREOGRAPHY ∙ STRUAN LESLIE REVIVAL CHOREOGRAPHY ∙ LUCY CULLINGFORD

TH E B BC CONC E RT ORC H E STR A

Libretto by the composer, based on the play Její pastorkyna (Her Stepdaughter) by Gabriela Preissová First performance 21 January 1904, Brno Theatre Performances in the new opera house at West Horsley Place on June 11, 17, 23, July 6, 8 This production originates from Welsh National Opera 1998 GRANDMOTHER BURYA the widow of the mill owner ∙ ANNE MARIE OWENS KOSTELNIČKA her childless daughter-in-law, Jenufa’s stepmother ∙ SUSAN BULLOCK ŠTEVA her grandson who inherited the mill ∙ NICKY SPENCE ≈ John & Carol Wates LACA grandson, half brother of Števa ∙ PETER HOARE JENŮFA granddaughter ∙ NATALYA ROMANIW ≈ Judith Lawless & Kevin Egan Aria Co Chvila ≈ An anonymous donor

STÁREK the mill foreman ∙ HARRY THATCHER MAYOR ∙ JIHOON KIM MAYOR’S WIFE ∙ HANNA-LIISA KIRCHEN KAROLKA their daughter ∙ HEATHER IRESON BARENA mill worker ∙ ALEXANDRA LOWE JANA mill worker ∙ ELEANOR GARSIDE PASTUCHYNA ∙ AMY LYDDON TETKA aunt ∙ JESSICA ROBINSON

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J E N U FA The Burya family has problems. Grandmother Burya had two sons and both died, leaving half-brothers, Števa and Laca. They are at odds. Their cousin Jenufa, the prettiest girl in the village, is expecting a child by Števa, the younger of the two and owner of the mill. Jenufa desperately hopes that Števa will avoid conscription so they can marry and avoid having a child out of wedlock.

The Miller, Old Burya=Grandmother Burya Klemen 1= Laca’s mother=Young Burya 2 Laca

Števa

Jenůfa1=Toma=Kostelnička 2 Jenůfa

Baby Števa

Act 1 Jenůfa waits anxiously to hear about Števa’s fate. Laca, bitter with jealousy treats Jenůfa heartlessly. The foreman announces Števa is not drafted after all. Jenůfa and Grandma Burya are delighted but Laca can’t hide his disappointment. Števa arrives drunk and forces Jenůfa to dance. An imperious Kostelnička interrupts and chastises Števa. Remembering her own drunken husband, she tells Števa he can marry Jenůfa only after a year of teetotalling. Grandma Burya sends the musicians packing. Števa leaves to sleep off his drunkenness but declares he will not abandon Jenůfa. Laca and Jenůfa are left alone and an argument develops. In the heat of the moment Laca slashes Jenůfa’s cheek.

DINNER INTERVAL Act 2 Five months later and Jenůfa has had the baby in secret. Števa arrives and Kostelnička begs him marry Jenůfa. He says he cannot marry Jenůfa now she is disfigured but will pay for the upkeep of his child. He is now engaged to the Mayor’s daughter, Karolka.

Laca is still in love with Jenůfa and wants to marry her. Kostelnička breaks down and tells him that Jenůfa has given birth to Števa’s

When Jenůfa wakes, Kostelnička pretends she has had a fever for two days during which time her baby has died. Kostelnička explains that Števa has rejected her but that Laca still wants to marry her. She reluctantly agrees.

Act 3 Two months later and Jenůfa is about to marry Laca. The Mayor and his wife come to pay their respects but Jenůfa is sad and Kostelnička uneasy. Laca tells Jenůfa that he has forgiven Števa and that he has invited him and his fiancée, Karolka, to the wedding.

The village girls sing a wedding song to Jenůfa and she receives Grandma Burya’s blessing.

Suddenly there is a commotion. The body of a baby has been found in the frozen millstream. Jenůfa identifies the baby as her own. The villagers assume Jenůfa killed her own baby. Kostelnička admits to the crime.

Jenůfa shows her stepmother mercy as she is lead away to face her punishment. Left alone Jenůfa tells Laca that he is free to go but he pleads to remain by her side. Jenůfa realises that through the suffering she has come to love him.

Winter Night (1920) from Slav Epic Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

child. He is horrified and in desperation Kostelnička says the child is dead. Left alone, she decides she has no choice but to kill the baby and drowns him in the mill-stream.

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JENUFA In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low.

D

eep in the mill. It all starts deep in the mill where the water gurgles and lathers, where the great wooden beams complain as if alive, where the machinery groans and creaks, where the grinding never ceases. Janáček spent hours down there, deep in Moravian mills, listening, wondering how to produce that extraordinary noise, the noise which opens the opera, the music of the mill; the mill which is the main source of wealth in the village, its symbolic centre, and the motif of unravelling fate in the lives of its people.

Coronation of the Serbian Tsar Stefan Dušan (1926) from Slav Epic Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

Janáček’s interest in Gabriela Preissová’s play Její Pastorkyna (Her Stepdaughter) didn’t just spring from his dislike of babies.

Janáček wanted to write a verismo opera, where powerful emotions are resolved within a tight village context, as in Cavalleria Rusticana. Preissová liked strong tragic

female characters, which call to English minds Thomas Hardy’s Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, or Bathsheba Everdene, or Tess, or even Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. In few operas do we have such a strong sense of a woman alone with her fate as in the Kostelnička’s music in the second act of Jen˚ufa. Only the Countess’s Dove Sono in Figaro, or Tatyana’s letter-writing scene in Eugene Onegin come close.

Preissová, a well-read and cultured Bohemian, had spent years in a Moravian village and gave lectures on village life. She based her story on a conflation of two actual incidents. As she puts it: in the first a lad wounded a girl, his brother’s sweetheart, while slicing cabbage. He wounded her in the face deliberately because he loved her himself. In the second, a woman helped her stepdaughter get rid of the fruits of her love (the girl threw the baby into the sewer),

Alphonse Mucha, when a chorister at Brno Cathedral, formed a friendship with Janáček. Mucha moved to Paris. and in 1894 happened to be in a print shop which had an urgent need for a poster for a Sarah Bernhardt play. The actress was so pleased with Mucha’s poster that she offered a six-year contract.

However, it is his Slav Epic, twenty large canvases painted between 1910 and 1928, that he regarded as his life’s work. The cycle depicts the mythology and history of Czechs and other Slavic peoples.

but I didn’t want to have two murderesses.

Within these distant villages, sexual activity before or outside marriage brought irreversible shame on the woman, and ostracism for any resulting bastard child.

Abortion was illegal and unobtainable outside the big cities. Illegitimate babies were often farmed out to ‘wet-nurses’ in other villages. Many were never seen again.

The Hungarian name for such ‘wet-nurses’ at this time was ‘angel-makers’. We are dealing with a sinister euphemism.

Janáček was a passionate Moravian, passionately devoted to the music and culture and dress and verbal habits of the people of the smaller of the two Czechspeaking provinces – Bohemia was the larger one. The two provinces were finally to escape the clutch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War, to become the state of Czechoslovakia.

Janáček taught music in Brno, the Moravian capital, and toured the small villages collecting folk-songs, folk-dances, and speech-intonations which he wrote down as musical phrases, and which are often at the heart of the vocal lines in his operas. They provide the short, spiky, oft-repeated motifs, so characteristic of his musical style, capable of peopling a scene without anyone appearing on stage.

Janáček regarded speech melodies as unique to the personality and mood of each individual, and was typically mysterious about them: ‘Whenever someone spoke to me, I may not have grasped the words, but did I grasp the rise and fall of the notes! At once I knew what the person was like: I knew how he or she felt, whether he or she was lying, or upset. Sounds, the intonation of human speech, indeed of every living being, have always had for me the deepest truth.’

In the first act of Jen˚ufa, nearly thirty years earlier, he had been less severe. For example

he had not hesitated to give the same theme to different singers. In the quartet with chorus in Act I, they all repeat Grandma Burya’s trite dictum ‘Každý párek si musí svoje trápení prestat’ (Every couple needs to get over its problems). By the second and third acts, written more spontaneously and a little later, he had come close to developing his mature style, and the themes had become more specific to individuals.

Janáček didn’t dislike all babies. Certainly he didn’t take initially to his first child, Olga.

‘He never cradled her in his arms, never played with her,’ said Zdenka, his young wife, still only sixteen. He was different with his son, Vladimir. The composer welcomed him, ‘like a prince’, ‘took pride in him, cushioned him in his arms, played with him’. He was to lose both of them. The playful, amusing Vladimir, who liked imitating his father, died of meningitis, aged only two and a half. Janáček would never refer to the boy again, and could never bear to go with Zdenka to visit his grave.

Olga became close to her father as she grew up, and Janáček’s shared happiness with her improved the tenor of his marriage. When Olga was in her late teens, Janáček, like many fathers, took against her young man. He tried telling her she was too young at 18 to have a boyfriend, but Olga, passionate and stubborn like her father, reminded him that Zdenka had been only 15 when they had become engaged. Janáček sent her to St Petersburg, to stay with his brother, to learn Russian, to get over her passion. In St Petersburg she contracted typhoid, was brought home, and never recovered. The composition of the last two acts of Jenu˚ fa was always associated in the composer’s mind with the illness of Olga, who grew to love the work as, from her sick room, she listened to it taking shape. He noted her speech melodies on her death-bed, and placed the last page of Jenu˚ fa in her coffin; he wanted her to have it with her always.

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In preparing his own libretto for Jenu˚ fa, Janáček was happy to have the latitude given him by a drama in prose, a first for an opera in Czech. Without the constraints imposed by a metrical text, he felt free to expand expressivity by repeating the ends of sentences. We become familiar with the habit: I have been praying, praying – it is all quite useless, quite useless – my baby is cold, don’t leave him there, don’t leave him.

He cut about a third of Preissová’s play. Dangerously he removed a long narration in the first act where the Kostelnička explains the important but complicated family relationships.

Early Czech audiences would have known the play, but modern operagoers need help to know who is who. Jenůfa’s habit of calling the Kostelnička ‘Mother’, and the shift of the title, from Her Stepdaughter to Jenu˚ fa, intensify the mystery.

The family tree (with the synopsis) and a word of explanation should help.

Old Grandma Burya, the widow of the mill owner, had two sons, both of whom have died. The eldest married once, and had a son, Števa. His wife, who came to the marriage with a son, Laca, has also died. She was rich, and her wealth passed first to her husband and then to Števa when he inherited the mill. This partly explains Laca’s resentment, and his demands of Grandmother Burya that his money, the 1,200 crowns, be returned to him.

Grandma Burya’s second son, Toma, who has also died, married twice. The first wife gave him Jenůfa, and the second is the Kostelnička, the Sextoness (kostel is Czech for church).

Laca’s jealousy of Števa thus has several sources: he isn’t linked by blood to the family, so he has no share in the mill; his mother’s money has gone to Števa – he has to join the army, while Števa can now buy himself out of this obligation; and Jenůfa prefers Števa to him.

The childless Kostelnička, who is at once the most principled and authoritative person in the village, feels strong affection, unhealthily strong some think, for Jenůfa, her gentle, orphaned, step-daughter. The Kostelnička undertakes small tasks round the village, providing for herself and Jenůfa; she allows Jenůfa to work at the mill, and is delighted to see her teach little Jana to read. Having been abused by her drunkard husband, she hates the Burya family. She regards Laca’s independence from them as an advantage over Števa in his suit for Jenůfa. Her high principles and religious sense render her drowning of the baby all the more horrific to her, as does her recognition that her dislike of the baby stems from its resemblance to its father, Števa.

Pilgrimage to St Anthony, detail (1894) Joža Uprka (1861-1940) ‘The night dragged on. And then suddenly – it was already growing light – the rhythm of her breath changed. I jumped up. I knew infallibly that this was the end; we knelt before Olga’s bed . . . The breathing stopped. It was 6.30am on Thursday 26 February 1903. . . . I began to do everything according to Olga’s will. My husband didn’t help. He gave himself over entirely to his grief. He tore out his hair, crying “My soul, my soul!” We decorated Olga’s room with Moravian embroidery. Olga had asked me not to leave her in those black funeral sheets . . . I strewed her with posies of fresh violets which we changed each day until the funeral’ Zdenka Janáček

As Janáček set the opera in a Moravian village, he expected everyone to wear folk costumes. This he saw as intensifying the claustrophobic moral climate of the village, the constricting atmosphere which provokes the antagonisms of the opening and the unbearable tensions and horrors of the second act. The final power of the opera springs from the release of these tensions through Jenůfa’s astonishing redemptive stroke: forgiving the Kostelnička, and accepting Laca as her husband, in the great healing moments at the end.

The first performance of Jenu˚fa took place in Brno in January 1904, and many musicologists would give their eye teeth to know exactly what it was like. The orchestra lacked expertise and Janáček had unwittingly done all he could to make life impossible for them. Few composers

wrote and crossed out more untidily than he: he often sketched his own staves, and used no key signatures, so flats and sharps often doubled to create the untidy effect.

He loved flat keys – difficult for the strings to tune – and had a habit of establishing a crotchet rhythm and then suddenly writing in quavers, so the copyists wondered if he’d doubled the time, or switched into shorthand. His unconventional style meant that even when they could read what he had written nobody was sure he could have intended it. Things would have been easier had Janáček liked checking proofs, but the most gross errors escaped his lazy eye. The players found themselves exposed, because the texture, particularly the string texture, frequently lacks a conventional centre. The emotional tension must have been as high in the pit as on the stage.

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The Janáčeks at home ca.1927. The composer sits at the white table onto which his three hens would fl y and keep him company. His wife, Zdenka, looks on

In the circumstances the fact that the opera was such a success suggests it must have touched a chord of Czech nationalism among the minority community in Brno, where over 60% of the population was German.

Janáček longed for a performance in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, but Karel Kovařovic was music director there. Kovařovic’s comic opera The Bridegrooms had been performed in Brno in 1887 and Janáček’s newspaper review of the production had provoked lasting resentment: The libretto and the music are independent.

Write a new operetta to this libretto and to this music some sort of play, full of horrible gloom, desperate screams, bodies stabbed by daggers.

The composer’s talent is attested by the overture, with its floods of chords and keys: which accordingly deafened everyone.

Janáček’s music criticism is as angular and unconventional as his music. There were unforgivable things in the review and Kovařovic hadn’t forgiven them. He refused to consider Jenu˚ fa for Prague. When he finally relented

after ten years or so, he did so on condition that the extraordinary sounds of Janáček’s orchestration be rendered conventional.

Thus the first Prague performance in 1916 presented the work in Kovařovic’s version, which is as radically different from Janáček as Rimsky’s Boris is from Mussorgsky. Kovařovic re-orchestrated the work, made frequent cuts, and rewrote whole sections, doubling some instruments to support Janáček’s ‘poor’ instrumentation, even adding, in the Act III finale, a more ‘festive’ sound of trumpets and French horns, all radically different from the original’s simple directness.

Jenu˚fa was Janáček’s first successful opera; he may have been so pleased to have it performed first in Prague and then, in 1918, in Vienna, only a hundred miles south of Brno, that he overlooked the damage done to his original conception.

He was enormously helped in the international propagation of the work by Kafka’s friend and biographer, the Germanspeaking Czech Jewish author, Max Brod.

Brod, who lived in Prague, translated Jenu˚fa

into German for the Vienna première, which he attended with Janáček.

Brod has left us a delightful description of his first meeting with the composer: One day the great composer Suk wrote to me quite out of the blue that I ought to go and listen to the opera Jenu˚ fa at the Prague Czech Theatre. I listened and had my greatest artistic experience since the beginning of the war.

The house was sold out, and with some trouble I found a place for standing in the top gallery.

I saw nothing, only listened. Suddenly there pounded up to me the primary sounds of a recruiting song, of a peasant dance. Tears of happiness, long missed tears, welled up into my eyes… Oh, it was simple and good once again to be in the world!

My heart awoke!

A few months later. An unknown old man stood in my room. It was Sunday, still quite early. A moment before, I had been sleeping deeply.

Was I still dreaming? – This head with its

high, beautifully domed forehead, twinklingly serious big open eyes, and curved mouth: it was Goethe’s head, as drawn by Stieler, but transposed here into softly Slavonic lines… A name sounded in my dream ‘Leoš Janáˇcek.’ It was the composer of Jenu˚fa.

In between I had written a report in Schaubuhne about the effect Jenu˚fa had had on me. Was this not indeed an extraordinary case, that an operatic masterpiece lies around mouldering twelve years in the offices of theatres, and then is discovered by accident, suddenly sees the light of day, and immediately enthrals and stirs everyone through the boundless musical forces contained in it? So that one asks with amazement: why not earlier? Why did a generation have to die without this emotional shock?

I did not want to take on the translation, I had already written a letter of refusal to the publisher.

Several plans for stage works were nearing completion. Having urgently drawn attention to Janácˇek work in a Berlin newspaper, I thought I had done enough… Then the Maestro came to me himself, undaunted by the long journey from Brno. His glance bewitched me. Still more his words, whose holy naivety moves me still today.

The only surviving manuscript page of the opera

When I saw Janáˇcek sitting in front of me, I felt: this is the sort of man that God wanted.

Strong, kind, upright. And what have we made of ourselves!

Without long deliberation I gave him my promise.

Brod playfully omits to mention that he had actually invited Janáček to come that Sunday, without specifying a time.

MICHAEL FONTES, who has written for our programmes every year since our second festival in 1999, was a don at Winchester College for for ty years. He retired to Najac in South-West France, where he established and ran Les Orchidées de Najac, selling his photos of the wild orchids and butterflies of the area. He is hoping to become a Black Brother of St Cross, the medieval almshouse in Winchester, founded between 1132 and 1136 by Henry of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror.

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A FROCK-FREE SOPRANO A piano on a rubbish dump was the start of Susan Bullock’s journey to Last Night of the Proms and her appetite for opera’s most demanding roles

F

eet firmly planted on the ground, there’s not the faintest whiff of the diva about Susan Bullock. “I’m no good at singing nice people who just stand in their frocks and sing.

I’m no good at that. I’ve tried, and I can’t do it!”

How did she get to be the go-to dramatic soprano for the world’s great opera houses?

It started when her older brother came home one day saying he wanted to play the piano and there wasn’t such a item in the Bullock house. On his rounds, Mr Bullock, a policeman, saw a piano on a tip, brought it home and her brother started his lessons.

Everything he did little sister had to do.

Susan became proficient, joined the school choir and sang the odd solo.

At 17, Susan auditioned for Saturday morning classes at the Royal Northern College of Music. Besides the piano, her brother suggested she throw in a couple of songs.

She chose Vaughan Williams The sky above the roof and Schubert’s Who is Sylvia? Head of vocal studies, tenor Alexander Young (who had sung Tom Rakewell in the UK première of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress) summoned her and advised she have singing lessons.

Susan wasn’t sure singing was for her, so her first staging post was a university music degree at Royal Holloway College, London.

Post-graduate studies continued at the Royal Academy of Music and the National Opera Studio under contralto Marjorie Thomas, a favourite of Sir Malcolm Sargent and regular performer at Covent Garden and the Proms.

Winning the 1984 Kathleen Ferrier Award, English National Opera signed up the promising youngster “in the days when they had a huge company of singers – I was way down the pecking order”. It was made clear that she was a “cover” but, after only three months the Pamina in Jonathan Miller’s Magic Flute withdrew, with just 12 days to opening night. Susan was launched onto the main

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stage: “My parents came to hear me, and they had never before in their lives been in a theatre. My father nearly passed out at the sheer size of the place. He wanted my Mum to take me away; he was terrified I was going to make a fool of myself.” This was what would be the pattern for her early career: a series of “happy accidents . . . jumping in at the last minute and getting on with it!”

The next important jump was Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. “I remember the Letter Scene . . . That was the first time I really got that buzz of big music, big emotions . . . you’re out there on your own. It was thrilling! That was a huge mental turning point for me”.

Onegin led to Butterfly with Graham Vick.

He’s one of the directors she most enjoys working with, along with Keith Warner and David Alden – directors who treat her as an actor. “They know every note of the orchestral parts, can tell you what the third clarinet is playing at any given moment and why they are playing it. That to me is a total joy”.

Butterfly was her calling-card in the 1990s, and took her around the world and then came Jenufa on the Glyndebourne tour. The role took eight months to learn opening a whole new sound world. All the time she was Jenufa she was thinking how much she wanted to sing Kostelnička.

The title role in Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena at Garsington (when Susan first met Wasfi) was a British première. “I just thought ‘This is long . . . it goes on a bit!’. That was my first venture into roles that demand stamina.

Keith Warner saw it. He rang and signed me up to sing Isolde in a semi-staged production for Opera North and then in another in Japan. I bought a really cheap score, because I thought ‘I’m bound to crash and burn in this, I’m not going to spend a fortune.’ I still have that cheap score because it’s got all my notes in it!”

Warner

then

offered

Brünnhilde

and

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SB and Bryn Terfel Die WalkĂźre Royal Opera House

Gloriana Royal Opera House

SB and Deborah Voigt Elektra Metropolitan Opera, New York

SB as the witch with Katie Bray and Fflur Wyn Hansel & Gretel Opera Nor th

SB as Emilia Mar ty Makropulos Case Oper Frankfur t

SB Elektra State Opera Prague

Last Night of the Proms 2011

everybody she trusted said she should do it. She has amassed the distinction of having sung Brünnhilde in all performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Covent Garden in autumn 2012 (four complete cycles) and, all over the world, a further 12 cycles.

The maintenance of the voice, which changes with age is crucial.

“You’ve always got to be aware of the changes and try to get ahead of the game” she says “– analyse it all the time. As you grow, you have to keep giving it a 50,000 mile service and re-balancing it.

It’s just a lot of hard, technical work!”, she laughs. “That’s why it’s important to have good coaches. You can torture yourself in a performance thinking ‘My God, that was terrible!’ and you come off and your coach will say ‘I didn’t even notice’. They know your voice better than you do” In her coach, Phillip Thomas, she has total faith: “He’s got the best pair of ears I’ve ever met.”

At the other end of the spectrum are appearances on BBC Radio 2 Friday Night is Music Night. “I’ve done Fridays when I’ve sung the Liebestod and a medley from Annie Get Your Gun, with some Ivor Novello in between, and you had to do it all from memory – not only was it live on air but there was an audience. I developed a real love of light music from that.”

Bullock sees herself now in a fourth phase of her career having begun with the light lyric repertoire, then into the slightly heavier roles – Puccini and Janáček – then Richard Strauss and Wagner.

Now she’s playing Gloriana, the Kostelnička, the Witch / Mother in Hansel & Gretel and Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd.

The Kostelnička isn’t the nicest of women but she’s exactly the kind of character Susan Bullock wants to get inside: “There’s a lot to find out about her. She’s not just the hard-hearted bitch-woman who drowns the baby. There’s a whole load of pain in her. You hear it in her first aria. She was in love with a handsome blond, like Jenufa, but he was a drunk and he beat her, and she used to hide in the woods. She doesn’t want her step-daughter to have the same fate.

But it’s too late. You’ve got to be a certain age to play her and that age is now upon me. And that’s just fine!”

DONALD MACLEOD has spent 40 years in public service broadcasting, working mainly for BBC Radio 3. Since 1999 he has been the writer and presenter of Radio 3’s flagship programme Composer of the Week.

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WAG N ER

D I E WA L K Ü R THE VALKYRIES Brünnhilde’s sisters

“The ring - I beg you - f ling it away!” (1911) Ar thurRackham

ROSSWEISSE ∙ FELICITY BUCKLAND GERHILDE ∙ TANYA HURST ORTLINDE ∙ BECCA MARRIOTT WALTRAUTE ∙ ANNE MARIE OWENS SCHWERTLEITE ∙ MORAG BOYLE SIEGRUNE ∙ LAUREN EASTON GRIMGERDE ∙ GEMMA MORSLEY HELMWIGE ∙ MARI WYN WILLIAMS

G E N E RO U S S U P P O RT F RO M DAV I D & A M A N DA L E ATH E R S with Sir Win & Lady Bischoff

CONDUCTOR ∙ STEPHEN BARLOW DIRECTOR ∙ STEPHEN MEDCALF SET DESIGNER ∙ JAMIE VARTAN LIGHTING DESIGN ∙ DAVID PLATER

THE BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTR A

E

First performance 26 June 1870, Munich Libretto by Richard Wagner, based on Norse myths Performances in the new opera house at West Horsley Place on June 29, July 1, 5, 9, 12, 15

WOTAN leader of the gods ∙ THOMAS HALL Wotan’s Farewell ≈ Katie Bradford FRICKA Wotan’s wife ∙ SARA FULGONI BRÜNNHILDE Wotan’s daughter by the goddess Erda, leader of the Valkyries ∙ JANE DUTTON War es so schmählich ≈ Stephen Gosztony & Sue Butcher SIEGMUND fathered by Wotan and a mortal mother ∙ BRYAN REGISTER

Spring Song and Sieglinde duet Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond ≈ Mr & Mrs Grant Gordon The Sword Nothung ≈ Mrs T Landon

SIEGLINDE Siegmund’s twin sister ∙ CLAIRE RUTTER HUNDING Sieglinde’s husband ∙ ALAN EWING CURATOR ∙ BRIAN SMITH WALTERS

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D I E WA LKÜ R E Wotan, the leader of gods, has fathered children with mortal women to produce a race of heroes for the gods’ protection. Siegmund is one of these mortal children.

Act 1 A storm Pursued by enemies, Siegmund stumbles exhausted into an unfamiliar place. Sieglinde finds him, and the two feel an immediate attraction. They are interrupted by Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding, who asks the stranger who he is and why he is there. Siegmund recalls his terrible past only to learn that Hunding is affiliated to his enemies. Hunding tells his guest they will fight to the death in the morning.

Siegmund recalls his father’s promise that he would find a sword when he most needed it. Sieglinde reappears – she has given Hunding a sleeping potion – and explains she was forced to marry Hunding. During her wedding feast a stranger thrust into a tree a sword which neither Hunding nor any of his companions could remove.

Sieglinde longs for the hero who can draw the sword and save her. The two realise they are in love. Siegmund gives his father’s name as Wälse (the name used by Wotan when appearing as a mortal) and Sieglinde realises this is her twin brother. Siegmund pulls the sword from the tree and claims Sieglinde as his bride.

Scene change . . . have a chat . . . but don’t move Act 2 Wotan, tells his warrior daughter, Brünnhilde, that she must defend his mortal son Siegmund in the fight with Hunding.

Wotan’s wife, Fricka, demands Siegmund and Sieglinde are punished for committing adultery and incest. As the goddess of marriage, she must uphold marriage laws. Wotan sees Siegmund as the hero who could retrieve the all-powerful Ring and the save the gods. Fricka argues that Brünnhilde must leave Siegmund to his own fate. Wotan capitulates and instructs Brünnhilde to help Hunding.

Siegmund and Sieglinde have fled. Brünnhilde tells Siegmund

he will soon die; he threatens to kill himself and his bride if the sword fails. Impressed, Brünnhilde decides to help him. Hunding arrives and the two men fight. Siegmund is close to victory when Wotan appears, shatters his sword and Siegmund is killed.

Brünnhilde begs them to help, but they dare not defy Wotan. Sieglinde is numb with despair until Brünnhilde tells her she bears Siegmund’s child. Heartened and keen to live, she takes the pieces of the sword and rushes off into the forest to hide from Wotan.

Brünnhilde escapes with Sieglinde and the broken sword. Wotan kills Hunding with a wave of his hand and vows to punish Brünnhilde for her disobedience.

Wotan finds Brünnhilde and proclaims her punishment: she will become a mortal, plunged in a magic sleep on a mountain, prey to any man. Brünnhilde pleads with him.

DINNER INTERVAL

Wotan will not give in but agrees to a concession: she will be encircled by a flame which will deter all but the bravest of heroes.

The Valkyrie warrior sisters observe battles and decide who will live and who will die.

Each carrying a dead hero, they have gathered to meet their sister Brünnhilde.

She arrives with a mortal, Sieglinde.

Both sense this hero will be Sieglinde’s unborn child.

Act 3

Wotan summons Loge, the god of fire, and leaves behind his beloved daughter.

The Valkyrie (1910) “I f lee for the f irst time and am pursued ...Save this woman!

Sisters your help!” Ar thur Rackham (1867–1939)

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‘MARK MY NEW POEM WELL, IT HOLDS THE WORLD’S BEGINNING AND ITS DESTRUCTION’ WAGNER TO LISZT 1853

Rima (1925) Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)

Yet despite that ambition, Wagner maintained his work was, fundamentally, ‘the depicting of reality’ (1854). Director Stephen Medcalf explains his resolution.

W

hen W H Auden remarked that the beginning of Act 2 of Die Walküre resembles ‘a Victorian breakfast scene, Wotan meekly cracking his morning egg behind The Times while Fricka furiously rattles the teacups’ he touched upon how closely, under the mythological surface, it approaches bourgeois realism.

There can be no more challenging prospect for an opera director than The Ring. It contains a distillation of German philosophical thought and, like Darwin’s scientific theories, it shook the world. Wagner claimed it was the first Gesamtkunstwerk: a fusion of poetry, music, architecture and drama offering a quasireligious experience. However, though the protagonists are gods, mermaids and earth spirits, their predicaments are profoundly human.

Heinrich Porges, in his eye-witness account of Wagner rehearsing The Ring at the first Bayreuth Festival, emphasises that, for all the high style of Wagner’s art, the great man was, in essence, striving for realism. ‘In articulation and characterization everything must appear

authentic and natural . . . rooted in fidelity to nature’. Above all the goal was to ‘so well coordinate the resources of art that we cease to be aware of them as such and are conscious solely of the dramatic action unfolding before our eyes.’

Thus, we have chosen for Die Walküre a realistic setting in which the action seems plausible and characters truthful.

Wagner’s leitmotifs (musical themes) unify the whole cycle and, for the stage director, provide the true stage directions. Rheingold, the first opera in the cycle, begins with the Rhinemaidens bathing in the Rhine: the world in a state of nature. The waters ripple but time doesn’t advance.

Alberich follows his animal instincts and tries to mate with them. The Rhinemaidens tease and tempt him: ‘whomsoever can make a ring from the gold lying at the bottom of the river will attain limitless power’. But there is a proviso: ‘only he that renounces the power of love, forgoes love’s delights, gains the magic to forge a ring from the gold.’ Alberich rises to the challenge, renounces love and grasps

at power. It is a momentous and symbolic moment: man has come to conscious thought, distinguished himself from his environment and is building knowledge of the universe.

This knowledge is power.

We hear the ring motif – which will later become the Valhalla motif – and we know that the rise of the gods comes about from this first conscious act of man: Alberich forging the ring. In other words, once man began to imagine and reason, he created the gods to understand his place in the universe.

But as his knowledge increases he comes to realize that man was not created by the gods – but evolved from primeval slime.

The moment Alberich forges the Ring he creates the gods and destroys them.

The Bone Hall, Smithsonian, Washington DC, 1881

The difficult question for the director is exactly how to suggest this without distracting. At the end of Rheingold the gods marched triumphantly into Valhalla; the march of evolution. At the opening of Die Walküre the earth is covered by forests and populated by men close to nature. Hunding

lives in a tree house with his wife, Sieglinde, imprisoned like an animal. Siegmund, halfcivilized, runs wild in the woods, shunned by his fellow man. The predominant emotion of the first act is of love; not just romantic love, but unstoppable love ending in sexual union.

A museum, symbolic of the hoard of accumulated knowledge in which lies the source of man’s power, came to be our solution and setting.

The fundamentally realistic ‘space’ of Act One reflects the primeval and that first action of conscious thought: the forging of the ring. The vital, symbolic objects (spear, sword, shield etc.) have a logical place here as well as a sacred significance.

Alberich, the progenitor of knowledge is, with Wotan, joint curator. Alberich uses knowledge to control and enslave; Wotan uses it to uphold the belief in gods and, when in the face of objective scientific fact this is no longer sustainable, he uses it to set man free.

The museum evolves with the story. In Act 2 society has developed and we find ourselves in Wotan’s world – a debating chamber of passionate arguments concerning the power of the gods and the free will of man. The display cases no longer contain natural history but objects of anthropological interest.

Above all, it belongs somehow to the political Wagner – the philosopher, the nationalist and the revolutionary.

In Act 3 we arrive at the place to which science seems inevitably to lead: a theatre of war.

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THE VALKYRIE & THE TWINS Twins have a special place in the folklore of almost all cultures. Wagner rode on this privilege balancing superstition with compassion, and love with a lust for power.

A

group of pri’mary school children in the 50s, when asked how they thought the Queen spent her time, did not hesitate: Buckingham Palace is very large and she often had guests of state, so the Queen had to be out of bed early to do the washing up from the night before, and to dust the palace. She needed to wear an apron over her royal robes so they should not be spoiled. All the while she would be wearing her crown, of course, and she had to be good at keeping it on, so it did not fall off when she hoovered under the furniture. After doing the housework she needed to check that Prince Philip was up and shaved, and then get breakfast for Charles and Anne, before taking them to school in the royal coach.

The Queen is a monarch and a mother, and the children had a mythical idea of a monarch and a real idea of a mother. In the resulting amalgam the myth prevailed over the real.

In primitive societies the myth often prevailed over the real in areas where man most acutely felt his ignorance. Certain events acquired magical status, just as the most cynical among us can be startled by a coincidence.

Would you be surprised if at one of your larger parties two guests were found to have the same birthday? Many people would be, yet when more than 23 people come together, it becomes statistically likely that two of them will have the same birthday.

Not all people interested in coincidences are superstitious. The great Viennese experimental biologist, Paul Kamerer, famous for his work on the Midwife Toad, wrote books about coincidences as well as toads. The Midwife Toad had become a land animal, but perversely Kamerer persuaded them to mate in water. The water made the females so slippery that the males developed ‘nuptial pads’, sticky patches on their hands, enabling them to cling on, like limpets, during coitus. Kamerer found to his delight, and to

the incredulity of the scientific establishment, that the baby toads so engendered, also had nuptial pads on their hands. This result, suggesting that characteristics acquired during one’s life can be passed to one’s children, was for long discredited. Now we are told that some scientists have changed all that, and that it’s possible that Kamerer was right, so Roger Federer’s two pairs of twins may be good at tennis even if their father never shows them how to hold a racquet.

Kamerer’s work developed a theory of what he called Seriality, that history has a habit of repeating itself. He considered everyday phenomena, spending hours in Viennese parks observing women going about, and noting whether or not they carried umbrellas.

He concluded that spies should study similar things carefully before undertkaing a dangerous mission, and that statesmen should discover whether or not they were on an upward or a downward spiral before taking decisions affecting the destiny of nations. Jung was intrigued by Kamerer’s theory and Albert Einstein described it as ‘interesting and by no means absurd’.

We are now still far from the craziness of Deepak Chopra who described coincidences ‘as signals from the universe which can guide us toward our true destiny’.

We are far too from the people, not all of them Americans, who ascribe most coincidences to the hand of God. Alexander Pope explained this view in his Essay on Man (1734): All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

This view came in handy for the governing classes in the 17th and 18 th centuries; it said that the rich and powerful had a divine right to remain rich and powerful, so any

Wotan’s farewell (1895) Ferdinand Leeke (1859-1937)

sort of rebellion was immoral to the point of blasphemy. By debunking the theory, Voltaire and Rousseau rendered revolution theologically respectable.

However, most of us don’t need the help of Voltaire and Rousseau to see the madness in the 100 th monkey effect, the idea that when populations of a species reach a certain density, their knowledge and techniques are miraculously transmitted to adjacent communities. This is a distortion of the work of Masao Kawai with macaques on the island of Koshima in the early 1950s. Kawai taught the monkeys to wash the sand off their

sweet potatoes before eating them, and to do the same with grains of wheat: the wheat floated, the sand sank. He was interested in how the technique was disseminated among the troupe. He found that the females and the young learnt quickly, but the males often completely failed to adopt the behaviour.

Kawai noted that the males usually lived alone whereas the females lived in groups with the young.

At no stage does Kawai say that immediately the 100 th monkey on Koshima learnt the technique, all the monkeys on neighbouring islands started washing their sweet potatoes

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in water – though he did encourage the monkeys to swim in the sea by throwing nuts into the water, thereby facilitating the sharing knowledge with neighbouring islands.

Edvard Westermarck, a Finnish anthropologist, knew that genetic sexual attraction, if indulged, would weaken the gene pool. He hypothesised that populations in which children were sexually immunised from each other by being brought up together, would have an evolutionary advantage, because they had fewer children from incestuous relationships. Studies made on children brought up in kibbutzes found that they had little tendency to marry each other, but usually looked elsewhere for mates.

Siblings and, in particular, twins, separated at birth, risk being attracted to each other should they meet later, and even marrying, in all innocence. In the UK in 2008 a pair of married twins took genetic tests to try to resolve their difficulties in achieving pregnancy, and were dismayed to discover their propinquity.

Twins are special, and, in consequence, have a special place in the folklore of almost all cultures.

In old Bulgaria the first ploughing of a settlement carried particular significance: the ploughshare had to be tempered by smiths working completely naked, and the ploughing performed by twin oxen driven by identical twin boys.

The Ashvins, of Hindu mythology and Vedic literature, are divine twin horsemen, sons of the sun god Surya. They are forever young, athletic and radiant. They symbolise the sunrise and sunset and represent the cosmic duality of ideas like light and darkness, healing and sickness. They are close to Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Zeus and Leda.

In Bali twins of opposite sex are assumed to have had sex in utero, and, in some social classes, expected to marry each other. In Thailand in October 2015 two three-year-old twins were married in an elaborate ceremony, ‘to ward off bad luck’.

Wagner rode on the privilege granted twins. The incest of Siegmund and Sieglinde, the first humans to appear in The Ring, escapes our censure because twins are special. We afford them licence. Wagner, great dramatist that he was,

Edvard Westermarck, Finnish anthropologist

What about twins? Do twins have particular psychic means of communicating? Many twins develop private languages and have a special bond. If separated early in life, they find themselves strongly drawn to each other on meeting later.

They are normally spared this fate by the Westermarck effect.

Friedrich Barbarossa was going to rise from the dead to save Germany.

A mountain in the Kyffhäuser range represents his sleeping form

intuitively understood the Westermarck effect. Wotan, in the interval between Rheingold and Die Walküre, has been into the world as a human, Wälse, and has sired on a human mother the twins and their Volsung siblings. At the same time, as a god, he has fathered the nine Valkyrie sisters on Erda, the earth goddess. Like most head gods he gives his wife plenty to complain about. The cosmic nature of the drama and the natural fantasy of the medium make us suspend moral judgement.

Siegmund, given shelter for the night, breaks fundamental rules of hospitality. Again we continue to side with him, because Hunding is so appalling, and because we feel Siegmund’s love and special anterior familiarity justify his adultery with his host’s wife, his own twin.

Early in Rheingold when Alberich renounces love to gain the gold, we sense the conflict between love and power. The love which Alberich renounces is not erotic: after all he goes on to father the wonderfully loathsome Hagen, the chilling force of the final Ring opera. What Alberich renounces is affection, reciprocal passion, and all that goes with it. Wagner would not have countenanced the modern idea that such love can exist between any two human beings regardless of their sex. He saw men and women as each contributing something particular, different, and necessary to a real loving union. And after the coldness of Rheingold, in Die Walküre we are plunged straight into the passionate world of such a union.

And in this passionate world we inevitably sense the power of love, of reciprocal affection. In Rheingold we see Alberich trade love for a dream of power; in Die Walküre we repeatedly feel the ability of love to transcend natural law, not only in Siegmund’s adulterous incest, but in such things as Brünnhilde’s disobedience of Wotan. In the Annunciation of Death scene she is touched

by Siegmund’s love for Sieglinde, something quite new to her, to the point that she who was so brash at the start of the act becomes sensitive and affectionate by its end.

Equally, Wotan, so adamantine and cold in Rheingold, by the end of Die Walküre is transformed in his infinitely affecting farewell to his daughter. It is as though contact with humankind has altered the way of the gods, the way they think and feel. Love has triumphed over their lust for power.

The women are badly treated in Rheingold – The Rhinemaidens are nearly raped by Alberich who steals their gold; Freia is carried off by the giants. One of Wagner’s masterstrokes is to give almost the only tender music in the opera to the grotesque giant, Fasolt: ‘We dullards toil away, sweating, with our horny hands, to win a woman who, winsome and gentle, will live with us poor creatures: and do you now upset our bargain?’ Fasolt’s inability to resist the igniting flash of Freia’s glance forces Wotan to include the ring in the deal.

Die Walküre shows us the importance of what Fricka calls ‘a woman’s worth’.

Many people see Wagner’s twins as precursors of the Nazi final solution. Isn’t Wagner presaging a world dominated by an Aryan master race, led by blue-eyed, fairhaired, pure-blooded kings? In 1850 when down on his luck and reduced to copy editing, Wagner wrote an anti-Semitic tract, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music). In it he attacked Mendelssohn and, less directly, Meyerbeer. He clearly resented the Jews’ mastery of money and banking, and argues that they should abandon their separate religion, and accept integration into German Christian society. Arthur de Gobineau, the French aristocrat and elitist, Aryanist and philosopher, came to stay with Wagner in 1881, but during a series of animated discussions the composer doesn’t seem to have accepted Gobineau’s view

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on the debilitating effect on Germans of mixing with other races. Wagner looked to resurrect his people’s greatness by refinding its essence and its traditions rather than by trying to create a master race.

Hegel, who Wagner was reading on the barricades in Dresden in 1848, had preached that understanding the spirit of a nation was vital to the personal fulfilment of its people.

Although their lands were politically divided, Germans had long fostered a sense of national identity. The execution of Konradin, the last Hohenstaufen Emperor, in Naples in 1268 marked the beginning of what they called the ‘streckliche kaiserlöse Zeit’, the terrible period with no Emperor. During this time the legend grew that Friedrich Barbarossa was going to rise from the dead to save Germany. A mountain in the Kyffhäuser range represents his sleeping form. As he turned to The Ring, Wagner was planning two prose dramas, one on Barbarossa, and the other a dramatised life of Christ. He saw himself as the deliverer of the German nation, identifying himself with both Christ and Barbarossa.

Wagner’s projected life of Christ has particular significance when we remember that, like most educated Germans, he had read David Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835), in which Christ’s miracles are presented as myths, and Christianity is compared to its pagan competitors. Wagner saw Christ as the founder of a religion of compassion, in contrast to the Jewish religion of laws. This fact illuminates the opposition of love and the law in Die Walküre, and the struggle in Wotan between his love for his children and his position as Chief God, Upholder of Treaties. It also reminds us of the importance placed on human compassion.

In the great scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde, when she tells us that she acts in the world as Wotan’s will, we cannot easily escape the parallel with God the Father and

God the Son, particularly when, later, Wotan removes his daughter’s divinity and places her as his agent in the world of mortal men; mortal men who, he hopes, will perform the act from which he is debarred, the recapture of the ring from the dragon Fafner.

Wagner was deeply sensitive to the legacy of the Middle Ages to German art.

In Meistersinger, Walther von Stoltzing, the young poet, liberates music from the fetters imposed by the starchy bourgeois mastersingers, and proudly traces his ancestry back to Walther von der Vogelweide (ca.1170-1230) whom Heine called the greatest German lyric poet. Wagner based the story of The Ring on subtle variations of the Nibelungenlied, the great medieval epic poem, interspersed with episodes from the Icelandic Eddas, stories of titanic battles between elemental forces.

Wagner saw his music as liberating the German Volk. He wanted his operas to be as popular as football has become; he wanted opera houses to be open to the people, to be available to everyone. Writing for the Volk, Wagner naturally turned to a folk idiom, which would be familiar to them. In doing so he tapped into the movement rediscovering German folk art, known to us from stories like Hansel & Gretel or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, collected by the brothers Grimm, and, at Wagner’s time, recently published.

Wagner was too great an artist to bear simple labelling. As a nationalist he looked back to the Middle Ages, when he sensed Germany had been great, rather than forward to any time when he thought it should try to be dominant. It was his misfortune to have been Hitler’s favourite composer. We should not judge one of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century on the uses to which his art was put in the twentieth.

MICHAEL FONTES

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Fricka approaches in anger (1910) Ar thur Rackham (1867–1939)

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B O O K N O W A T G LY N D E B O U R N E . C O M

TIMELY KNITTING 1808 Sep Covent Garden theatre burns down 1809 June Richard Monckton Milnes born. An immensely cultured man with a passing interest in Psychical Research and a persistent interest in Florence Nightingale, he eventually takes “no” for an answer and marries John Crewe’s daughter.

Seven years later, in 1858, MR’s father, Robert, was born. (Later titled Marquess of Crewe, but for these pages, he is Robert) Sept 18 The second Covent Garden theatre opens. It has taken less than a year to build 1811 Benjamin Lumley born, son of Jewish merchant Louis Levy. More later . . .

1813 May Wagner born, Leipzig

Cartoon by James Gillray (1756-1815) John Kemble, his brother and sister, Sarah Siddons, beg outside Nor thumberland House and receive £10,000.

Covent Garden Theatre burns in the background

The people who brought us to the woods at West Horsley Place are knitted with Queen Victoria’s journals, operatic rivalries, conflagrations, taxes, tunnels, tortoises and our three composers: Wagner, Puccini, Janáček.

1831–1836 Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle: ‘In the evening we reached the island of S Pedro [off Chile]. A fox, of a kind said to be peculiar to the island, and very rare, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching . . . that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer’ Darwin comments on the taste of the tortoise varities. 40 tortoises are kept on HMS Beagle for food, as souvenirs and scientific specimens 1834 Children aged14 clean chimnies – though apprentices under 10 are outlawed 1835 Hungerford Crewe at 23 inherits Jacobean Crewe Hall set in countryside. On his death his nephew, Robert (MR’s father) inherits

Crewe Hall in its Jacobean guise. By 1913 when the King and Queen stayed with Mary Roxburghe’s parents, it had been greatly altered

Oct Verdi born, Le Roncole

1838 June Queen Victoria’s journal QVJ ‘Lord Melbourne told me they had come to a decision about these Peers for the Coronation . . . he thinks not more than eight; there were 16 at the last, and 15 at the one before, but he thinks that that was a good deal . . . I asked if Lord Mulgrave was to be made Marquis of Normanby; Melbourne replied in the affirmative . . . he and Lord Dundas would be the only advancements . . . Of Lord King’s and Lord Crewe’s [Hungerford’s] wishing to be made Earls, Lord M could not see why.’

Nov Brno railway station is tested; opens 1839

Brno railway station

1837 Crewe railway station opens – one of the first. Victoria at 18 becomes Queen

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Oct 15 ‘I sent for Albert; he came to the Closet where I was alone, and after a few minutes I said to him, that I thought he must be aware why I wished them to come here,- and that it would make me too happy if he would consent to what I wished (to marry me); we embraced each other over and over again, . . . Oh! how I adore and love him, I cannot say!! . . .I told him it was a great sacrifice,- which he wouldn’t allow’ 1840 Feb 10 V & A marry. A ‘rink mania’ sees artificial rinks made by mixing hog’s lard and salts Dec 30 QVJ ‘We drove to Frogmore & Albert pushed me in a sledge chair on the ice & it went with such rapidity. I had never been on the ice before.

I then walked up & down, whilst Albert & the others skated; & I watched them playing hockey — Saw Ld Melbourne at ½ p. 4 . . .— Albert who had been skating again, read to me, whilst I lay down & knitted. The Baby was brought down. Looking very nice & pretty. We then sang together.’

The Frankfurt terminus of the Taunus railway, 1840

Oct 14 Queen Victoria is in love. QVJ ‘. . . Then I asked, if I hadn’t better tell Albert of my decision soon, in which Lord M. agreed; how? I asked, for that in general such things were done the other way . . . ’

New York City: The Skating Pond, 1862

1839 Oct Fleeing his creditors, Wagner arrives in London en route to Paris. ‘We shuddered through a ghastly English Sunday, and wound up with a train trip (our very first) to Gravesend’ and on to Boulogne. For the next 25 years, Wagner would be in debt – usually on the run

James Barry gets to work on Houses of Parliament 1840 Frankfurt terminus of Taunus railway, one of Germany’s first, financed by the Rothschilds 1842 The owner of Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket dies and Lumley is ‘persuaded to take the burthen of the management . . . the sole direction of the great Italian Opera House in London was henceforward placed in my hands’ 1843 Dutchman première John Calcott Horsley (b1817) makes the first printed christmas card

July 20 Queen Victoria visits Her Majesty’s. Lumley: ‘not only was this the first state visit since Her Majesty’s accession, but for more than ten years no monarch had appeared in state at the opera house’ QVJ ‘Gave Winterhalter a long sitting for the full length portrait . . . At ¼ p. 7 we went with same suite as last time, in state, to the Opera. We were most kindly Received. Went home at ¼ p. 12’ The Theatres Act removes the advantages of

Wapping to Rotherhithe tunnel

Wapping to Rotherhithe tunnel opens

‘patent’ theatres. Thus Covent Garden can rival Her Majesty’s which has been the focus for opera 1844 May The Glaciarium, off Tottenham Court Road, is the first mechanically frozen ice rink: a concrete base with layers of earth, cow hair and timber planks. Oval copper pipes, carrying glycerine with ether, nitrogen peroxide and water, when covered by water freezes the water into ice. The process was used to freeze meat for import from Australia and NZ

The first Christmas card John Callcott Horsley RA (1817-1903)

Dec Wagner campaigns for the removal of the remains of Weber from London to Dresden.

‘It had become known that the insignificant coffin which contained Weber’s ashes had been disposed of in such a careless way in a remote corner of St. Paul’s, that it was feared it might soon become impossible to identify it’ 1845 Aug 17 QVJ Mainz (Hotel de l’Europe) ‘We had to receive old Baron Anselm de Rothschild, a great man at Frankfort.’ His brother Nathan Mayer is MR’s great-great-grandfather 1846 Lumley ‘a momentous crisis for the theatre . . . a second Italian Opera House . . . the enormous preparations going on for the restoration and embellishment of Covent Garden Theatre. A struggle for life or death was at hand and every nerve had to be braced to wage the struggle effectively.’ Lumley’s conductor decamps to Covent Garden with most of the orchestra Lumley advertises a new opera Tempest by Mendelssohn who had clearly refused the offer.

Mendelssohn’s death in 1847 is a lucky escape 1847 Gas lighting introduced to Brno

Apr 20 QVJ ‘Baron Benst sat next to me & talked of Bavaria & the strange doings which have been going on there for the last 3 months: [Ludwig I] the King’s passion for Lola Montes, a Spanish dancer of bad character, (in fact Irish) who has become the cause of immense changes, such as the downfall of the Jesuits, & a change of Govt, quite contrary to what the King used formerly to like & act upon’ Jul 22 Verdi conducts premiere of Masnadieri in Lumley’s theatre. V&A are there with Duke of Wellington and much aristocracy. QVJ ‘the music is very inferior & common place. Lablache [her singing teacher] acted the part of Maximilian Moor, in which he looked fine, but too fat for the starved old man’ 1847-1858 Lionel de Rothschild (son of Nathan Mayer) elected MP. Being required to swear the Christian oath prevents him from taking his seat.

Queen Victoria 1844 Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-73)

Apr 6 Covent Garden (renamed Royal Italian Opera) re-opens with Rossini’s Semiramide

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A Bill to remove the problem is repeatedly defeated in the Lords and finally it is agreed each house will decide its own oath. Thus, Lionel becomes the first practising Jew to sit as an MP

1852 May Celebrated mezzo Johanna Wagner, niece (by adoption) of the composer, is contracted by Lumley.

Covent Garden tempts her away with a larger fee. Lawsuits ensue. Johanna goes home having not sung a note

1848 Ludwig I abdicates in favour of his eldest son, Maximilian, father of Wagner’s saviour, Ludwig

May RW writes poem-libretto for The Ring in one month

1849 Paris Meyerbeer (hated by Wagner) capitalises on the roller skating craze, inserts a skating ballet into Le prophète. Paris Opera’s new electric arc-lights are used to create a sunrise and conflagration Dresden Creditors issue a warrant for Wagner’s arrest; he flees 1850 Dvorák, aged 9, sees his first train. It was carrying soldiers on a branch line of the Prague – Dresden line near his small country house at Vysoká, not far from J anáček’s birthplace : ‘I [Dvorak] especially like the huge and clear ingenuity with which the locomotive is constructed! It consists of many parts created by many different components. Each of them has its importance; each of them is right in place.

Even the smallest screw is in the correct place . . . Everything has a purpose and role and the result is amazing. Such a locomotive can be put on the track and filled with water and coal. One person moves with a small lever and the big levers start to move too. Even though the carriages weigh a few thousand quintals, the locomotive runs as quickly as a rabbit with them!”

Aug 28 Weimar Liszt – close friend and early supporter of Wagner – conducts première of Lohengrin to celebrate the centenary of Goethe’s birth. It is a hit 1850 Wagner publishes anonymously antisemitic tract Jewishness in Music

The Railway Station (1862) William Powell Frith (1819-1909)

1851 Singer sewing machine; Jews in Norway granted religious freedom; first issue New York Times; Cubitt designs Kings X; repeal of Window Tax. Houses taxed instead

1853 Steinway piano makers in NY; opening of Vienna Trieste railway through the Alps; Lumley overwhelmed by financial problems flees to France 1854 – 3 July J anáček born Hukvaldy, Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire); close to Brno 1855 Jan RW ‘1 began the instrumentation of the Walküre’ Mar RW lured to London by cash. Concerts exceptionally well attend including V&A. RW ‘Just think, in Germany the police are after me and treat me like a highway robber and the Queen of England is pleased to make my acquaintance’.

He loves Regent’s Park ‘the animals are magnificent’. Fog in the middle of June 1856 Russian railway construction commences; Karl Bechstein founds piano company in Berlin Mar 5 Covent Garden catches fire – again. Lumley dashes back to London to fill the vacuum QVJ ‘After luncheon, drove with . . the Equerries riding, to Covent Garden, where we witnessed indeed a dreadful & melancholy scene. We went into the little court, where we had so often been, which remains intact, & here found poor Mr Gye, trembling, & ready to weep, — some of the Fire Brigade, & Police, beginning with the Inspector. They said we could get out of the carriage, which we did, & saw what is very absurdly, but not untruly described, by the newspapers.

Mr Gye helped me up the stone stairs, over smouldering “débris”, to where one could see that once splendid Opera House, — now a mere shell & heap of ruins! It was smoking & still burning in places, & roofless. Truly a melancholy sight, though at the same time interesting.’.

1858 Jan 12 Robert, MR’s father and Bamber’s great grandfather born, 16 Upper Brook Street May 8 3rd Covent Garden theatre opens QVJ ‘at ¼ to 10 we started . . . for the new Battersea Bridge station, where we got into the train, which brought us in about 20 m. to the Crystal Palace . . . At ½ p. 5 went to the Houses of Parlt, over which we went in great detail, & she was much interested. — We dined en famille & went with our guests to the Opera, to see 2 acts of the Huguenots’ Lumley calls it a day. ‘Singers of commanding talent . . . are more rare, alas! The orchestra, having been augmented in proportion as vocal talent has waned, now constitutes the leading feature, epecially at Covent Garden, where its masses of sound serve but to cover the deficiencies of artists.’

Jun 2 Astronomer Giovanni Battista Donati observes a comet which becomes the talk of everywhere

L’Avenue de l’Opera, Paris, lit by lamps ca1876

1857 Jul 1 QVJ ‘Such sad accounts from India — the mutiny amongst native troops spreading, sad murders of Europeans’

Donati’s Comet 1858

June / July Johanna Wagner returns to London. QVJ ‘to the old Opera, Her Majesty’s Theatre, which has opened about 5 weeks ago. We saw ‘I Capuletti & Montecchi’ in which Mlle Wagner, as Romeo, sings & acts beautifully, & looks extremely well. —’

Dec 22 Puccini born

Things looking up for Wagner – after 12 years, the warrant for his arrest is rescinded. Simon Callow’s excellent book Being Wagner explains: ‘This is where Wagner becomes almost incomprehensible to mere mortals. His domestic affairs in tatters; the Paris production of Tannhäuser a spectacular disaster; Tristan & Isolde, Rheingold, Valkyrie and two thirds of Siegfried complete but unperformed – and he embarks on yet another massive project. ‘I know what I’ll do” he seems to say to himself when things are going particularly badly, “I’ll write a 4½ hour opera” [Meistersinger] Dec 14 Prince Albert dies 1863 US abolition of slavery; Broadmoor for the criminally insane; opening of Paddington to Farringdon underground railway – the first in the world 1864 Lumley in his memoirs explains why his theatre failed. ‘the increased numbers of those who compose the wealthy residents of London occasion infinitely more entertainments . . . countless attractions offered during daylight hours leaves less and less appetite for pursuits connected with Art: déjeuners, flower-shows, exhibitions of all kinds, reviews . . . occupy

The Bellelli family (1861) Edgar Degas (1834–1917 Bellelli was an Italian patriot exiled from Naples, living in Florence

1861 Feb Crown Prince Ludwig sees Lohengrin in Munich.

Dec Sees Tannhäuser. He has found a reason for living

St. Valentine’s Day John Callcott Horsley (1817–1903)

1859 Hungerford Crewe opposes the new railway line Newcastle-under-Lyme to Wrexham, which passes through his estate. By the time of his death the countryside to the west of Crewe Hall was a major railway junction

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After a three day illness, Ludwig’s father dies. Callow tells the tale: ‘One of the first actions of the young king was to send Pfistermeister to find Wagner. The elderly courtier after an epic quest – Vienna, Zurich – he finally found the composer in Stuttgart. With due formality, the royal secretary handed Wagner a ring and a photograph with an accompanying letter . . . While Wagner and his Stuttgart chums were celebrating this astounding turn of events at supper that evening, news came that Meyerbeer had just died.

Wagner knew better than most how to recognise the intervention of fate . . . By the wave of the Bavarian treasury wand, Wagner’s debts were wiped out and Wagner installed in a three-storey house on Lake Starnberg.’

One of Sophie’s engagement photos. It was all about hair

young and old; and finally, the late dinner consumes the space during which the two first acts of the opera ought be going on . . . A great operatic establishment in this country, unlike similar enterprises on the Continent, is and must remain a matter of private speculation. In other countries the enormous expenses are often lightened by Government subventions. In some cases the operatic theatres are court theatres or are wholly in the hands of the head of the state. . . But Parliaments are chary of granting public monies for theatres. An operatic manager in England is obliged to take the whole risks of a vast speculation upon his own shoulders.’

1865 Munich Première of Tristan conducted by von Bulow. Wagner’s extravagances and the relationship with von Bulow’s wife Cosima are so scandalous that locals nickname him Lola II or Lolette after Lola Montez. Ludwig is forced to ask Wagner to leave Germany.

Two days later, Wagner is on a train (yes, a train) to Switzerland.

Ludwig talks of abdicating in order to follow his hero but ‘Wagner swiftly dissuaded him. An ex-king was of no use to him.’ (Callow) 1866 19 Jan QVJ ‘Ld Augustus Loftus dined, He does not give on encouraging account of the young King of Bavaria, who seems to be so strange, so mystical, & only living for music.’

Jan Huge fire at Crewe Hall. E M Barry, son of Sir Charles Barry, undertakes restoration. Budget: £150,000 (£12.9m today)

He was the photographer

4 May RW ‘Alas, he is so handsome and wise, soulful and lovely, that I fear that his life must melt away in this vulgar world like a fleeting dream of the gods.’

Jul Bavaria fights with Austria in the Austro-Prussian war. Callow: ‘Ludwig was not of a military disposition, though he was rather keen on soldiers. Once, he spotted a sentry at the Residenz who looked tired, so he sent out a sofa for him. . . Wagner persuaded him to be a king and lead his army, which he did, briefly’ 1867 Jan 22 Ludwig is engaged to his cousin Sophie of Bavaria.

Repeatedly he postpones the wedding and in October cancels. Fret not – she is having an affair with photographer Edgar Hanfstaengl, hired to take her engagement portraits Dec 6 Her Majesty’s Theatre destroyed by fire 1868 Munich Première Meistersinger Britain End of public hangings

Meanwhile, Richard has a new baby, Eva (at Tribschen)

Mar Ludwig visits Wagner in Villa Tribschen, Switzerland

1869 Britain Repeal of tax on hair powder 1869 Sep 22 and 1870 Jun 26 Munich Ludwig refusing to wait any longer, demands previews of Rheingold and Valkyrie.

Wagner argues they MUST be part of the cycle and refuses to attend. They take place anyway 1872 May Foundation stone of Bayreuth Festspielhaus 1874 J anáček enrols at Prague organ school. With no piano in his room he makes do with a keyboard drawn on a tabletop 1875 Mar 17 London Lumley dies leaving less than £1,000 1876 Schliemann excavates Mycenae; Melville Bissell patents a a carpet sweeper with a central brush, rubber wheels, vacuum technology; compulsory school for age 5-10

Heinrich Schliemann excavates Mycenae (1876)

Aug 14 Inauguration of Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Walküre presented in the first complete Ring cycle 1877 Swan Lake 1878 Red Flag Act limits road vehicles to 4mph and requires a man with red flag to precede them. Karl Benz’s motorized tricycle (1885) reaches 8.1mph 1880 Robert Crewe suprises everyone and marries 1881 MR’s mother, Peggy Primrose born to 5th Earl of Rosebery (PM 1894-95) and Hannah Rothschild, daughter of Mayer Amschel. On his death, it was said Hannah was Britain’s richest woman Theatre fires in Nice, Prague and Vienna

Exploratory work to build a Channel tunnel. On the English side a 7ft diameter boring machine digs 6,211ft tunnel and on the French side, a similar machine digs 5,476ft (from Sangatte). The project is abandoned May 1882 as British assert the tunnel will compromise national defences. Brexit 1882 Puccini to his great-uncle ‘My studies are going well . . .

The cold up here is worse than in previous years . . . I’m asking you for a favour: I must study in the evenings . . . my room is cold I need a bit of heat. I’ve no money . . . I need help to buy one of those cheap charcoal-burning stoves . . .’

Her Majesty’s Theatre presents British première of The Ring 1883 Feb 13 Wagner dies. Doctor’s report: ‘It is self-evident that the numerous psychical agitations to which Wagner was daily disposed by his peculiar mental constitution and disposition, his sharply defined attitude to a number of burning questions of art, science and politics and his remarkable social life did much to hasten his unfortunate end.’ Callow: ‘In other words, Wagner died of being Wagner.’

Mar 27 John Brown, personal servant, dies. QVJ ‘Went to a short service before good Brown’s remains were removed, & placed some flowers on the coffin. It upset me much, & it is most painful to think I shall never see him again’ Aug 12 The last Quagga dies in Amsterdam. Heavily hunted by Dutch settlers in South Africa, breeding programs in Europe were unsuccessful. The last wild population (Orange Free State) died out by 1878

A quagga (1804) Samuel Daniell (1775-1811)

Jul The new Brno theatre opens (the previous one having burned down). It is the first public building in the world to use Edison’s electric lamps. A power station with four huge dynamos (made in New York) is positioned 300m from the theatre to minimise noise. Thomas Edison isn’t present at the opening but visits 25 years later. Several J anáček premières take place – but not Jenufa

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Aug 19 Saumur Coco Chanel born Oct Opening of Metropolitan Opera, New York 1884 GP’s first opera Le Villi. GP gives Elvira piano lessons.

Two years later she is having his baby and leaves her husband Chicago First skyscraper: innovative use of structural steel in a metal frame design 1885 Feb 2 Horsley & Ockham & Ripley station opens. The name was simplified to Horsley December 1914, but some timetables gave the full title: Horsley for East Horsley, West Horsley, Ockham and Ripley Aug 11 Vichy Robert Crewe’s father dies after a rich meal and bottle of champagne

1887 May 25 Fire at the Opéra-Comique 84 killed. Matisse in the stampede for the exits ‘fought his way down to the ground floor, where he found thirty bodies piled up against a glass-paneled door that opened inwards’. Matisse attends the rebuilt Opéra-Comique for free as part of a claque hired to clap on first nights. He applies for a job as a guard (but doesn’t get it) Sept Robert’s wife dies leaving him with 4 small children.

The only son dies two years later 1889 Mar Eiffel Tower is finished and GP visits Jul GP is sent by his publisher to Bayreuth ‘armed with a pair of scissors . . . to make the necessary cuts to Meistersinger to alter it like a suit of clothes to fit the good people of Milan’ 1890 Aug 5 QVJ Osborne House ‘Out in the pony chair after breakfast, & I met Marie. — The beautiful German Band

The hall of mirrors at Ludwig’s new palace at Chiemsee 1885

Jun 18 QVJ ‘Had an interesting letter from Vicky, about the poor King of Bavaria, who though quite rational about many things, had been really quite mad, & dangerously so. She says he might already 2 years ago have been restrained, been put under a Doctor’s care & been got to abdicate. But it had been badly done, & far too abruptly. —’

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen 1885

1886 Jun 14 QVJ ‘Received a telegram with the dreadful news, that the poor King of Bavaria, who had just lately been declared unfit to reign, owing to his extraordinary eccentricities, restrain his extravagancies, pay his debts, or see anyone, &c his Uncle Pce Luitpold being made Regent, — had been found drowned last night in the Lake of Starnberg, close to the Castle of Berg where he had been taken, & placed under certain restraint.

His doctor, Dr Gudden, who was with him, was also drowned.

Too awful! We were horror struck. He was Louis’ 1rst cousin, as the Queen of Bavaria & Pss Charles of Hesse were sisters.

Surely the whole thing must have been very badly managed.

Telegraphed asking for more details.– After dinner, Beatrice & Evelyn M. played beautifully on 2 Pianos. – Further telegrams from Mr Drummond, every detail of which adds to the horror of the event. – Ordered Court mourning at once. —’

Coco Chanel 1936

Sep Ludwig completes his equivalent of Versailles at Chiemsee, costing the equivalent of £154m. He visits just once

Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) riding his giant tortoise

The fire at the Opéra Comique, Paris 1887

played again during & some little time after luncheon. They play Wagner splendidly. Wolthen’s Abschied from the Walkühre we made them play each day. —’

1893 Feb 9 La Scala, Milan Première Verdi’s Falstaff. Ticket prices 30 times greater than usual. Royalty, aristocracy, critics, leading figures from the world over are present Jul GP to publisher ‘I have bought a bicycle – payable in monthly instalments. Please pay on my behalf 70 lire as the first instalment.’ Three years later he is a superstar Edvard Munch The Scream (first of four) 1894 Uncle Crewe dies of flu and leaves his estates (including Crewe Hall and 23 Hill Street) to his nephew Robert, MR’s father 1894 Mar Lord Rosebery is PM (for 15 months) 1896 Jan 25 Auguste & Louis Lumière short film (50 seconds) The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. The audience are terrified

The Scream (1893) Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

1892 Work starts on Blackwall Tunnel

Aug 6 QVJ ‘Alix came to see me, & took leave. They are going to London tomorrow morning to start for Bayreuth. —’ 1897 Apr 22 Manchester UK première La Bohème in English by Carl Rosa Opera Company supervised by Puccini 1898 Prague Bohème première. There is no clear evidence Janáček was there. However scholar Jan Smaczny detects a melodic similarity between Jenufa final scene and the closing bars of Bohème Margaret Etienne Hannah Primrose and Robert Crewe meet.

PP writing in 1955 ‘…we met at a dinner party at the Asquiths, though I had known him at a distance as a child. We talk at dinner and … Margot Asquith prophesied our marriage. We became engaged at the coming out ball of his daughter Annabel who was 8 months younger than myself and our marriage was strongly opposed by my grandmother (the Duchess of Cleveland).

She thought the difference in age and three step daughters were insuperable obstacles to married happiness. She did not know

Poster advertising the Lumière brothers cinematograph in Paris. (1895) Henri Brispot (1846-1928)

Feb 1 Turin Première La Bohème. Fascinated by technological advances, Puccini writes Scossa Elettrica, a humorous piece with electric shocks

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that age does not affect affinity – the three stepdaughters they became my dearest friends.’

Robert & Peggy marry in Westminster Abbey

1899 Mar 29 Nice QVJ ‘After dinner a great treat: the celebrated Italian composer Leoncavallo came & played to us out of his new opera La Bohème, & also 3 pieces out of Pagliacci. (Leoncavallo regarded Puccini as a plagiarist. But Puccini would be pall-bearer at his funeral.)

1902 Siberian peasants by the Trans Siberian railway

April 15 MR’s parents, Robert and Peggy, marry in Westminster Abbey, with 10 bridesmaids and 600 guests.

James Pope-Hennessey: ‘Hours before the service, Parliament Sq was filled with a dence mass of sightseers. Boys climbed the trees and lamp-posts near the Abbey. London came to a standstill . . . Women in the crowd pressed forward to get a glimpse of the wedding dress, which was embroidered in diamonds and silver-thread in a design of primroses and wheat ears…that afternoon, the evening news appeared printed on sheets of primrose-yellow paper.’ They settle at 23 Hill Street Dec La Scala Milan Toscanini opens season with Italian première of Siegfried.

1900 Jan 14 Teatro Costanzi , Rome première Tosca Jul 12 GP in London for British première at Covent Garden.

GP: ‘complete triumph. . . It is cold here – quite like autumn” He visits the slums ‘which interested me very much’ and stays at the Rothschild’s. In later years he grew fond of London ‘immense movement, infernal, indescribable, Paris is nothing compared with it. … splendid theatres and entertainments in profusion. The city is hardly beautiful but fascinating’

1903 Feb Olga dies. Janáček dedicates Jenufa to her memory. Prague Janáček visits his doctor and sees Tosca.

It is said to have influenced Jenufa.

FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) factory opens with 35 staff and makes 24 cars. It heralds the dawn of Italian industrialisation

UK speed limit increases to 20 mph

1901 Jan 21 Queen Victoria dies

1904 May Dvorak, Janáček’s mentor and friend, dies.

J anáček is politically active

Jan 27 Verdi dies. GP hurries to Milan for the funeral May GP buys his first car De Dio-Bouton 5 CV Robert & Peggy buy Wharnecliffe House (renamed Crewe House) in Curzon Street Mayfair. James Pope-Hennessey: “a relic of old Mayfair that was destroyed between the two world wars by taxation, private cupidity, aristocratic egotism and a strange lack amongst Londoners of a collective sense of civic responsibility and historical pride. Crewe House was capacious with several drawing rooms and 17 bedrooms …

The main entrance, however was at the back of the house and approached by a narrow carriageway winding round into the courtyard. By removing a conservatory on the Curzon Street side of the house, inserting a new front door in its place and reconstructing an old laundry and some of the stables, they greatly improved the property.” Today it is the Saudi Embassy.

1902 GP fined for speeding on the Via Aurelia. A few months later he has a serious car crash Janáček takes daughter Olga to St Petersburg, to study Russian and get over a boyfriend. Three months later, Olga is very ill and her parents take her back to Brno

1904 Jan 21 Brno Première Jenufa (written over 10 years).

12 years passes before its first Prague performance.

1911 Feb Robert & Peggy have a son. A few days later, a fire breaks out in the roof of Crewe House. 14 fire engines, a 100 firemen plus Lord Crewe and his aristocratic neighbours succeed in bringing it under control by 1.15am. Peggy and her new son move to her father’s home in Berkeley Square.

1911 Crewe is created a marquess. He is unfavourably disposed to the idea of Women’s Suffrage but in 1918 changes his mind 1912 Jun 23 Maida Vale Alan Turing born Jun Sopwith Aviation Co created (at Brooklands) 1915 Mar 23 Lady Mary Crewe-Milnes born 1918 break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Moravia becomes part of Czechoslovakia 1920 Peggy appointed one of first UK women magistrates; Coco Chanel launches Chanel no5, the first perfume to feature a designer’s name

1923 Yehudi Menuhin, aged 7, débuts in San Francisco 1924 Jan GP’s throat bothers him “the tiny little pimple is trying to strangle me.”

Nov 4 GP drives his Lancia Lambda to Pisa station to take the train to Brussels for radium treatment and the removal of his larynx.

Nov 29 Puccini dies 1928 Aug 12 J anáček dies

Richard Crewe-Milnes (1911-22) Philip de László (1869-1937) Richard was Mary Roxburghe’s brother

1922 Robert & Peggy’s son Richard dies, aged 11

1931 MR’s parents sell Crewe Hall; downsizes to WHP 1933 Black Magic created by Rowntree; marketed as a courtship gift and an affordable version of a luxury product 1935 Oct 24 Mary marries 9th Duke of Roxburghe at Westminster Abbey

1945 Jun 20 Robert Crewe dies at WHP in ‘a room overlooking the flower garden and lined with books’. He had held many offices, among them Viceroy of Ireland, Secretary of State for India and Ambassador to France, and there would be 31 great-grandchildren (Bamber Gascoigne is one) 1953 Mary divorces – an opera in itself

Yehudi Menuhin in 1927

1937 Peggy Primrose: ‘Some years after the sale of Crewe Hall, he determined also to give up Crewe House and bought Argyll House, a rambling building by Leoni behind gates on the Kings Road.’

1967 Peggy Primrose dies; MR inherits WHP 1983 The Saudi government purchases Crewe House. MR took a philosophic view of the worldly goods with which she was endowed. When informed that Crewe House, sold by her father in 1937 for £90,000, was on the market again for £50 million, she replied ‘I will bear the news with fortitude’ MEMORIES OF MARY ROXBURGHE John Somerville: ‘I met MR at the Mentmore House Sale in 1977 when she introduced herself as “prime minister Rosebery’s granddaughter”. Later, at a Sotheby’s luncheon, though divorced she still took precedence as a duchess and so sat on the host’s right, with Countess Spencer on his left. I was on Mary’s right and, during the pudding, she said sotto voce “My dear, if I suddenly get up to go it is not because you are boring me, but I am not having her (indicating Lady Spencer with her spoons) do her usual and try – as she thinks she can, as the stepmother of our future Queen – to be the first to leave and pull rank on me’.

Richard Bigham, 4th Viscount Mersey (1934–2006) ‘Mary escaped major injuries in a car crash by being thrown through the open window of the car. Richard’s brother remembers her dressing as the Sugar Plum Fairy at a fancy dress ball.’

1928 poster

She was not prepared to give so much as an inch when it came to who she was, though she travelled to and from Bond Street by bus whereas Countess S arrived and departed in a chauffeured Rolls.’

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CHIlDREN Be under no illusion. I’ll be cruising along the Danube past the Black Forest before I’m 84. Raymond’s excited (I’ll introduce him soon).

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KIRKER MUSIC HOLIDAYS F O R D I S C E R N I N G T R AV E L L E RS Kirker Holidays offers an extensive range of independent and escorted music holidays. These include tours to leading festivals in Europe such as the Puccini Opera Festival in Torre del Lago, Grafenegg and the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, as well as Glyndebourne, Buxton and opera weekends in Vienna, Milan, Venice and New York.

We also host our own exclusive music festivals on land and at sea, and arrange short breaks with opera, ballet or concert tickets, to all the great classical cities in Europe.

THE VERDI FESTIVAL IN PARMA

OPERA & ART IN VIENNA

A SIX NIGHT HOLIDAY | 16 OCTOBER 2017

A FIVE NIGHT HOLIDAY | 20 JUNE 2017

The annual Verdi Festival takes place in one of Italy’s most beautiful historic cities, Parma. It is here in the countryside around Parma that Verdi was born, grew up and lived for much of his life.

The special charm of Parma’s Verdi Festival is that performances take place not just in the Teatro Regio, but also at the Teatro Verdi in Busseto and this year we shall see La traviata, Messa da Requiem and Jerusalem, with a further special performance of Stiffelio in the imposing Teatro Farnese within the ducal palace. We will be based at the 4* Hotel Palace Maria Luigia and there will be visits to the important art collection at the Palazzo della Pilotta, to Busseto, where we shall see the Villa Verdi and the Museo Nazionale Giuseppe Verdi, and to the nearby city of Cremona.

The undisputed centre of musical life from the 18th to the early 20th century, Vienna offers an unrivalled collection of great opera and concert venues, which play host to the world’s greatest performers throughout the year.

Our visit to the former Hapsburg capital includes Verdi’s Don Carlo with Placido Domingo as Rodrigo, and L’elisir di amore by Donizetti, featuring Bryn Terfel and Rolando Villazon. We will also attend the opening gala concert of the Grafenegg Festival, and visit the city’s important museums and galleries.

Price from £2,298 per person for six nights including flights, accommodation with breakfast, two lunches, two dinners, tickets for four performances, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Lecturer.

Price from £2,459 per person for five nights including flights, transfers, accommodation with breakfast, two lunches, three dinners, tickets for three concerts, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour leader.

OPERA AT LA FENICE, VENICE

LA SCALA, MILAN

FOUR NIGHT HOLIDAYS | 10 SEPTEMBER & 23 OCTOBER 2017

FOUR NIGHT HOLIDAYS | 3 OCTOBER & 1 NOVEMBER 2017

La Fenice is one of the world’s most historic opera houses. Originally built in 1790 it has twice burned down, in 1836 and again in 1996.

It reopened in 2003 and has been sensitively restored to its original splendour.

Performances in autumn 2017 include Verdi’s La traviata and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Our holiday will also include a series of walking tours taking in the finest churches and galleries in the city, including the jewel-like Santa Maria Miracoli, the Accademia, where we see works by the most important Venetian artists from the 14th to the 17th centuries and the more modern Peggy Guggenheim collection.

We shall be based at the 4* Deluxe Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal for the duration of our holiday.

Price from £1,797 per person for four nights including flights, transfers, accommodation with breakfast, two dinners, one first category opera ticket, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.

La Scala, Milan opened in 1778 with an opera by Salieri and since then many of the greatest Italian operas have received their first performance on its hallowed stage.

During autumn 2017 our holidays will include performances Handel’s Tamerlano and Weber’s Der Freischütz. Based at the 4* Hotel de la Ville in the heart of Milan’s historic centre, our tour also includes visits to the city’s Duomo, Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ at Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the wonderful La Scala Museum. We will also see the Basilica Sant’Ambrogio, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum and the Casa Verdi, a residence founded by Giuseppe Verdi for retired musicians and singers.

Price from £1,698 per person for four nights including flights, transfers, accommodation with breakfast, two dinners, one opera ticket in the stalls at La Scala, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.

Speak to an expert or request a brochure:

020 7593 2284 quote code GGR www.kirkerholidays.com

B RY N , Z E N

& F R I EN DS

K I N D S U P P O RT F RO M J A M E S & B É ATR I C E LU P TO N

BRYN TERFEL ∙ BASS-BARITONE ZENAIDA YANOWSKY ∙ PRINCIPAL, ROYAL BALLET HANNAH STONE ∙ HARPIST IAIN BURNSIDE ∙ PIANIST

F R I D AY 16 J U N E 2 0 17 WITH

AT

WEST HORSLE Y PL ACE

SINFONIA CYMRU

S I N F O N I A C Y M R U , founded in 1996 by Gareth Jones, marked its

20th year appearing with Bryn Terfel and Joseph Calleja at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod and as part of Wales Millennium Centre’s Festival of Voice. Alongside Danielle de Niese, Alison Balsom, Sting and Michael Sheen they celebrated Bryn Terfel’s 50th birthday at the Royal Albert Hall.

A young, innovative chamber group of professional musicians Sinfonia Cymru’s repertoire ranges from Bach to Birdsong Cân yr Adar (fusing jazz, classical and soul-folk) and The Freddie Mercury Project. New commissions include Murmurations (Mark Boden), H20 (Gareth Moorcraft) and Queen Concertante (Vlad Maistorovici).

In the last year, they have been broadcast on BBC One Wales, BBC 4, S4C, Sky Arts, Classic FM at Bridgewater Hall, Royal Festival Hall and Birmingham Symphony Hall, with artists including Alina Ibragimova, Benjamin Grosvenor, Rachel Podger, Carlo Rizzi, Paul Watkins, Llyr Williams.

For Deutsche Grammophon they recorded Blessing with Catrin Finch and Cantata Memoria by Sir Karl Jenkins, marking 50 years since the Aberfan disaster.

Creative Learning projects include Boats, Tunnels & Bridges, a multimedia composition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Severn Bridge, the Brynglas Tunnel and the last Aust ferry crossing.

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BRYN TERFEL

BASS-BARITONE

W

elsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel has performed in all the great opera houses and concert halls of the world. He sang Tevye in Grange Park Opera’s 2015 production of Fiddler on the Roof. In 2017 he received a knighthood.

Recent engagements include Scarpia Tosca (Opera de Paris, Deutsche Oper Berlin), Hans Sachs Meistersinger (ROH), Dulcamara Elisir and Wotan Ring Cycle (Wiener Staatsoper). Other recent highlights include title role Sweeney Todd (ENO), Méphistophélès Damnation de Faust (Opera de Paris), title role Boris Godunov (ROH), Hans Sachs Meistersinger (WNO), Leporello Giovanni and Scarpia Tosca (La Scala) and Wotan Ring Cycle (ROH and Met. NY).

Known for his versatility as a concert performer Bryn’s highlights include the opening ceremony of Wales Millennium Centre, BBC Last Night of the Proms, Royal Variety Show and Gala Concert with Andrea Bocelli in Central Park, New York. He is a Grammy, Classical Brit and Gramophone Award winner with a discography encompassing operas of Mozart, Wagner and Strauss, and over fifteen solo discs including Lieder, American musical theatre, Welsh songs and sacred repertory. Interests: visiting the Barbican, Southbank centre, ROH and ENO, golf, football, whisky, wine and snooker.

of English Song. In 2014, Delphian released Burnside’s complete Rachmaninov songs with seven outstanding Russian artists.

Burnside has written / devised a number of highly individual theatre works which intertwine drama, prose, poetry and music: A Soldier and a Maker, based on the life of Ivor Gurney (Barbican and Cheltenham Festival), Journeying Boys (Milton Court Theatre), Why does the Queen die? (Oxford Lieder Festival), Shining Armour, reinventing Brahms’s Die schöne Magelone through the eyes of Clara Schumann.

IAIN BURNSIDE

P

PIANIST

ianist and broadcaster, Iain Burnside has performed with many of the world’s leading singers. His recordings straddle repertoire from Schoenberg to Judith Weir with a special place reserved for the highways and byways

This season, Burnside appears at the Rosenblatt Recitals, Leeds Lieder Festival, Lied Festival Victoria de Los Ángeles (Barcelona), with Robin Tritschler and Roderick Williams (Wigmore Hall).

In demand as teacher and animateur, Burnside also works on the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at Covent Garden, National Opera Studio and Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.

ZENAIDA YANOWSKY

PRINCIPAL, ROYAL BALLET

R

aised in Spain, Zenaida joined Paris Opera in 1992 and then joined The Royal Ballet in 1994, promoted to Principal, 2001.

Zenaida has performed leading roles in classical, dramatic and contemporary repertories, and has created roles for and worked with choreographers including Baldwin, Brandstrup, Bruce, Davies, Duato, Ek, Flindt, Forsythe, De Frutos, Kylián, Liang, Marston, McGregor, Page, Ratmansky, Scarlett, Tetley, Tharp, Tuckett, Yanowsky and Wheeldon (including Mother/Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Paulina in Winter’s Tale). Zenaida has danced in several short films including Duet and The Sandman (Channel 4), Riot at the Rite (BBC), Leda & the Swan (Deloitte Ignite 14) and 52 portrait (Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion). She has collaborated on exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery and the Tate Modern. Zenaida recently won The National Dance Award for her role in Elizabeth. Interests: people and looking through the window on a moving train. She also excels at wasting time and gets irritated about it.

HANNAH STONE

F

HARPIST

ormer Harpist to HRH Prince of Wales, Hannah studied at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Mozarteum Salzburg and Welsh College of Music & Drama.

A National and International Eisteddfod winner, Hannah was appointed principal harpist with the Schleswig Holstein Festival Orchestra. She has since appeared at Barbican Centre, LSO St Luke’s, St John’s Smith Square, Museum of London, National Concert Hall in Dublin, St David’s Hall, Wales Millennium Centre, Edinburgh International Festival, Litchfield Festival, at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, Verbier Festival and most recently in Toronto and Vancouver.

At the North Wales International Music Festival, Hannah gave the première of St Asaph’s Dance by Karl Jenkins and Amaterasu by Gareth Glyn.

Hannah performed for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee tour of Wales, 2014 NATO Conference at Cardiff Castle (where guests included Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Barack Obama) and Lord Snowdon’s memorial service at St. Margaret’s, Westminster.

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The celebrated violinist Yehudi Menuhin founded his School in Surrey in 1963 to provide a place for musically-gifted children from around the world to develop their talents to the highest level within a nurturing and stimulating academic environment, regardless of their economic background.

We depend on a broad range of generous donors, including our dedicated group of Friends. Every gift, no matter the size, makes a huge impact on the lives of our young musicians.

To become a Friend of the School, or to find out more about how you can support the future of classical music, please contact:

development@yehudimenuhinschool.co.uk

The Menuhin Hall, our 300-seat concert venue, showcases the incredible talent of our students. We are also proud to be a part of the increasingly thriving, local arts community, playing host to performances by orchestras and ensembles from across the region, and holding concerts by artists of international renown such as alumnae Nicola Benedetti and Tasmin Little.

The Yehudi Menuhin School Stoke d’Abernon, Cobham Surrey, KT11 3QQ

To book for our 2017/18 season, please visit:

01932 864739 admin@yehudimenuhinschool.co.uk

www.themenuhinhall.co.uk

www.yehudimenuhinschool.co.uk

Cranmore School Independent Preparatory School for girls and boys 2 ½ - 13

Music is strong, valued and

highly praised by parents.

- Good Schools Guide

Developing

Creative

Potential Our pupils are delighted to be performing in Tosca.

Music scholarships for year 3 entry

Cranmore actively promotes an enjoyment and love of music throughout the school for every level of ability.

www.cranmoreprep.co.uk 01483 280340 admissions@cranmoreprep.co.uk West Horsley, Surrey KT24 6AT

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BIOGRAPHIES

STEPHEN BARLOW Conductor Walküre Studied: Trinity‚ Cambridge and GSMD. Was co-founder of Opera 80. Has conducted La Fanciulla del West, Peter Grimes, Boheme, Falstaff, Norma, Capriccio‚ Rusalka‚ Tristan und Isolde‚ Pique Dame, Queen of Spades and Carmélites for Grange Park Opera. Current Artistic Director of Buxton Festival where he has conducted Leonore, Lucia di Lammermoor, Louise, Jacobin, La Colombe, Intermezzo, La Princesse Jaune and The Barber of Baghdad. Recent and future projects include La Cenerentola (Oper Stuttgart), Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Beijing), Carmen, Faust and Nabucco (Australia), Bluebeard’s Castle (Auckland), Koanga and Medée (Wexford Festival); Otello (Birmingham Opera Company), The Rape of Lucretia and Owen Wingrave (Irish Youth Opera) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (GSMD). He has appeared at Glyndebourne, ROH, ENO, Opera Northern Ireland, Scottish Opera and Opera North as well as conducting his own opera King (Canterbury Cathedral). Recordings include Joseph James’ Requiem and his own composition Rainbow Bear with his wife‚ Joanna Lumley‚ as narrator.

Interests: cars, wine, the Dumfriesshire hills and cricket.

SUSAN BULLOCK Kostelnička Jen˚u fa Susan was awarded a CBE in June 2014. She has sung Brünnhilde at Oper Frankfurt, Wiener Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper, Opera Australia, New National Theatre Tokyo, Canadian Opera Company and ROH where, under Antonio Pappano, she became the first ever soprano to sing four consecutive Ring Cycles. She has sung Elektra with Fabio Luisi, Semyon Bychkov, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Mark Elder and Edo de Waart. Recent highlights include Minnie La Fanciulla del West (ENO), Mrs Lovett Sweeney Todd (Houston Grand Opera) Emilia Marty The Makropulos Affair (Oper Frankfurt), Elizabeth I Gloriana (ROH) and Mother and The Witch Hänsel und Gretel (Opera North).

Interests: jazz, cooking and playing the piano.

JOSEPH CALLEJA Cavaradossi Tosca Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja appears this season as Pollione Norma (ROH), Duca Rigoletto (Metropolitan Opera), Don Jose Carmen (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Rodolfo Bohéme (Deutsche Oper) and Faust Mefistofele (Bavarian State Opera). Past engagements include title roles Faust and Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Metropolitan Opera), Alfredo Traviata opposite Renée Fleming, Adorno Boccanegra alongside Plácido Domingo, Riccardo ballo in maschera and another turn in title role of Faust (ROH), Rodolfo Bohème, opposite Anna Netrebko, and Alfredo Traviata (Lyric Opera of Chicago), Roberto Maria

Stuarda alongside Joyce DiDonato and Ruggero Rondine (Deutsche Oper), Don José Carmen (Oper Frankfurt) and Duca Rigoletto (Bavarian State Opera). Recipient of the 2014 International Opera Awards’ Readers Award and the Gramophone’s 2012 Artist of the Year, the Grammy nominee has a large discography including five solo discs.

Concert appearances include the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm, a private concert for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip and the Last Night of the BBC Proms (2012). Calleja recently teamed up with Malta’s Bank of Valletta to form the BOV Joseph Calleja Foundation, created to help children and families in need. Joseph is Malta’s cultural ambassador. Interests: spending time in the Mediterranean Sea and wine collecting.

LUCY CULLINGFORD Revival Choreographer Jen˚u fa Studied: Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Recent work includes Snow In Midsummer; The Tempest, Don Quixote and The Jew of Malta (all RSC), East is East (Northern Stage), Abigail’s Party (Theatre Royal Bath), Of Mice And Men (Birmingham Rep), The BFG (Octagon Theatre); The Night Before Christmas (West Yorkshire Playhouse), And Now: The World (Openworks Theatre), Flare Path (The Original Theatre Co), Talking Heads (Theatre Royal Bath), The Mother (Ustinov Studio), Constellations (Trafalgar Studios, UK national tour, Manhattan Theatre Club, Broadway, Duke of York’s Theatre and Royal Court), Abigail’s Party (Curve Theatre); Intimate Apparel and The Double (Ustinov Theatre, Bath), The Spanish Golden Age Season (Ustinov, Arcola and Belgrade Theatres), The Scottsboro Boys and A Season in the Congo (Parallel Projects Young Vic), The Revenger’s Tragedy (Hoxton Hall), 20 Tiny Plays About Sheffield (The Crucible, Sheffield), Yerma (Hull Truck and The Gate Theatre) and A Tender Thing (RSC/ Northern Stage). Lucy was the RSC/Warwick University Creative Fellow in Residence (2012). Future productions include King Lear (Chichester Festival Theatre).

JANE DUTTON Brünnhilde Walküre Jane has sung at the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, ENO, Gran Teatre del Liceu, and New York City Opera – first as a mezzosoprano and now as a dramatic soprano – under conductors including Levine, Runnicles, Ozawa, and Conlon. Roles include Kundry Parsifal (ENO and Aalto Theater Essen), Senta Fliegende Holländer (Opera Hong Kong), Isolde (Theatre Kiel), La Nourrice Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (Gran Teatre del Liceu), Amneris Aida (ENO), Eboli Don Carlo (Opera North), Sonyetka Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (San Francisco), Grimgerde Walküre (Los Angeles), Sara Roberto Devereux (New York City) and Eboli (cover) Don Carlos (Metropolitan). Interests: entrepreneurship - in her spare time she has owned and operated an online retail business.

ALAN EWING Hunding Walküre Alan has sung for the ROH, ENO, WNO, Netherlands Opera, Berlin Staatsoper, Zurich, Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Opera Colorado and at the Festivals of Salzburg, Lucerne, Aldeburgh, Maggio Musicale, Florence and New Zealand in a wide range of roles including Osmin, Sarastro, Ochs, Bluebeard, Rocco, Ferrando, Sparafucile, Leporello, Kutuzov, Fafner, title role Sweeney Todd, and on two award-winning recordings, Polyphemus Acis & Galatea for William Christie and Les Arts Florissants and Achilla Giulio Cesare for Marc Minkowski and Les Musicians du Louvre. He has worked with Sir Colin Davis, Steuart Bedford, Richard Hickox, Thomas Adés, Jean-Claude Malgoire and Antonio Pappano. At ROH he has recently sung the Archbishop King Roger, multiple roles in The Nose and Powder her Face (also for ENO and Bilbao), Lady Bracknell The Importance of Being Earnest (also at Lincoln Center with New York Philharmonic), and elsewhere, Gremin Onegin (Grange Park Opera), and Bottom A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Performing Arts Centre, Hyogo). Future performances include his debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo (Dream of Gerontius). Interests: reading, thinking and an insatiable love of Renaissance polyphony!

SARA FULGONI Fricka Walküre Sara has appeared at ROH, WNO, ENO, La Scala, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Teatro Petruzzelli, San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona, Palau de les Arts Valencia, Opernhaus Zürich, Bayerische Staatsoper, De Nederlandse Opera, De Vlaamse Opera, Geneva Opera and Opera National du Rhin. Sara sang Brangäne in Grange Park Opera’s 2016 production of Tristan und Isolde. Recent roles include Judith Bluebeard’s Castle, Dalila Samson & Dalila and Beroe The Bassarids (Teatro dell’Opera di Roma). Future highlights include the premiere of a song cycle by Ben Parry and Forester’s Wife The Cunning Little Vixen (La Monnaie). She has recorded for EMI, DG, Philips, Chandos and Decca. Interests: good food and wine, gardening, antiques and cats.

THOMAS HALL Wotan Walküre Recent engagements include Telramund Lohengrin (Savonlinna Opera, Korea National Opera, Hong Kong Arts Festival and Teatr Wielki), title role in Fliegende Holländer (Savonlinna, Teatro Regio Torino, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, and Opera Hong Kong), Wanderer Ring Cycle (Theater Kiel), Abimelech Samson & Dalilah (Savonlinna), Jochanaan Salome (Opera Australia, Den

Norske & Ballett and Royal Danish Opera) Scarpia Tosca and Orest Elektra (Bologna), Il Conte di Luna Trovatore (Opera de Nuevo Leon, Mexico), and Bonze Butterfly (Madison Opera). Other roles include title role in Rigoletto, Germont Traviata, Don Carlo La Forza del Destino, Rodrigo Don Carlo, and Carlo Quinto Ernani.

Interests: reading, exercise, and spending time in nature.

PETER HOARE Laca Jen˚u fa From Bradford, Peter trained as a percussionist. Recent work includes Laca Jen˚u fa, Zinovy Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Faust Damnation of Faust and Hermann Queen of Spades (ENO); Alwa Lulu (WNO); Cajus Falstaff, Larry King Anna Nicole, Fatty Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Covent Garden), Creon Thebans (Theater Bonn, co-production with ENO), Witch Hänsel und Gretel (Amsterdam); Schapkin From the House of the Dead (Berlin Staatsoper); Captain Wozzeck (Metropolitan, NY), Sharikov A Dog’s Heart (Opéra de Lyon, Teatro alla Scala, ENO); Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Opéra de Lyon); Desportes Die Soldaten in Calixto Bieito’s production (Opernhaus Zürich) and in David Pountney’s production (Ruhr Triennale, New National Theatre, Tokyo and Lincoln Centre, NY), Piet the Pot in Ligeti’s Grand Macabre, with LSO and Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. Plans include Alviano Salvago in Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (Komische Oper Berlin), Bob Boles Grimes (ROH) and Shapkin From the House of the Dead (La Monnaie Brussels, and Opéra National de Paris).

PAUL KEOGAN Revival Lighting Design Jen˚u fa Born in Dublin. Studied TCM and Glasgow University. For Grange Park Opera credits include: Bohème, Don Quichotte, Les Carmélites, Eugene Onegin, Idomeneo, Samson & Dalilah and Queen of Spades. Other opera credits include: Falstaff (Vienna Staatsoper), Maria de Buenos Aires (Cork), Bohème and Wake (Nationale Reisopera), Thérèse / La Navarraise, Christina Regina Di Svezia, Snegurochka, Penelope and Susannah (Wexford), Makropulos Case, Ballo in maschera and Fliegende Holländer (Opera Zuid), Fairy Queen and Zauberflöte (Royal Irish Academy of Music), Lighthouse (Opera Theatre Company, Ireland and Montepulciano), Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Silver Tassie and Dead Man Walking (Opera Ireland) and Magic Flute (Korea National Opera). Other recent credits include Run to The Rock (Belfast International Festival), Flight (Rambert), Lord of the Flies and The Crucible (Open Air Theatre, Regents Park, London), Powder Her Face (Teatro Arriaga, Bilbao), Novecento (Trafalgar Studios), No Man’s Land (English National Ballet), Cassandra and Hansel & Gretel (Royal Ballet), Tartuffe, The Misanthrope and A Streetcar Named Desire (Playhouse, Liverpool), The Birds and A Streetcar Named Desire (Gate Theatre, Dublin).

Interests: Paul is a keen fencer. En-garde!

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JIHOON KIM Angelotti Tosca / Mayor Jen˚u fa Korean bass Jihoon was a member of the JPYAP at ROH, subsequently becoming a Jette Parker Principal and Company Principal. Current and future engagments include Colline Bohème, Bonze Butterfly (WNO) and Sarastro Magic Flute (Longborough). ROH roles include Alessio Sonnambula, Hector’s Ghost Troyens, Wagner Faust, Chevalier / Priest Robert le Diable, Second Armed Man Zauberflöte, Colline Bohème, Sciarrone Tosca, Tom Ballo in maschera, Flemish Deputy Don Carlo, Ceprano Rigoletto, Pietro Boccanegra, Dr Grenvil Traviata, Hermann Ortel Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Montano Otello. Engagements elsewhere have included An Old Hebrew Samson et Dalila (Palau de les Arts, Valencia), Timour Le Roi de Lahore, Silva Ernani and Ferrando Il trovatore (Chelsea Opera Group), and Beethoven Symphony No. 9 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. For Grange Park Opera, he has previously sung Ashby La Fanciulla del West and The Monk Don Carlo. Interests: the countryside, horses and gardening.

WILLIAM LACEY Conductor Jen˚u fa William studied at King’s, Cambridge.

Whilst Staff Conductor at San Francisco Opera he conducted Aida, Bohème and The Tsar’s Bride and assisted Mackerras, Gergiev and Runnicles on Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan and Parsifal.

As Erster Kapellmeister, Leipzig, performances included Hänsel und Gretel, Fledermaus, Macbeth, Traviata, Bohème, Zauberflöte, Aufsteig und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Cunning Little Vixen. Lacey has conducted Giovanni and Midsummer Night’s Dream (Stanislavsky), Figaro and Billy Budd (Bolshoi), Tamerlano (Barcelona, Washington, Los Angeles), Fidelio, Idomeneo, Giovanni and Life is a Dream (Birmingham Opera Company), Curlew River (Barbican) and Giovanni and Iphigénie en Tauride (Washington). In the US William has conducted at HGO, Los Angeles Opera, Santa Fe, Washington National Opera, Toronto, New York, Utah Opera, Hawaii Opera Theatre and Glimmerglass. In Europe guest appearances include Liceu Barcelona, Opéra Comique, Royal Swedish Opera, Norwegian National Opera, ENO, Greek National Opera, Opera North, Nationale Reisopera, Nordnorsk Opera, Scottish Opera and Oper Köln. Interests: languages, looking at paintings, and gardening.

STRUAN LESLIE Original Choreographer Jen˚u fa Struan Leslie was Head of Movement at the RSC for five years until 2013. Opera credits include Owen Wingrave (Aldeburgh) Jenufa and Kat’a Kabanova, (Grand Opera Geneva), Jephtha (ENO and Copenhagen) Cosi, Sacrifice, as

Director, and Carmen MAX, (WNO), St. Matthew Passion (Glyndebourne Opera), Paul Bunyan (Bregenz Festival/ Lucerne Opera), Oedipe, Marriage of Figaro and Il Viaggio a Rheims (Theatre Bielefeld). Movement direction and choreography for theatre includes Libertine (Theatre Royal Bath), Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie (High Tide/ Arcola Theatre), Waiting for Godot (Crucible Theatre), The Hook, Regeneration and Tale of Two Cities, (Royal and Derngate/ National Tour), Oliver Twist (Lyric Hammersmith), Julius Caesar and The Maids (Young Vic), Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer (Traverse), The Country (Royal Court), Easy Virtue (Chichester Festival Theatre) and Endgame (Donmar Warehouse). Musicals include the Sound of Music, Sweet Charity and West Side Story. Interests: countryside walks in the UK and abroad GIANLUCA MARCIANO Conductor Tosca Gianluca is Artistic Director of the Al Bustan Festival, Beirut, where this season he is conducting Cherubini Médée, Rossini Stabat Mater and Berlioz La Mort de Cléopâtre. Previous posts include Tbilisi State Opera & Ballet Theatre, Georgia, where he conducted concerts with Andrea Bocelli and operas including La Forza del Destino, Cavalleria Rusticana, Nabucco, Attila, Il Trovatore, Mitridate, Re di Ponto and Aida. He has conducted Don Carlo, Samson et Dalila, Eugene Onegin, Traviata, Butterfly, I Puritani, Eugene Onegin, Queen of Spades and Tosca all for Grange Park Opera. Recent engagements include Butterfly and Bohème (ENO), Traviata (Opera North), Turandot and Nabucco (Ópera de Oviedo), Ernani (Lithuanian National Opera) and Pagliacci (Moscow).

Engagements this season include Traviata, Butterfly and Bohème (Lithuanian National Opera), Nabucco (Chelsea Opera Group), Elgar Symphony No. 1 in Tokyo, and gala concerts with soloists including Angela Gheorghiu at Dubai’s ‘White Nights’ festival. Interests: good food and wine and, as every Italian, clothes and shoes.

STEPHEN MEDCALF Director Walküre Stephen’s productions include Le nozze di Figaro (Glyndebourne Festival/DVD), Aida (Royal Albert Hall/ DVD), Pikovaya Dama (Teatro alla Scala), Manon Lescaut (Palau des Arts Valencia, Teatro Regio di Parma, Teatro di Bari), Falstaff (Teatro Farnese Parma, ROH Muscat/DVD), Zauberflöte (Teatro Regio di Parma, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari/DVD), Leonore (Buxton), Herculanum (Wexford), and Ariadne auf Naxos (Festspielhaus Salzburg). Past work includes new productions at Teatro alla Scala, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, RAH, Opera North, Salzburger Landestheater, GFO, Teatro Regio di Parma, Théâtre du Châtelet, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Teatro Real Madrid and ROH. Stephen was Director of Productions at ETO and Head of Opera Production at GSMD, where he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for education. He earned the Premio Abbiati Italian critics’ prize Director of the Year (2005)

and International Opera Award for Rediscovered Work Cristina di Svezia (2014). For Grange Park Opera, he has directed Flute, La Fanciulla del West, Capriccio, Eugene Onegin and Bohème. Interests: cricket, rugby and West Ham. Enjoys walking in the Surrey hills, cycling and watching his children make music.

EKATERINA METLOVA Tosca Tosca Studied Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Moscow), the Accademia dell’ Arena di Verona and the Centre Perfeccionamento Plácido Domingo at the Palau de les Arts (Valencia). Ekaterina has performed in Italy, France, Spain, the USA, Canada, China and Korea conducted by Donato Renzetti, Daniel Oren, Zubin Metha and Lorin Maazel first as a mezzo-soprano and now as a dramatic soprano. Recent and future engagements include Minnie La Fanciulla del West (La Coruña, Spain, Castleton Festival, USA and Teatro di San Carlo, Naples), Abigaille Nabucco (Deutsche Oper, Opera de Oviedo, Spain and Stuttgart), Senta Der Fliegende Holländer (La Coruña, Spain), Isabella Don Carlo (Teatros del Canal, Spain), Tosca (Opera de Oviedo), Amelia Un ballo in maschera (Gran Teatre del Liceu), Verdi I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata (Bilbao), Butterfly (Castleton Festival, USA) and Elisabetta Don Carlos (El Escorial). Earlier in her career Ekaterina sang Charlotte Werther (Bolzano, Cremona, Pavia and Ravenna), Dulcinee Don Quichotte (Slovenia), Suzuki Butterfly and Lucilla The Silken Ladder (Palau de Les Arts, Valencia), Rosina Il Barbiere di Siviglia, title role in Carmen (Teatro Petruzzelli, Bari Italy) and title role in The Rape of Lucretia (Berkeley, California). Interests: listening to pop and rock, composing music and travel.

KATIE MITCHELL Original Director Jen˚u fa Katie’s recent operas include Pelleas et Melisande (Aix en Provence Festival), Lucia di Lammermoor Royal Opera House), Alcina (Aix en Provence Festival), The Way Back Home (ENO/Young Vic), Trauernacht and The House Taken Over (Aix en Provence Festival), Le Vin Herbe (Staatsoper, Berlin), Written on Skin (Aix en Provence Festival & ROH), Al Gran Sole Carico D’Amore (Staatsoper, Berlin & Salzburg Festival), Orest (De Nederlandse Opera) and Clemency (ROH).Recent theatre includes The Maids (Toneelgropes, Amsterdam), Cleansed (NT), Ophelia’s Room (Schaubühne, Berlin/ Royal Court), Reisende auf einem Bein (Schauspielhaus, Hamburg), The Cherry Orchard (Young Vic), The Forbidden Zone (Salzburg Festival & Schaubühne, Berlin), A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Vienna Burgtheater) and Night Train (Schauspiel, Cologne & Avignon Festival & Theater Treffen). Film and television includes Untitled Short Film (Warp/ Film4); The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, Jenufa, Rough for Theatre 2 and The Turn of the Screw. Katie has been an Associate Director at the RSC, NT and The Royal Court Theatre.

She was awarded an OBE in 2009 and is the Visiting Chair in Opera Studies at Oxford University for 2016-2017.

VICKI MORTIMER Designer Jen˚u fa Opera credits includes Lucia di Lammermoor (ROH), Written on Skin (Aix Festival and on tour) Al Gran Sole (Salzburg Festival and Staatsoper Berlin); Neither / Footfalls (Staatsoper, Berlin); Entfuhrung aus dem Seraglio, Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg, St. Matthew Passion and Cosi fan Tutte (Glyndebourne); The Winter’s Tale and After Dido (ENO), The Way Back Home (with ENO at the Young Vic) and Wozzeck (Lyric Opera, Chicago). Winner of the International Opera Award for Design 2016.

Theatre credits include The Plough and the Stars, The Threepenny Opera, Here We Go, The Silver Tassie, Othello, Hamlet, Waves, Cat in the Hat, Three Sisters, The Seagull, Closer, Paul and Last of the Haussmans (all NT). Recently Oil (Almeida) and Little Match Girl (Shakespeare’s Globe).

Also previous designs for the Young Vic, the RSC, the Donmar, the Royal Court, Kneehigh Theatre Company, as well as work in Japan, Sweden and on Broadway.

Dance credits include Raven Girl (ROH), Yantra (Stuttgart Ballet); Genus (Paris Opera Garnier); Skindex (Nederlands Dans Theater); Millenarium, Sulphur 16 and Aeon (Random Dance Company).

FRANCIS O’CONNOR Designer Tosca Francis trained at Wimbledon School of Art. Credits for Grange Park Opera include Samson & Delila, Eugene Onegin, Fanciulla del West, Fortunio, Capriccio, Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, South Pacific and Iolanthe. Other credits include Leonore and Orfeo & Euridice (Buxton Festival), Oklahoma (national tour), High Society (national tour), Vert (Garsington), Noyes Fludde (Lowestoft), Rusalka (Nürnberg, Monte Carlo), The Adventures of Pinocchio (Opera North, Bonn, Moscow), Carmen (Biel, Switzerland) and Kiss Me Kate (Dortmund).

Theatre includes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lyceum, Edinburgh), The Father (Gate, Dublin), Beauty Queen of Leenane (Ireland, Los Angeles, New York), Waiting For Godot (Druid/Spoleto), Romeo and Juliet (Singapore), The Weir (Lyceum, Edinburgh), Big Maggie (Gaiety, Dublin), The Importance of Being Earnest (Gate, Dublin/Spoleto), Talking Heads (touring) and Druid Shakespeare (Druid, Galway & Lincoln Centre, New York). Awards include 3 Irish Times Awards, Boston Globe and Critics’ Circle Awards. His designs for the opera Pinocchio nominated for Der Faust Prize, Germany. Interests: gardening with limited skill and time, but bags of enthusiasm!

ANNE-MARIE OWENS Grandmother Jen˚u fa / Waltraute Walküre Born in South Shields and studied at GSMD and NOS. Anne-Marie has sung Prioress Les Dialogues des Carmélites, Auntie Peter Grimes, The Countess Queen of Spades, Larina Eugene Onegin, Jezibaba Rusulka and Princess Clarice Les

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amour des Trois Oranges all for Grange Park Opera.

She has performed roles including Azucena Il Trovatore, Amneria Aida, Brangäne Tristan und Isolde and Jezibaba Rusulka on opera stages throughout the world. Recent opera roles include Mamma Lucia Cavalleria Rusticana (WNO), La Frugola Il Tabarro (Opera North), Mrs Herring Albert Herring (Théâtre du Capitole), Mrs Grose The Turn of the Screw (Vienna Konzerthaus, Théâtre du Capitole and Glyndebourne), Mrs Sedley Peter Grimes (Staatsoper Hamburg), Brangäne Tristan und Isolde, Fricka Rhinegold and Walküre (Nederlandse Reisopera), Marcellina Figaro (Warsaw), Grandmother Buryjovka Jenüfa (Scottish Opera) and Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune (ROH and Bregenz Festival). Interests: swimming- AnneMarie takes part in the Great North Swim every yeartheatre, cinema and being with family and friends.

DAVID PLATER Lighting Designer Tosca & Walküre Previously Head of Lighting at the Donmar Warehouse, David has been Resident Lighting Designer for Ballet Black since 2001.

David’s nominations for design include Olivier, Tony, and Drama Desk Award nominations for Best Lighting Design for Bring Up The Bodies (Winter Gardens Broadway, Aldwych, West End), Knight of Illumination Award for Richard II (Best Play Lighting) in 2012 and for This is My Family (Best Musical Lighting) in 2013. David was Lighting Designer for Oliver! and Fanciulla del West for Grange Park Opera. Extensive lighting designs include Sinbad (Stratford East), Murder Ballad (Arts Theatre), A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Deathwatch, Terra and The Cocktail Party (Print Room), Brass (Hackney Empire), The Mentalists (Wyndham’s), Ballet Black (Barbican), Beautiful Thing (Arts Theatre) The Dishwashers (Birmingham Rep) The Glass Supper (Hampstead), Billy Liar (Manchester Royal Exchange), Richard III and Twelfth Night, Roger Rees: What You Will, and 13 The Musical (Apollo Theatre), Richard II, Four Quartets, and Three Days of Rain (Donmar Warehouse), Loyal Women (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs), Macbeth (Sheffield Crucible), Mrs Lowry & Son, The Silence of the Sea, and Stacy/Fanny & Faggot (Trafalgar Studios), and The Chair Plays (Lyric Hammersmith). Interests: the theatre, going to the cinema and walking in the country.

BRYAN REGISTER Siegmund Walküre American tenor Bryan Register studied at the Manhattan School of Music and at the studios of the Santa Fe Opera and Glimmerglass Opera. He sang Tristan Tristan und Isolde for Grange Park Opera’s 2016 season. Recent highlights include Enée Les Troyens (Frankfurt Opera), Tristan Tristan und Isolde (Tokyo Nikikai Opera Theatre), Siegmund Walküre (Theater Kiel), Florestan Fidelio (Opera Omaha), title role Lohengrin (Hong Kong Arts Festival and Savonlinna), Florestan Fidelio and Drum Major Wozzeck (ENO) and Beethoven 9 (RLPO). Previous operatic highlights include Siegmund (Greenwich Symphony Orchestra),

Erik Der Fliegende Holländer (Opera Roanoke) and Don Josè Carmen (Virginia Opera). Bryan has been engaged for many new or rarely performed works including The Soldier Stone Soup (Tulsa Opera), Second Bandit Hlas Lesa (Gotham Opera), Sundar The Thief of Love, Announcer and Man Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Manno Sacco and Vanzetti with The New York City Opera Orchestra.

In future seasons, highlights include Bryan’s debut at La Monnaie. Interests: travel (cruises being his favourite), yoga and playing the piano.

PETER RELTON Director Tosca Peter has been involved with Grange Park Opera for 12 years: firstly as a member of the Chorus and now as a director. In 2016 he revived Fanciulla and in 2015 he transferred Fiddler on the Roof to RAH for the BBC Proms. Previous GPO revivals include Queen of Spades, Tosca and Rigoletto. Peter has directed revivals of Satyagraha and Barber of Seville (ENO – the latter broadcast live in cinemas). He has directed Bohème, Falstaff and La Rondine (Opera North), Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (Festival de la Vezere), La Voix Humane (Les Azuriales Opera Festival), Cenerentola and Tosca (Opera Brava), Pearl Fishers and Nabucco (Northern Opera), Marriage of Figaro, Traviata, Magic Flute and Tosca (Opera Nova). He has also directed scenes at RCM and RAM. As Assistant Director: ENO, ROH, Opera North, Scottish Opera, GFO and RNT. As a Revival Director he has also worked in Austria, Holland and Germany. Most recently he was the Staff Director on Adriana Lecouvreur at ROH. Interests: golf and repairing his 30 year old Citroen CX. NATALYA ROMANIW Jenufa Jen˚u fa Welsh soprano Natalya trained at GSMD (Gold Medal) and the Houston Grand Opera Studio. Natalya won first prize at the Kathleen Ferrier Awards and was a Song Prize finalist in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.

Recent engagements include Tatyana Eugene Onegin (Garsington Opera), Lisa Queen of Spades, Maliella I gioielli della Madonna and Fiora L’amore dei Tre Re (Opera Holland Park), Suzel L’Amico Fritz (Scottish Opera and Den Jyske Opera), Ortlinde Walküre, Mimi Bohème, Ines Il Trovatore, Rosalinde Die Fledermaus, Micaela Carmen and Krystina The Passenger, (HGO), Foreign Princess Rusalka (SO) and Governess The Turn of the Screw (Glyndebourne on Tour). Natalya has appeared in concert with the Hallé Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra. Interests: Natalya is a Netflix addict and budding yoga bunny.

CLAIRE RUTTER Sieglinde Walküre Born in South Shields, Claire Rutter began her career at Scottish Opera and has appeared with ENO, Opera North and WNO. She was nominated for the Maria Callas Award after her USA debut at Dallas Opera, and her international engagements have included Opera Australia, Opera Flanders, Finnish National Opera, Opéra de Bordeaux, Opéra de Montpellier, the Opéra de Rennes, Opéra national du Rhin, Norwegian Opera, Theater Basel, Florida Grand Opera, Minnesota Opera and Santa Fe Opera. Claire has established a firm relationship with Grange Park Opera where she has appeared as Elvira Puritani, Norma, Minnie Fanciulla, Butterfly, Tosca and Violetta Traviata. Recent / current engagements include the title role Vanessa (Wexford), Mother L’Enfant Prodigue (Scottish Opera), title role Gioconda (Malmö Opera), title role Tosca (Icelandic Opera and WNO) and Beethoven Symphony No. 9 with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In concert, she has sung also sung with BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Hallé (Gramophone Award), London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Her performance as Lucrezia Borgia with English National Opera was the first opera to be broadcast by Sky Arts.

NICKY SPENCE Števa Jen˚u fa Scottish tenor Nicky Spence trained at GSMD, NOS and was a Harewood Young Artists (ENO). Credits include Alwa Lulu and David Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (ENO), Young Man Moses und Aron (Opéra de Paris), Courtois Zazá (Opera Rara), Francesco Benvenuto Cellini (De Nederlandse Opera), Mime Das Rheingold (Hallé under Sir Mark Elder), Iago Otello (Buxton Festival), Tamino Zauberflöte and Steuermann Der Fliegender Holländer (Scottish Opera), Števa Jenüfa (La Monnaie, ENO); Tichon Katya Kabanova (Seattle Opera, Opera Holland Park), The Makropulos Case (Oper Frankfurt) and a Rossini double bill at WNO with Carlo Rizzi. Other performances have included roles in Billy Budd, Les Dialogues des Carmélites, Intermezzo, Don Giovanni, The Beggar’s Opera, The Turn of the Screw, The Rake’s Progress, and Fidelio. Nicky had the role of Brian created for him in the world premiere of Nico Muhly’s opera Two Boys (ENO, reprised Met NY).

Future roles include Andres Wozzeck (Opéra de Paris), Captain Pirzel Die Soldaten (Teatro Reale) and House of the Dead (ROH). Interests: dancing, eating and cooing over irresistible dogs.

ROBIN TEBBUTT Revival Director Jen˚u fa Robin studied music and drama at the University of Birmingham. His productions include Béatrice & Bénédict (HGO), Il Matrimonio Segreto (WIAV/Barga Festival) and Tarka the Otter (Buxton Festival). As Staff Director

at Glyndebourne he directed Tippett’s New Year (GOT). As Staff Director at WNO (19932008), he directed revivals of Rigoletto, Traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci, Béatrice & Bénédict, Carmen, Cosí fan tutte, Butterfly, Kát’a Kabanová and Jephtha. He has directed revivals of David Pountney’s productions of Simon Boccanegra (Prague) and Guillaume Tell (Warsaw and Geneva). Collaborations with Katie Mitchell, as Assistant Director, include Katya Kabanova, Jephtha, St Matthew Passion, The Sacrifice, Trauernacht, Lucia di Lammermoor and Pelléas & Mélisande. Recent engagements include revivals of The Way Back Home (Stockholm) and David Pountney’s production of Figaro Gets a Divorce (Poznan). Interests : Robin is a member of a vegetable growing co-operative- last year they cleaned up on the prizes in the village show!

TONY THOMPSON Cardinal Tosca Tony was born in Ruislip and studied at Haberdashers Askes and Trinity College, Cambridge before becoming a partner in a London firm of solicitors. Despite his father being a failed actor (attending Italia Conte with Jack Hawkins), Tony did not appear on stage until 1970 when he took a five line part and was hooked as an amateur thespian. Tony lives in West Horsley. Interests: Apart from amateur dramatics, golf, bridge and gardening.

ADAM TUNNICLIFFE Spoletta Tosca Canadian tenor Adam studied at Christ Church, Oxford and GSMD. He has sung Shepherd / Young Sailor Tristan und Isolde and Joe Fanciulla del West for Grange Park Opera. Recent performances include Nathanael / Spalanzani / Pittichinacio Les Contes d’Hoffman and cover title role Werther (ETO).

In 2017 he sings Das Lied von der Erde For English National Ballet. Operatic roles include title role Albert Herring, Oberon, Alfredo Traviata, Quint Turn Of The Screw, Tom Rakewell, Sumers Italian Girl In London, Sandy The Lighthouse, Rinuccio Gianni Schicchi, Lensky Eugene Onegin, Canio Pagliacci, Basillio Figaro, Ferrando Cosi, Vogelsang Der Schauspieldirektor and Chevalier Le Comte D’ory. World premier performances include Captain Promised End, Admiral Burial At Thebes and Enoch Nancy The Waterman. He has performance for companies including ETO, OHP, Longborough, Bampton Classical Opera, New Sussex Opera, Saffron Opera, Garden Opera, Riverside Opera, New Chamber Opera, Park Opera, Oxford Opera Company, Windsor & Eton Opera, St Albans Chamber Opera, Manning Camerata and BYO. Interests: coffee, antiques and historical design.

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JAMIE VARTAN Designer Walküre Jamie trained at Central School of Art. He represented the UK at Prague Quadrennials in 1999, 2007, 2011 & World Stage Design 2013 (Best Set Design Award).

Jamie designed Grange Park Opera’s 2015 production of Bohème. Other designs for opera include Ariadne auf Naxos (Salzburg Festspielhaus), The Queen of Spades (Teatro alla Scala), Death In Venice (Salzburg Landestheater), Don Giovanni (Varna), Manon Lescaut (Teatro Regio Parma & Valencia), Village Romeo and Juliet, Aida and Carmen (Cagliari), La Statira (Teatro San Carlo, Naples), Der Zwerg (Teatro Comunale, Florence), Traviata (Malmö Opera), Il Pirata (Opera Marseille), L’isola disabitata (ROH), Carmen (Teatro Sao Carlos Lisbon), Falstaff (Teatro Farnese, Parma and Oman), The Last Hotel (Edinburgh International Festival 2015 & St Ann’s Warehouse, NYC), The Barber of Seville (Wide Open Opera) and Cristina di Svezia, Herculanum & Village Romeo and Juliet (Wexford Opera, Irish Times Best Set Design Award). Current work includes designs for The Second Violinist (Galway International Arts Festival 2017) & Eugene Onegin (Strasbourg Opera 2018).

Interests: as a resident of Brockley, South East London, he is a keen supporter of the Poplar Blackwall & District Rowing Club, where his son rows, and local coffee shops.

PHILIP WHITE Head of Music Philip was Chorus Master of the Royal Danish Opera from 2004 to 2012 and for the last ten years has been Assistant Chorus Master at the Bayreuth Festival. In 1995 he was Assistant Chorus Master on Moses and Aron (Théâtre du Châtelet) and was invited back as Chorus Master for Oedipus Rex, Le Rossignol and Parsifal.

After working with the Chorus of Radio France on Britten’s Spring Symphony he was nominated their Associate Chorus Master in 2001. He has notably prepared the chorus for Deutsche Grammophon’s recording of Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Bizet’s Ivan IV, Honegger’s La Danse des Morts, Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (EMI), Théâtre du Châtelet’s production of Tannhäuser and Sting’s album Sacred Love. Since leaving Royal Danish Opera Philip has worked as Guest Chorus Master for Scottish Opera, Opéra de Lyon, Longborough Festival Opera, ENO, and WNO. Interests: walking, cooking, travelling and reading just about anything about the USA. SIMON WILDING Sacristan Tosca English bass Simon Wilding has performed Cappadocian Salome, Foltz Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Lane/Merriman The Importance of Being Earnest, Sciarrone Tosca, Lackey Ariadne Auf Naxos, Pinellino Gianni Schicchi, and Gessler Guillaume Tell (all ROH). Simon has appeared

regularly with ENO, OHP, Wexford and Mid Wales Opera. Other engagements include the Athlete American Lulu (Opera Group- Young Vic (London), Glasgow, the Edinburgh Festival, and the Bregenz Festival), Fasolt Das Rheingold and Hagen Götterdämmerung. Further international engagements include Bayreuth Festival, Batignano Festival (Italy), Macedonian National Opera, Beijing Music Festival and the New Victory Theatre, New York. Simon has performed with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Ulster Orchestra and at the Royal Albert Hall. Recorded work includes Salome and Die Meistersinger (ROH) and Billy Budd (Hallé Orchestra).

Interests: playing the guitar and the ukulele player and sailing tall ships.

ROLAND WOOD Scarpia Tosca Studied at RNCM and NOS. Semifinalist in the 2003 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition and Company Principal at Scottish Opera between 2002 and 2004. Roles include Count Almaviva The Marriage of Figaro, Papageno Flute, Paolo Albani Simon Boccanegra, Zurga The Pearl Fishers, Bunyan/ Pilgrim The Pilgrim’s Progress, Marcello Bohème and Oedipus Thebans (ENO), Roucher Andrea Chenier and Ford Falstaff (ROH), Count di Luna Il Trovatore, Robert Storch Intermezzo, Albert Werther and Escamillo Carmen (Scottish Opera). Other notable appearances in the UK are Nick Shadow The Rake’s Progress (Glyndebourne Festival), Giorgio Germont Traviata (Opera North), Don Giovanni and Eugene Onegin (ETO). Recent international work includes Renato Un ballo in maschera (Canadian Opera Company), Giorgio Germont Traviata (Santa Fe), Renato, Giorgio Germont and Enrico Lucia di Lammermoor (Nationale Reisopera) and Macbeth (St Louis). Engagements this season include Golaud Pelléas et Mélisande (Scottish Opera) and Rigoletto (Michigan Opera Theatre. Interests: binge-watching DVD boxsets whilst doing the ironing and trying not to stand on rogue pieces of his son’s Lego.

NIGEL EDWARDS Original Lighting Designer Jen˚u fa Opera credits include The Maids (ENO) and Hansel & Gretel (Opera North). Best known as the lighting designer for Forced Entertainment. Other credits include Lanark (Citizens), Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and 448 Psychosis and Stoning Mary (Royal Court), Crave (Paines Plough), Roberto Zucco, The Mysteries, Victoria, The Tempest and Troilus and Cressida (RSC), Debbie Tucker Green’s Dirty Butterfly and Trade (Soho), Opening Skinners Box (Improbable), Sitting Comfortably (Gerry Pilgrim), Hands Off, Story of Us and Last Straw (People Show). West End credits include Sexual Perversity in Chicago, When Harry Met Sally and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Nigel has designed and toured with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Jeff Beck, Diamanda Galas, Ólafur Arnalds and Joss Pook.

ENSEMBLE PRZEMYSLAW BARANEK Born Bydgoszcz, Poland, Prezemyslaw continued his studies in Milan working with the Verdi Symphonic Chorus and the chorus of the Accademia Teatro alla Scala. Roles include: Aeneas Dido & Aeneas, Dulcamara L’elisir, Leporello Giovanni, Guglielmo Cosi and Streshnev Khovanskygate. He is passionate about fitness, travel, history, medieval and ancient civilisations.

OLIVIA BARRY Olivia completed her PGDip at Birmingham Conservatoire.

Credits: Rossweisse Walküre (Fulham Opera), Fillipyevna (Cover) Onegin (Ryedale Festival), Ulrica Masked Ball, Mercedes Carmen (Opera Up Close), Nutrice L’incoronazione di Poppea (Opera De Bauge), Chorus Tannhäuser (Longborough) and Mother Hansel & Gretel (St Albans Chamber Opera).

ALEX BEVAN Born in Bath, Alex studies at RAM. Credits: Mozart Requiem at St-Martin-in-the-Fields / Royal Courts of Justice, Tippett Child of our Time Truro Cathedral.

Opera includes Ruggero Rondine (OperaCoast), chorus Tristan & Isolde, Tannhäuser, Rigoletto (Longborough). Alex starts in the autumn at Royal Scottish Academy where he can indulge his passion for hiking.

MORAG BOYLE Schwertleite Walküre Credits: Juno Semele, Pasqualita Doctor Atomic, Mar tha Gospel According to the Other Mary, Mrs Alexander Satyagraha, First Norn Götterdämerung, Mamma Lucia Cavalleria Rusticana Annina Rosenkavalier (ENO) and Diary of One Who Disappeared with Bostridge/ Ades (Wigmore Hall).

FELICITY BUCKLAND Rossewisse Walküre Trained RNCM & ENO Opera Works.

Credits: Angelina Cenerentola (High Time Opera), Cherubino Figaro (Opera Up Close), Maddalena Rigoletto (Park Opera), Mercedes Carmen (CoOpera Co). Chorus includes Holland Park, ETO & Birmingham Opera. Offstage, Felicity enjoys countryside walks with her dog.

PHILIP CLIEVE Philip is completing his masters at the RNCM. Credits: Barbrov Paradise Moscow, Dulcamara L’Elisir and Baron Zeta Merry Widow (RNCM). Philip has performed with Aughton Male Voice Choir, Southport Bach Choir, Formby Choral Society, and with the Academy of Ancient Music. He enjoys fell walking and real ale, as a member of CAMRA.

ROSEMARY CLIFFORD Shepherd Boy Jen˚u fa Studied GSMD. Credits: Rose Seller Oliver! (GPO), Hansel Hansel & Gretel (Opera Unmasked), Popova The Bear (Opera Anywhere), Nancy Albert Herring (Hampstead Garden Opera), Gertrude (cover) Fortunio (GPO). Oratorio includes Haydn Paukenmesse, Mendelssohn Elijah and Mozart Requiem. Rosemary enjoys reading, cooking and walking her dog, Barney.

JONATHAN COOKE Studied at the RCS. Credits: Tamino Flute (Young Opera Venture), Turridù Cavalleria Rusticana (Hampstead Garden Opera), Angelo Miracle: An Opera of Two Halves, Eisenstein, Fledermaus (Fulham Opera), Goro Butterfly (Ormond Opera), and 1st Priest & Armed Man Flute (Mid Wales Opera). He is a keen football player and member of London’s largest singing football team, Weaver’s Field Wanderers.

LAUREN EASTON Siegrune Walküre Australian mezzo, Lauren debuted internationally in 2011 with Glyndebourne Festival Opera as Magdalena Die Meistersinger and has since performed the roles of Amarella The Yellow Sofa, Sandman Hansel & Gretel and Flora La Traviata (GFO and GOT). Last year she sang Delilah Samson & Delilah (Bury Port Opera).

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ELEANOR GARSIDE Jana Jen˚u fa Studied at the RNCM. Credits: Helene Koanga, solo soprano ensemble Riders to the Sea (Wexford Festival Opera) Papagena Magic Flute (Young Opera Venture) Atalanta Xerxes, Miss Wordsworth Albert Herring (RNCM), Belinda Dido & Aeneas, Yum Yum Mikado, and Mabel Pirates of Penzance (Silk Opera).

LUCILLA GRAHAM Studied at RNCM. Credits: Orpheus Orpheus ed Eurydice, Mercedes Carmen and Amastre Xerxes. She performed in the Merry Opera Company’s celebrated staged Messiah, directed by John Ramster. Lucilla enjoys travelling, cooking, and exploring London’s restaurants, which she counterbalances with running along the Thames to keep fit.

MILO HARRIES Studied at RCM. Credits: Nathan (cover) Pleasure (Opera North/ Aldeburgh/ROH), Owen (cover) Owen Wingrave (British Youth Opera), Dandini Cenerentola (HighTime), Papageno Zauberflöte, Almaviva Figaro, Guglielmo Così (RCM scenes).

Alongside performing standard concert repertoire, Milo has devised two new works, Mosaic and Fragments.

MATTHEW HOWARD Matthew graduated from TCM. He has sung with ENO, Grange Park Opera, Wexford Festival Opera and is also an established concert singer, performing with many of the UK’s finest ensembles. In his spare time, Matt enjoys a whole host of sports, and in particular is a keen free runner.

LOUIS HURST Jailer Tosca Louis Hurst trained at RNCM and ENO’s Opera Works. Roles include Colline La Bohème (Opera Loki), Luca The Bear (Opera View) and Mr Peachum Beggar’s Opera (EOC). Chorus includes Scottish Opera and Aix-en-Provence Festival. Louis’ competitive spirit manifests through daily challenges on his newly acquired Fitbit device.

TANYA HURST Gerhilde Walküre Last year Australian Soprano Tanya Hurst sang Dama Macbeth (Iford Festival), Chorus La Traviata (West Green House Opera) and formed part of the quartet for Grimeborn’s chamber version of Terterian’s Fire Ring. Autumn 2016 saw Tanya make her Wagnerian role debut in Parsifal as Flowermaiden 1 (Elemental Opera).

HEATHER IRESON Karolka Jen˚u fa Studies at RNCM. At Wexford sh has appeared as Coro Il Campanello, chorus Herculanum Vanessa, (Wexford) Carmen, Poliuto, Meistersinger, Béatrice et Bénédict (Glyndebourne), Saul, Don Pasquale and Entführung aus dem Serail (Glyndebourne Tour).

Heather enjoys walking, watching movies, cooking and baking.

ELEANOR JANES Studied at TCM. Credits: Marenka Bartered Bride, Manon Manon, Hanna Glawari Merry Widow, Countess Figaro, Mimi Bohème, Elle Voix Humaine and Erste Dame Zauberflöte. Eleanor recently performed at the London Song Festival. When she’s not singing, Eleanor enjoys spending time on the beach in Pembrokeshire, entertaining friends and crafting.

HANNA-LIISA KIRCHIN Mayor’s Wife Jen˚u fa Trained at the NOS, ENO Opera Works & RNCM. Plans includes Arsace (cover) Partenope (ENO), Flora Traviata (Reis Opera). Roles include Fidalma Matrimonio Segreto (Dutch National Opera) and Ruggiero Alcina (Longborough and Ensemble Orfeo (Bayerische Staatsoper). She enjoys reading and watching films and is an avid learner.

ALEXANDRA LOWE Barena Jen˚u fa Alexandra completed her Masters of Music at RNCM, where she graduated with a First Class Bachelor of Music in 2015. Roles include Mrs. Coyle Owen Wingrave, Métella Vie Parisienne, Fiordiligi Così, Rose Maurrant Street Scene and Helena Dream.

Interests: country walks and spending time in Mallorca, where she grew up.

AMY LYDDON Pastuchyna Jen˚u fa Amy was a choral scholar at Trinity College, before studying at RCM. Credits: Nancy Albert Herring (Shadwell Opera at Opera Holland Park), Nicklausse (cover) Tales of Hoffmann (ETO), Ger trud Hänsel & Gretel and Mrs Herring Albert Herring (RCMIOS). When not singing, Amy enjoys a country walk and a gin & tonic.

KRYSTAL MACMILLAN From Australia, Krystal studied at RAM. Credits: Despina Cosi (Opera Loki), Strawberry Seller Oliver! (GPO), Sandman Hansel & Gretel (Opera Holloway).

Concerts include Mozart Requiem, Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle, Faure Requium, Handel Messiah, Vivaldi Gloria and Monteverdi Magnificat. She enjoys reading, cooking, being outdoors, travelling, painting.

BECCA MARRIOTT Ortlinde Walküre Read English at Oxford before commencing her Masters at TCM Credits: Mimi Bohème (King’s Head Theatre), Manon Manon Lescaut (Brent Opera), Tosca (OperaUpClose), Elvira Giovanni, Nitocris Belshazzar, Contessa Nozze di Figaro. Becca creates improvised comedy operas and enjoys baking fantastical cakes.

PAUL MILOSAVLJEVIC Born in Hobart, Paul studied at the University of Tasmania & Sydney Conservatorium.

Credits: Opera Australia, Netherlands Opera (Sydney Festival), Pacific Opera, North West Opera, Opera North, WNO, Diva Opera, Pavilion Opera and Opera Rara. Roles include Vasek, Tamino, Alfredo, Spoletta, Cavaradossi and Artemidore.

GEMMA MORSLEY Grimgerde Walküre Operatic roles include: Carmen, Maddalena, Ciesca, Flora, Annina, Flowermaiden, Second & Third Ladies and Dorabella.

Other stage works include: Mrs Sowerberry & Mrs Bedwin in Oliver!, Fruma-Sarah in Fiddler on the Roof (GPO and the BBC Proms) and Merry Opera’s Messiah.

MARK NATHAN Mark graduated from RCM. Credits: Marcello, Dr Falke, Point, Adonis, Koko, Dr Pangloss Candide, Sir Joseph Porter, Il Dottore Traviata, Gob The Poisoned Kiss, Morales, Judge, Counsel Trial By Jury, and Wagner Faust. Outside of singing, Mark is a musical theatre lyricist and has written and produced several shows, cabarets and song cycles.

LANCELOT NOMURA Sciarrone Tosca Lancelot studied at Royal Academy Opera and Le Studio de l’Opéra de Lyon.

Recent engagements have included Larkens Fanciulla and Steuermann Tristan (Grange Park Opera) and Pinellino Gianni Schicchi (Opera National de Lorraine). Lancelot enjoys fly-fishing, gardening, cooking (especially Japanese cuisine. His debut novel will be published next year.

IRIA PERESTRELO Iria studied at GSMD. Credits: Susanna, Adele Fledermaus (Teatr Wielki, Warsaw), Gingerbread Woman Village Romeo & Juliet (Wexford), Moth Dream (Barbican) Serpina (Musicamera Portugal), Despina (Zêzere Arts Portugal), Cis Albert Herring (Silk Street Theatre) and 1st maid St. Mathew Passion (National Theatre directed by Jonathan Miller). Iria is a coffee lover and enjoys dancing and travelling.

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JESSICA ROBINSON Aunt Jen˚u fa Welsh soprano Jessica graduated from RWCMD with distinction as the Prince of Wales Scholar.

She has performed in New York, China and Italy. Performance highlights include WNO, CBSO, Radio 3, Opera Gala at Buckingham Palace, and recently, her debut at the Royal Albert Hall.

RYAN ROSS Ryan is Dutch / American.

Credits: Knife Grinder Oliver!, Avram Bookseller Fiddler on the Roof, Marcello Boheme, Douphol Traviata (GPO), Scottish Soldier 1 Silent Night (WFO) and the US première of Burger’s Two Songs for Baritone & Orchestra.

Ryan is an avid bibliophile who enjoys hiking, cinema history, researching suppressed music.

NICOLA SAID Maltese soprano Nicola graduated from GMSD. Roles include: Zerbinetta, Lucia, Rosaura, Barbarina, La Fée, Olympia and Ariane. She has performed alongside Calleja in Malta, recorded at Abbey Road Studios. She enjoys spending time with family, friends, cooking, Pilates, and catching up with her favourite series.

DAVID SANCHEZ-SERRA Born in Barcelona, David graduated from GSMD and was a member of the Glyndebourne Festival and Tour chorus. Credits: Opera de Lyon, Wexford Festival Opera, ROH, Festival de Peralada and Opera de Lille. David is a confessed hedonist, passionate about languages, travelling and gastronomy.

BRIAN SMITH WALTERS Brian began his professional career as a horn player before turning to singing. Recent roles include Parsifal, Tristan, Peter Grimes, and Siegmund Walküre. Brian has performed on BBC Radio 3 and 4; SWR Radio, NDR Radio and Television and in festivals such as Lucerne, Schleswig-Holstein, Longborough, Buxton, and Aldeburgh.

DOMINIC STEWART From Bristol, Dominic graduated from RNCM where appearances included St. Brioche Merry Widow and chorus Paradise Moscow, Dorvil La Scala di Seta, Eisenstein Fledermaus and Mitch A Streetcar Named Desire. Dominic has sung with Buxton Opera Festival, Opra Cymru and Opera on Location.

HARRY THATCHER Foreman Jen˚u fa Harry studied at RCM. He has sung with Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestra of Opera North. Roles include: Flemish Deputy Don Carlo, Bello Fanciulla (Grange Park Opera), Gugliemo Cosi, Ernest Priester Zauberflöte (RCM), Death (cover) Savitri (BYO) and Spencer Coyle Owen Wingrave. Harry enjoys football and sport and loves cooking to unwind.

MATTHEW THISTLETON Matthew completed a Master’s degree at RNCM. This is his four th season with Grange Park Opera where operas have included Peter Grimes, Queen of Spades, Samson & Delilah, Fanciulla and Don Carlo.

Matthew is also a keen baker and twice won the RNCM’s Bake Off competition.

MARI WYN WILLIAMS Helmwige Walküre Welsh soprano Mari studied at RWCMD and WIAV. She has performed alongside Gwyn Hughes, Bryn Terfel and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. Roles include Lady Macbeth Macbeth, Nella Gianni Schicchi, Giorgetta Il Tabarro, Leonora Il Trovatore and Brünnhilde The Rinse Cycle (Unexpected Opera).

Other appearances include Westminster Abbey, Waldorf Astoria, New York, British Embassy, Paris and in Hong Kong.

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