THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

Club in the Parish Church, and for the Thaxted Festival, Essex. We also took it to the tiny theatre at Buscot House, just the other side of the Thames from Bampton, where we performed it as a surprise at the Diamond Wedding party of our patron Sir Charles and Lady Mackerras – a particularly happy and special occasion.

There was yet another Haydn performance that summer at a venue which soon became a favourite: Wotton House (Wotton Underwood) in Buckinghamshire. This came about through the persistence of Gilly who charmed its owner David Gladstone to add us to his well-established summer recital series. Wotton is a noble Baroque house built 1704-14 by an unknown architect, with an expansive estate later reshaped with lakes and classical temples by Capability Brown. Like so many country houses of its scale and declining state of preservation, it had once been doomed: it was within a fortnight of demolition when, in 1957, it was rescued at the eleventh hour and bought (for £6000) by one Elaine Brunner, who was only on a trip past in search of columns to grace a swimming pool. It is a wonderful rescue story – operatic in itself – and well recounted in Ptolemy Dean’s obituary of Mrs Brunner in The Independent, 9 April 1998, available online. Elaine’s daughter April married David Gladstone and the couple inherited the house in 1998, continuing the laborious restoration of house and