THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

the chorus in Mozart’s ‘Waiting for Figaro’ at Westonbirt and St John’s Smith Square, enabling them to work with and learn from some outstanding experienced musicians. One teenage soprano from that time, Caroline Kennedy, went on to train as a singer and later took roles in several Bampton productions, most recently in 2019 as the maid Bettina in Storace’s Bride & Gloom, a role which well suited her quirky and vivacious comedic skills.

Subsequent productions at Queen’s enabled talented teenagers singing the major female roles to work as equals alongside male professionals, unfailingly raising the girls’ standards. Best were Mozart’s charming juvenile opera Apollo and Hyacinth in 2007 and especially Schubert’s rarity The Conspirators (Die Verschworenen) which we staged in the school hall in March 2009. Gilly conducted both these operas and the visiting professionals were Edmund Connolly and Tom Raskin, who were so kind and supportive in their mentoring of the youngsters. Men teachers enthusiastically added the lower voices to the otherwise teenage chorus.

Schubert’s score is a complete joy and was to impress and influence Arthur Sullivan. We were delighted that Opera magazine sent a leading reviewer (Igor Toronyi-Lalic) and his thoughtful comments remain as one of Bampton’s loveliest reviews:

“The result was intermittently scrappy and confused, yet still also a joy. Few of the period opera companies, who spend so much time and effort trying to recover the original feel of a work through elaborate academic digging, come close to conjuring up the atmosphere of authenticity of these performances. Schubert and his friends would surely have felt at home with Bampton’s small production … so full of warmth, personality and camaraderie, all charmingly fraying at the edges. The young, raw voices were the highlight.”

Thirty Years Of Bampton Classical Opera

Staging opera in the Bath or Buxton theatres has advantages of comfort - no chill breeze to unsettle the audience, no unexpected gusts of wind to topple the precarious scenery (or worse, a mirror, as happened at Bampton in 2002), no suspicious raindrops to panic the violins and cellos, no thunder-claps when there is no percussion marked in the score. As Richard Bratby cheerfully explained when reviewing us in The Spectator in July 2022:

“Audiences bring their own picnics and chairs and sit there in GoreTex and pac-a-macs, munching away throughout. We were advised that the opera would move to the church if it rained, though I suspect it would have taken a Thames valley tsunami to shift this crowd.”

With our garden performances, the weather has certainly sometimes taken its toll, but it’s miraculous how rarely we have had to shift into our indoors alternative. In the 1990s the problem was more likely to be extreme heat and sun –indeed Bampton audiences used to threaten to plan family weddings on our opera weekends because we were so blessed by fantastic sunshine. This may have been an arrangement with the Almighty brokered by one of our original Board members, the Rev’d Martin Seeley (now a Bishop, but sadly no longer on our Board). However I remember feeling increasingly tense at Westonbirt in 2002: as we reached the driving energetic finale of Mozart’s Cairo Goose I became uneasily aware of darkening skies and distant rumbling thunder. Was our conductor, Edward Gardner, also aware of this as there appeared to be a definite hastening of pace in the final pages? It was just as well – about 30 seconds after the last chord, the deluge hit like the crash of a massive cymbal, and everyone dived for cover. Ed later protested he was quite unaware of the threat, and that his accelerando was purely musical.

At Bampton itself we managed a whole decade without serious weather problems. If the evenings were chilly, they could be alleviated by a supply of local council emergency blankets of which we were the temporary guardians. The first weather casualty only came in 2003, with the second evening of Falstaff, but the audience seemed happy enough to be crammed into St Mary’s church, dry and with excellent acoustics. We had such a full house that some were seated in the choir stalls behind the action, and we instructed the cast (who had had no rehearsal in the church) to be flexible and to turn to face them from time to time, and everyone seemed very happy. Anne Hichens relates a story about tenor (and master comedian) Mark Wilde:

“he was dressed as an American airman, singing ‘She revels in my pain…’ just as Elvis Presley would have…. But later making a fast exit round the pillar, slipped on the flags and fell straight at me, sitting