THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

our name began to feel somewhat unseasonal. We now selected 21 December as the regular date, the shortest day of the year and the feast-day of Bampton’s own obscure Anglo-Saxon saint, Beornwald, whose probable shrine is in the north transept. In 1995 we chose the delightful and popular Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, by the then-living composer Gian-Carlo Menotti (1911-2007). We performed it in the composer’s arrangement for two pianos, played by Guy Hopkins and myself, requiring the expensive hire of concert grands and a fair amount of strenuous pew shifting. The opera had been originally written for television in 1951, and in our simple updated production, which involved hanging a lot of purpledyed laundry around the arches of the church, Amahl’s down-atheel mother was watching an old black-and-white television. Amahl, written for a boy soprano, was ably sung by young Nicolas Moodie, son of friends from Northampton.

The Three Kings were played by Leigh Melrose, Richard Ireland and Matthew Sharp, and the Mother by Lindsay Richardson, a very strong cast. We staged Amahl again in 2019, with another fantastic cast.

Gluck’s well-known Orpheus and Euridice was our 1996 summer opera choice, given on an exceptionally hot July day when the heat made the afternoon dress rehearsal severely testing. I began to fall in love with this great composer’s lyrical writing, leading later to several other rarer works by him, and especially his majestic Paris and Helen in 2021. Indeed, from 1997 we resolved to concentrate only on rarities, a policy which has happily led to widespread praise from the press and has continued to intrigue and educate our audiences. A catalyst for this was a recent Royal Festival Hall concert by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the foremost ‘period’ instrument bands. This intriguing programme, entitled

‘Opera in Mozart’s Vienna’, included music by Storace, Gazzaniga, Paisiello, Salieri and Martin y Soler, and we went on over the coming years to tackle operas by all these neglected composers. That OAE concert included a scene from Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s Don Giovanni, which we realised would ideally suit our forces and budget: we naughtily imagined that some audience might come expecting Mozart and be surprised to discover something new. We performed it in 1997, inviting Standlake resident