In the ecology of country house opera – privately funded, watched by devoted but relatively small audiences – much remains hidden, or unseen. The optional fancy dress and high ticket prices steal headlines, mostly negative. Their short seasons, which began in May, are drawing to a close. (Glyndebourne, older, bigger, better funded, operates somewhat differently, though there are overlaps.) In this month of political transformation, with so many questions about the future of our crumbling cultural landscape, we need to take a closer look at these small enterprises. What is happening beyond the frivolous image of pleasure gardens? Should we care?
In short, yes. I have alluded to their work in passing in recent weeks – at Longborough and Garsington – but there are many more. Their work is vital. The habitat that has so long nurtured our national companies – English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera – has been destroyed: by Arts Council cuts, by political indifference, by contempt for music education. Whatever support the new government provides, these complex organisms will need time to recover from a long-term catastrophe. It will require more money than even a culturally benevolent Chancellor will ever have.
Behind the scenes, out of season, with shoestring budgets and skeleton crews, these small festivals are helping to save the UK’s classical music scene. Not on their own – orchestras, ensembles, the Proms (starting next week), Aldeburgh, to name a few, are doing a great job – but systematically, consistently. As they have evolved from haphazard to highly professional institutions, they have flexed their muscles. Musicians are hired, singers are nurtured at every level, performing arts are taught. The list goes on, encompassing local communities of all ages.
Last week a new Children’s Book Prize winner for literature was named (Frank Cottrell Boyce). Why not one for music?
Last week I was at Grange Park Opera in Surrey for one of the highlights of the festival. (In the biblical rain: no cork popping, just shivering and hissing, although the beautiful theatre, recently painted red and gold by volunteers, is purpose-built and dry.) If the GPO can convince one of the world’s best singers, Bryn TerfelTo perform here, there often has to be a reason. The legendary ability of Wasfi Kani, founder and CEO, to convince individuals to donate enough to ensure that Terfel receives a decent compensation is irrelevant. He hardly has to do it. He has to see something priceless in the enterprise.
Two particular activities stand out. The company’s pioneering arm, Pimlico Opera, has been working with prisoners to stage musicals behind bars since 1989. Next up, in March 2025: Made in Dagenhamin HMP Bronzefield, Surrey, the largest women’s prison in Europe. Of equal importance is Primary Robins, a programme reaching 6,500 (and rising) children in Key Stage 2: 56 schools in deprived areas and without music provision, in 10 counties, from north to south. This equates to 100,000 hours of music lessons a year. The children sing for half an hour a week. Singing together? It sounds easy. The administration and bureaucracy involved are unimaginable. And also, when you read the evidence, the positive effects on the children.
Last week, a new Children’s Book Prize winner was announced for literature (Frank Cottrell Boyce). Why not one for music? I would start by nominating Nicholas Daniel, oboist and music education campaigner supreme. Keir Starmer knows that his own access to music came from another kind of privilege: free music tuition in schools.
Terfel played the leading role in a well-coordinated double bill, tightly 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 one-sided but passionate melodrama about old age being rejected by reckless youth. Gianni Schicchi (1918), on the other hand, is Puccini’s late comedy about the eponymous trickster, one of the doomed sinners in Dante’s Hell.
In each of these pieces the Welsh bass-baritone sang the title role, towering over a fine cast of supporting actors and in Alekoa stage full of youthful choruses and dancers (movement Lynne Hockney) dressed as squatters in a once-posh house (designer Jamie Vartan). As the outcast, rejected by his bored and susceptible younger wife (dazzled by Ailish Tynan), Aleko succumbs to jealousy with tragic consequences. Rachmaninov was still a teenager when he wrote it. The opening dances, vividly scored, are hardly theatrical, but provide a melodic prelude to the main action, which ignites after a lush, slow harp glissando. Terfel maximizes the work’s expressive potential, making it more than meets the eye.
The perfect certainties of Gianni Schicchinot a note wasted, the orchestration radical and ingenious, giving him the opportunity for sharp comedy. As the mohawked Schicchi, dressed in red motorcycle suits, he strutted and skipped, lithe, sly and funny. Some of the higher notes push the limits of his range, but every word and gesture contributes to the deceptive humour. 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. Rising New Zealand soprano Pasquale Orchard delivered her big aria, O mio babbino caro, with enough innocent calm to allow the sentimental Schicchi (the sweet babbino/daddy in question) to well up.
Some non-opera related 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 who were marginalized in the 20th century), Welsh pianist Siwan Rhys played three sonatas by Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), born in St. Petersburg and for a time a composition student of an admiring Shostakovich: unique, stunning, percussive works, beautifully played. An enchanting program by the Bozzini Quartet The same series included Ruth Crawford Seeger’s magnificent String Quartet (1931).
At the Barbican, as part of the five-day Classical Pride festival – interesting programmes, if slightly biased towards female composers – I heard the excellent Fourth Choir perform music from across the centuries. My beloved husband. Samuel Barnett and Petroc Trelawny read moving excerpts from love letters between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. The person next to me didn’t know Britten was gay. He’d never been to a classical concert either. In a wet field wearing funny clothes, or at a festival celebrating queerness, perhaps also wearing funny clothes, the margins meet the centre. There might be something to learn from that.