THIRTY YEARS OF BAMPTON CLASSICAL OPERA

on the feet of the medieval crusader lying there - as he approached along the floor I grabbed the mirror to prevent a further accident, and he and I ended up five inches from the floor staring into each others’ eyes.”

Our next indoors performance was not until July 2007, when we performed Georg Benda’s lyrical but curious setting of Romeo and Juliet, another UK première. As mentioned above, we had preceded the Bampton performances with two at the Buxton Festival, and we had glorious Pre-Raphaelite sets by Nigel Hook and elaborate Victorian costumes by Pauline Smith (helped by Jean Gray and Fiona Hodges). All should have been well: by the time we reached Bampton a few days later, the production was well sung in, and our Thursday evening dress rehearsal in the garden was accompanied by serene warmth and calm skies. As Juliet sings at the opening: “She too is silent, the singer of the night, a peaceful silence has descended on all creation.”

The ‘make-do-and-mend’ nature of the church performances worked well, and the wartime costumes hired and made by Rose Martinez were a treat.

However by the next morning, the performance day, that peaceful silence was shattered: the sky was barely visible, and we were all sharing with Juliet “the fear which creeps upon me in the darkness.” The rains began, and quickly developed into a monsoon of unforgettable dimensions. Within hours Bampton was marooned as an island with the roads in and out virtually impassable – indeed many residents were flooded out of their homes that day. But The Show Must Go On, of course, even if in the church and without the scenery which was too hefty and soaked to move. All the cast were staying in the village, but by midafternoon we realised that only a random handful of our orchestral players could reach us from outside. With no viable orchestra the only solution was for conductor Matthew Halls to play on the church piano, a far from perfect instrument and of course untuned. To make matters worse there was soon a total power cut. Fortunately candles were appropriate to our Victorian concept, and we gathered as many as we could and placed them around the church. Playing the piano without adequate illumination would have been challenging, but a resourceful member of the audience drove his car down the churchyard footpath to the porch and rigged up the piano with a light powered from his car battery.

It became a spellbinding performance, especially the extraordinary funeral music which dominates the third act – “These candles were divinely meant to lead her to the altar.” The ‘dead’ Juliet (soprano Joana Seara), in a cascading Victorian wedding dress, was carried solemnly on a bier by four black cowled monks around the church - an intense and moving experience, still often mentioned by the few who were lucky enough to see it (only about 30 people could make it to the performance). This being an eighteenth-century setting of Shakespeare it resolves unexpectedly with a happy ending: as Romeo (sung by tenor Mark Chaundy) is about to swallow the poison, Juliet’s sleeping draught