THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

history of art class at the London school where I was teaching. Her parents, Linda and Peter, discovered they had little chance of escaping becoming an opera venue, even if not quite written into the house purchase covenants. They were still hosting the opera 25 years later.

Another unwelcome discovery was the need for a Public Entertainments Licence from WODC – initiating me into the joys of legalistic form-filling. The PEL process generally involved a cheerful advance visit from the local policeman, the posting of a planning application at the Deanery gate, and a site inspection by the fire officer – who decided that the official escape route from the garden should be via a narrow and obscure opening on the far side of the house between two bushes, which the gardener had to trim to reach the required dimensions. Fortunately the bureaucracy later became much easier.

Many aspects developed, although there was still no staging or canopy. We hired portaloos for the first time - somewhat basic plastic cabins, lined along the entrance pathway; labelling them as for ‘sopranos and altos’ and for ‘tenors and basses’ seemed to cause confusion for some in the audience, and they were unlit once it went dark. We needed a much larger band of 24 players, again ‘fixed’ for us by Felicity: the wind section grew to include flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani, that is, a full ‘classical’ orchestra which we grandly called the Westminster Players, as several had links with Westminster School. For the chorus we invited the local Burford Singers, although as rehearsals were of necessity in London this proved a little inconvenient. Soloists included again Gilly and John Virgoe, and we also introduced soprano Amanda Pitt. Amanda (‘Milly’) was to become a regular at Bampton, singing a further 12 roles over many years. The non-singing

Impresario role was performed with characteristic aplomb by Trevor, a stalwart of the Bampton Drama Group. Our first-year conductor and director had moved to Italy, and we now asked Guy Hopkins: he continued conducting for us until 1999. I decided to make my first attempt at directing (my parents had met on the amateur stage and as a child I had regularly helped paint scenery) - I had plenty of ideas, but perhaps not much expertise. I chose a loosely thirties dress style, which would be cheap and easy to manage, and I located the opera ‘at the seaside’: this required a tower in which the lovelorn girls of the plot had been incarcerated by the boorish Don Pippo. Somehow I managed to construct the top part of a lighthouse in our own tiny back garden, but it was a very ramshackle affair. Alan Allinson and David Mills, the fathers of our two 1993 walk-on children, were