In the ecology of country house opera – privately funded, seen by dedicated but relatively small audiences – much remains hidden, or unseen. The optional dressing up and high ticket prices steal headlines, mostly negative. Their short seasons, which began in May, are nearing an end. (Glyndebourne, older, bigger, better funded, operates slightly differently, though there are overlaps.) In this month of political transformation, with so many questions to ask about the future of our collapsing cultural landscape, we should look closely at these small enterprises. What goes on beyond the frivolous pleasure gardens image? Should we care?
In short, yes. I have referred passingly to their work in recent weeks – at Longborough and Garsington – but there are several more. Their work is vital. The habitat that so long nurtured our national companies – English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera – has been destroyed: by Arts Council funding cuts, by political indifference, by a disregard for music education. Whatever support the new government gives, these complex organisms will need time to recover after prolonged catastrophe. More cash will be required than even a culturally well-disposed chancellor will ever have.
Behind the scenes, off season, with tiny budgets and skeleton staff, these little festivals are helping to save the UK’s classical music scene. Not single-handedly – orchestras, ensembles, the Proms (starting next week), Aldeburgh, to name only the obvious, do sterling work – but systematically, consistently. As they have evolved from haphazard to supremely professional fixtures, so they have showed their muscle. Musicians are employed, singers nurtured at every level, stagecraft taught. The list goes on, and involves local communities of all ages.
Last week I was at Grange Park Opera in Surrey for one of its main festival highlights. (In biblical rain: no cork-popping, only shivering and squelching, though the handsome theatre, newly painted red and gold by volunteers, is purpose-built and dry.) If GPO can persuade one of the world’s greatest singers, Bryn Terfel, to perform here, frequently, there must be a reason. The fabled ability of Wasfi Kani, founder and CEO, to persuade individuals to donate enough for Terfel to be paid a proper fee is irrelevant. He scarcely needs to do it. He must perceive in the venture something invaluable.
Two particular strands of activity stand out. The company’s pioneering offshoot, Pimlico Opera, has worked with prisoners since 1989 to stage musicals behind bars. Next up, in March 2025: Made in Dagenham, at HMP Bronzefield, Surrey, the largest female prison in Europe. Of equal importance is Primary Robins, a scheme that reaches 6,500 (and rising) key stage 2 schoolchildren: 56 schools in deprived areas and with no music provision, in 10 counties, north to south. This equates to 100,000 hours of music teaching per year. The children sing for half an hour a week. Singing together? It sounds easy. The administration and red tape involved are beyond imagination. So too, reading the evidence, are the positive effects on the children.
Last week a new children’s laureate for literature was appointed (Frank Cottrell Boyce). Why not one for music? I’d nominate, for starters, Nicholas Daniel, oboist and campaigner for music education supreme. Keir Starmer knows his own access to music came from a different kind of privilege: free music education in schools.
Terfel starred in a well-matched double bill, crisply directed by Stephen Medcalf and conducted by Gianluca Marciano, with the BBC Concert Orchestra enthusiastic and competent in the pit. Rachmaninov’s early opera Aleko (1893), based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies, is a lopsided but impassioned melodrama of old age rejected by heedless youth. Gianni Schicchi (1918), in contrast, is Puccini’s lateish comedy about the eponymous trickster, one of the doomed sinners in Dante’s Inferno.
In each, the Welsh bass-baritone sang the title role, towering over an excellent supporting cast and, in Aleko, a stage full of youthful chorus and dancers (movement Lynne Hockney) dressed as squatters in a once-chic house (designer Jamie Vartan). As the outcast, rejected by his bored and susceptible younger wife (sparkily played by Ailish Tynan), Aleko yields to jealousy with tragic outcome. Rachmaninov was still in his teens when he wrote it. The dances at the start, vividly scored, make scant theatrical sense but provide a melodic prelude to the main action, which ignites after a luscious, slow harp glissando. Terfel maximised the work’s expressive potential, making it more than first appears.
The perfect certainties of Gianni Schicchi, not a note wasted, orchestration radical and ingenious, gave him the chance for sharp comedy. As the cock-o’-the-walk Schicchi, clad in red biker leathers, he strutted and skipped, lithe, sly and funny. Some of the higher notes push at the limits of his range, but every word and gesture add to the fraudsterish wit. The ensemble cast included Luis Gomes (Rinuccio), Sara Fulgoni (Zita), Robert Winslade Anderson (Betto di Signa) and Jeff Lloyd Roberts (Gherardo), as well as Tynan (Nella) and Terfel. The rising star New Zealand soprano Pasquale Orchard delivered her big aria, O mio babbino caro, with enough innocent poise to make soppy Schicchi (the dear babbino/papa in question) well up.
Some non-operatic events to note: as part of the Southbank Centre’s Sound Within Sound festival (inspired by Kate Molleson’s book of the same name, about composers sidelined in the 20th century), the Welsh pianist Siwan Rhys played three sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), born in St Petersburg and for a time a composition pupil of an admiring Shostakovich: singular, stupendous, percussive works, superbly played. A beguiling programme by the Bozzini Quartet in the same series featured Ruth Crawford Seeger’s dazzling String Quartet (1931).
At the Barbican, as part of its five-day Classical Pride festival – interesting programmes if light on female composers – I heard the excellent Fourth Choir perform music across the centuries in My Beloved Man. Samuel Barnett and Petroc Trelawny read moving extracts of love letters between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. The person next to me hadn’t known Britten was gay. Nor had he been to a classical concert before. In a wet field wearing silly clothes, or in a festival celebrating queerness, possibly also wearing silly clothes, the margins reach the centre. There may be something to learn from that.
