THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

We returned to the Bath Shakespeare Festival in March 2004 with our Dad’s Armyinspired interpretation of Salieri’s Falstaff, a late and gloriously funny masterpiece by this much maligned composer; we had given the UK première in Bampton the previous summer. We were also invited to the niche English Haydn Festival in Bridgnorth, Shropshire where we staged our first Haydn opera, L’infedeltà delusa. Haydn’s operas are often passed over, but the music and orchestration are always wonderful and surprising, and L’infedeltà was to reappear in our schedules with several different casts and venues through until 2007. This small-scale opera requires a cast of only five and we hoped would make a conveniently portable production. The first conductor was Jason Lai (then Assistant Conductor with the BBC Philharmonic); Fiona Hodges, the wife of my school friend Chris Hodges (who was soon to become our Chair) produced a set of beautifully colour-balanced period costumes displaying her skills in historic corsetry. We rehearsed in just a week in London and set off to

Shropshire in a hired van driven by our adorable friend from Radcot, Anne Hichens, who recalls “I got a few double takes when they saw a grey-haired old lady in the getaway van.” Anne, a wonderful source of warm memories about our history and who, with husband Andrew, has sung in many of our choruses, goes on to report:

“We had been warned that the