“O ruddier than the cherry!”

“What a brilliant idea. ‘Bring a chair’, said the ticket. That way you couldn’t complain of a sore backside. Mind you, there were the surroundings to distract from any discomfort: the Deanery Garden in Bampton is a really beautiful place for outdoor music. A courtly hedge makes a natural set and behind the audience the house seems to hold the sound in –the acoustics were amazingly good.”

Giles Woodforde, writing the first press review (Oxford Times, 23 July 1993) for what was then called Bampton Summer Opera, opened with a flourish, picking out several crucial aspects of our first opera which remain true thirty years later. When preparing a simplystaged opera at the Deanery in 1993, we decided to save the expense of providing seating and so create a more relaxed and welcoming event (“accessible” would be current jargon, not a term much used in the 1990s). A lovely lawn, a sunny evening, the swifts swooping overhead and glorious baroque music: surely just the right ambience for sprawling on a homely garden chair rather than on a hard plastic one from the village hall.

Besides, there was little purpose investing in infrastructure for what was intended as a one-off event. Handel’s glorious pastoral ‘serenata’, Acis and Galatea, composed in 1718 for Cannons, the