Grange Park Opera Programme 2016

S I N C E 19 9 8

L I O N E L B A RT

G I ACO M O P U CC I N I

O L I V ER !

LA

GIUSEPPE VERDI

R I C H A R D WAG N E R

D O N C A R LO

TRISTAN

Sponsored by ALIX PARTNERS

Sponsored by ICAP plc

FANCIULLA DEL WEST

Suppor ted by a syndicate led by DAVID & AMANDA LEATHERS with Philip & Mary Ling, Bill & Anda Winters and two anonymous donors

IN CONCERT

UND

ISOLDE

Model of the Theatre in the Woods

19 9 8 t o 2 017

1998 The Entrance Hall as Grange Park Opera found it

KEY SUPPORTERS 2016 Our passion for the beautiful does not make us extravagant, nor does our love of culture make us weak.

As for our wealth, we do not brag of it.

Instead, we use it well, appropriately, for the good of all.

PERICLES 432 BC

ICAP plc

Mr & Mrs Grant Gordon

AlixPartners

Mr & Mrs Peter Nutting

The Linbury Trust

Hamish Parker

Fortnum & Mason

Christopher & Anne Saul

David & Amanda Leathers

Diane & Christopher Sheridan

Bell Pottinger

Philip & Mary Ling

Franรงois Freyeisen & Shunichi Kubo

an anonymous donor

Ruth Markland

Lime Wood Group Ltd

Francis & Nathalie Phillimore

Rothschild Wealth Management

Bill & Anda Winters

an anonymous donor

Mr & Mrs Ernst Piech

Nerissa Guest

Mrs Peter Cadbury

Minnie & Joe MacHale

Judith Lawless & Kevin Egan

Rathbone Investment Management

John L Pemberton

Linklaters LLP

two anonymous donors

Baring Asset Management

Laurent-Perrier Champagne

Financial Express

Elm Capital Associates Ltd

Adam & Lucy Constable

Barbara Yu Larsson

Christopher Swan

LONMART Insurance

an anonymous donor

Mr Quentin Black

David & Simone Caukill

Ed & Lulu Siskind

Jeremy & Rosemary Farr

Stephen Gosztony & Sue Butcher

Raymonde Jay

David & Clare Kershaw

Dominic & Katherine Powell

Mr & Mrs Richard Morse

HardHat

Simon & Victoria Robey

Brian & Jennifer Ratner

Johnny & Marie Veeder

an anonymous donor

Sandbourne Investment Advisers

Paul & Lydia Goodson

Noreen Doyle

Adam & Carola Lee

5

Perfectly orchestrated

Discover Fortnum & Mason’s beautiful hampers, bespoke gifts, intimate dinners and exclusive experiences – all perfectly orchestrated by our dedicated Client Services team.

Call +44(0) 20 7973 5602 or email client.services@fortnumandmason.co.uk to find out more.

ICAP is proud to support Grange Park Opera.

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WEST HORSLEY PLACE

THE THEATRE IN THE WO

THE ORCHA

THE 18th CENTURY WALLED GARDENS

for our wirework furniture and indian tents amid the ancient box hedges

THE CAR PARK IN THE BREWHOUSE MEADOW

GETTING THERE A later start time of 6pm and an easy trip by car or train ยบ

10 minutes to M25 (junction with A3) 23 miles to Shepherds Bush ยบ

OODS

1 mile to Horsley station Four trains / hour from Waterloo, Vauxhall (Victoria Line) and Clapham Junction ยบ

WHEN? Opening night Thursday 8th June 2017 with Joseph Calleja in the first of nine performances of Tosca RD

THE 15th CENTURY HOUSE WITH A 17th CENTURY FACADE 18th CENTURY STABLES, A LARGE 19th CENTURY BARN, A SMALLER TUDOR BARN, FIVE PIGSTIES, CARTSHEDS and MORE

9

THE

THEATRE

IN THE

WOODS APPEAL

JOINT CHAIR: SIR DAVID DAVIES & DAME VIVIEN DUFFIELD PATRONS: JOANNA LUMLEY & BRYN TERFEL

Grange Park Opera’s home from 2017: West Horsley Place, a delicate 15th century timber-frame house hides behind a 17th century brick facade

Between late November 2015 and early May 2016, more than half of the £10m target had been achieved

‘

West Horsley Place is a glorious sprawling ancient house, grand but welcoming, formal gardens with secret corners for picnickers and gazebos, a sense of history and occasion, a crinkle crankle wall extending the length of one garden and beyond into the orchard (too majestic to describe) and barns, outbuildings, aged trees and box hedges.

It was waiting to be reborn through the generosity of Bamber and Christina Gascoigne, and the energy and passion of everyone who loves Grange Park Opera.

What happens there will be a gift to lovers of opera, as well as young audiences and will breathe new life into this demi-Eden.

Just 150 vital Pioneers are helping build the Theatre in the Woods. I hope you will join us.

’

11

THE

PIONEERS

PATRON : JOANNA LUMLEY

Donor levels are named to reflect the project’s pioneering spirit. Contact Jack Rush, Appeal Secretary, jack@grangeparkopera.co.uk for sparkling printed matter with further information.

L E A D D O N O R S – T H E AT R I U M

M I C H A E L & H I L A RY COWA N

˚

HADRON COLLIDERS Naming oppor tunities for boxes, the upper tier, the balcony, the grand tier

RONNIE FROST & FAMILY MICHAEL & SARAH SPENCER WILLIAM GARRETT SPUTNIK

˚

THE FIRST ARTIFICIAL EARTH SATELLITE

A row in the stalls

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a 23” diameter metal sphere with four antennae to broadcast radio pulses. Clearly visible from earth, it caused consternation and triggered the Space Race. The satellite transmitted signals for 21 days until the batteries ran out. The term beatnik was inspired by Sputnik.

DAVID & AMANDA LEATHERS JOHN L PEMBERTON SIMON & MEG FREAKLEY THE GEOFF & FIONA SQUIRE FOUNDATION HAMISH & SOPHIE FORSYTH RUTH MARKLAND WILLIAM & KATHY CHARNLEY DAVID & LINDA LLOYD-JONES T U R I N G - S P U TN I K S STEPHEN GOSZTONY & SUE BUTCHER

˚

T U R I N G BREAKER OF THE ENIGMA CODE A column in the atrium Alan Turing was a genius. He occasionally ran the 40 miles from Bletchley Park to London to attend meetings; he was prone to hay fever (in the first week of June he would wear a gas mask whilst cycling to the office) and cherished his mug (he chained it to the radiator to prevent it being stolen).

Peter & Annette Dart Sir David Davies Peter & Manina Dicks Noreen Doyle T V Drastik Niall, Ingrid & Gabriella FitzGerald François Freyeisen & Shunichi Kubo David & Clare Kershaw Lord & Lady Sassoon Anthony & Carolyn Townsend Adam & Lucy Constable Rothschild

Thomas Sopwith’s first solo flight in 1910 crashed after 300 yards. Soon after he won a £4,000 prize for the longest flight from England to Europe in a British built plane (169 miles in 3 hrs 40 mins.) using the winnings to set up the Sopwith School of Flying at Brooklands. The Sopwith Aviation Company received its first military aircraft order in 1912 and from premises in Kingston upon Thames produced 18,000+ World War I planes, including 5,747 Sopwith Camel singleseat fighters.

Sir Gerald & Lady Acher Nick & Lesley Dumbreck Anne & Barry Rourke John & Jackie Alexander The Buckley Family David & Elizabeth Challen Jane & Paul Chase-Gardener Judith Lawless & Kevin Egan

There are 700 yards of walls built around 1710 when J S Bach, in his mid-twenties, was organist at Weimar

˚

S O P W I T H SURREY AVIATOR A named step on a staircase

Christina & Bamber Gascoigne Richard & Pamela Jacobs Raymonde Jay Keith & Lucy Jones The Justham Trust Mark H Lewisohn Oscar & Margaret Lewisohn Tessa & John Manser Peter & Poppity Nutting Cathy & Michael Pearman Diane & Christopher Sheridan Johnny & Marie Veeder Edward & Mandy Weston The Ewins Family Adam & Louise Tyrrell º

The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation The Golden Bottle Trust

The crinkle-crankle wall in one of the gardens

Nigel & Viv Robson

13

THE

CIRCLE

OF

VIRTUOUS ENTERPRISE

PATRON: BRYN TERFEL

63 Mrs Elizabeth Vyvyan

Mr Brian Boyce 126 Mrs Carolyn Conlan Mrs Judith Boyce 127 Dominic & Katherine Powell Anonymous 128 Mrs Laurence Colchester 67 Mr & Mrs S R Jeffreys 129 Mr Mark & Mrs Sue Luboff 68 Christopher Jack & Stephanie Sfakianos 130 Julian G Jones 69 Robin & Anne Purchas 131 Ian & Helen Andrews 70 Laura & Andrew Sykes 132 David & Elizabeth Pritchard 71 Anonymous 133 Anne Howells & Steve Clarke 72 Mr Adrian Knowles 134 Hugh Fagan 73 Mrs Tikki Adorian 135 Crispin Cazalet 74 Laurence & Janey Langford 136 Antoni & Caroline Daszewski 75 Paul Batchelor 137 Dr Anthony Smoker 76 Janet Batchelor 138 Mr & Mrs Max Ulfane 77 Miss Deborah Finkler 139 Clive & Helena Butler & Mr Allan Murray-Jones 140 Jill & Mike Pullan 141 Nick Viner & Victoria Boyarsky 78 Mr & Mrs John Colwell 79 Dr Jonathan Holliday & Dr Gwen Lewis 142 Mr & Mrs John Tremlett 80 Sharon Pipe 143 Edwina Sassoon 81 Martin & Brigitte Skan 144 Mr Christopher & Mrs Clare McCann 82 Dr Patrick Mill 145 Michael de Navarro 83 Jeanette Mill 146 Emily, Victoria & Isobel Battcock 84 Dr Peter Harrison & Verity Jones 147 Christian & Katie Wells 85 The Fischer Fund 148 Mr & Mrs Angel 86 Bill Bougourd & Judith Thomas 149 Austin & Ragna Erwin 87 Iain & Mary Rhind 150 Charles Alexander & Kasia Starega 88 Mrs Michael Beresford-West 151 Alan Thomas 89 Mr Mat Kirk & Mrs Sam Kirk 152 Jerry & Clare Wright 90 - 91 The Foxley Trust 153 Sue & Peter Morgan 92 Peter Kerfack & Russell Townend 154 Sue & Peter Paice 93 Andrew & Jane Sutton 155 Dieter & Lesley Losse 94 George Meagher 156 Mr Charles Rosier 95 Jack Gardener 157 Anonymous 96 Jan & Michael Potter 158 Professor Heather Joshi CBE 97 Mr & Mrs Henry Lumley 159 Dr Barbara Domayne-Hayman 98 Sir Michael Parker 160 Mr Hugh Gammell 99 Lady Parker 161 Anonymous 100 Miss Lily Bagwell Purefoy 101 Pam Alexander & Roger Booker 102 Dr & Mrs G M Tonge 103 Simon & Rosemary Godfrey 104 Rob & Felicity Shepherd HOW IT WORKS 105 June, Dyrol & Becky Lumbard The Circle are 850 people contributing 106 Janet Mernane at the Entry Level towards the £10m 107 Victor Coles Esq Theatre in the Woods Appeal. The 108 David & Virginia Essex 850 places (“points”) are allotted in 109 Mr & Mrs David Blackburn the order of joining and contributors 110 Andrew Luff acknowledged in the theatre on a 111 & 112 Diana & Terence Kyle scroll in point number order (not 113 Mr Julian Hardwick alphabetical) for 20 years.

114 Mr & Mrs Peter Leaver 115 John Kessler Bryn Terfel has taken Point 1. The 116 Angela Kessler sooner you join the Circle, the closer 117 Mr Habib Motani you will be to Bryn.

118 Miss Elizabeth Cretch You may consider taking Points for your 119 Anonymous children or grandchildren.

120 David & Vivienne Woolf 121 Mr Julian Stanford At the time of going to press, the Entry 122 – 124 James & Béatrice Lupton Level is £1,750.

125 Mina & Suzanne Goodman 64 65 66

Fiddler on the Roof 2015

1 Bryn Terfel 2 Wasfi Kani 3 Alexander & Mary Creswell 4 Mr & Mrs David Ibeson 5 Ms Nicola A Freshwater 6 Mr & Mrs Graham West 7 Jean & Richard Baldwin 8 Hilary & James Leek 9 Adam & Carola Lee 10 Christopher & Tineke Stewart 11 Miss Pamela M North 12 Tony Legge 13 Anonymous 14 Mrs Susan Lochner JP DL 15 Mr Harry & Mrs Ellen Thurman 16 Roger & Jackie Morris 17 Peter & Irene Casey 18 George Kingston 19 – 23 Gerry & Joy Acher’s grandchildren 24 Peter & Jacquie Homonko 25 Mrs Alyson Wilson 26 Mr David & Mrs. Alison Watson 27 Mr & Mrs William Witts 28 Liz & Nigel Peace 29 Jane Poulter 30 Angela & David Harvey 31 Mrs Annabel Allott 32 Ian & Clare Maurice 33 Nick & Sarah Treble 34 David & Fiona Taylor 35 Paul Drury & Anna McPherson 36 Mr George & Mrs Marie Rushton 37 Peter & Marianne Hooley 38 Mark & Rosemary Carawan 39 Sir Anthony & Lady Cleaver 40 Ernst Uwe Hanneck & Karin Mueller 41 Madeleine & Stephen McGairl 42 Antonia Murphy & Clare Bevan 43 Dame Janet Gaymer 44 Mr John Gaymer 45 Dr Martin Read & Dr Marian Gilbart Read 46 Siân & Ben Tyler 47 Sally Phillips 48 Tristan Wood 49 Dr Carolyn Greenwood & John McVittie 50 Eliza Mellor 51 Mr Andrew & Mrs Marian Sanders 52 William & Kitty Vaughan 53 David & Sarah Rosier 54 John & Cecilia Gordon 55 David & Peta Crowther 56 Liz & Mike Cooper-Mitchell 57 Anonymous 58 Dr Henry & Mrs Julia Pearson 59 Mrs Margaret Green 60 Helen Culleton 61 Mr & Mrs P Wilson 62 Mrs Margaret Bolam

‘

Singing with Grange Park Opera is life-affirming. These are people who want to bring a new generation to opera on and off the stage. I will be joining them on their journey.

I hope you will participate with me in this initiative to create a Theatre in the Woods.

’

15

THE

THEATRE

IN THE

WOODS

Concealed within the richly textured, mysterious brick drum is an intimate auditorium of four tiers around a “decorated room”, with balcony fronts enriched for warmth and splendour, a painted ceiling and tree-like columns soaring from floor to roof through the atrium.

FANFARE BALCONY UPPER TIER BALCONY

AUDITORIUM

STAGE

ATRIUM

DRESSING ROOMS

designed to target an optimum reverberation time of 1.4 seconds

GRAND TIER STALLS CIRCLE

ORCHESTRA PIT

Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners planning consultants David Lloyd Jones consultant architect / project co-ordination R J Smith building contractor DESIGN TEAM led by Tim Ronalds Architects Price & Myers structural engineers Max Fordham services engineers Ramboll Environ acoustics Mike Ibbotson landscape Bristow Johnson cost consultant

West Horsley Place lies midway on the line connecting Glyndebourne and Garsington. It must be destiny.

J M Partnership building control

The brick drum of the Theatre in the Woods

Garsington

Grange Park Opera THEATRE IN THE WOODS WEST HORSLEY PLACE

The Grange

Glyndebourne

Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe (1915-2014)

Grange Park Opera began in 1998 with an ambition to stage world-class productions that inspire, challenge and entertain. It is now established as one of Europe’s leading opera companies and synonymous not only with artistic excellence, but the warmth of the relationship shared between artists, audiences and supporters. The company appeared at the 2015 BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Not without reason has it become known as ‘a small jewel with big performances’.

From 2017 the Grange Park Opera team moves to West Horsley Place, recently inherited by Bamber and Christina Gascoigne.

In an act of exceptional philanthropy Bamber and Christina have given the full freehold ownership of the house, land and ancillary buildings to The Mary Roxburghe Trust. The Trust wishes to introduce a range of uses focusing on arts and the teaching of crafts of all kinds, to achieve the conservation of the house and to widen public access.

estate slumbering in the Surrey countryside.

Behind the house, an ancient orchard opens into a wooded glade, which is the setting for the Theatre in the Woods. Here Grange Park Opera will realise the next chapter in its quest to abolish the myth of elitism that that surrounds opera today and to nurture the next generation’s connection with the wider arts.

Glowing brick façades, framed by antique box hedges and walled gardens, sit in the midst of the 300-acre

STAGE DOOR

YARD

DRESSING ROOMS SIDE STAGE 16m

SIDE STAGE 12m

GET-IN DOORS

STAGE

– pr

o

niu sce

OR

C

1m – m1

TR HES

IT AP

AUDITORIUM STALLS

ATRIUM

17

The Red Drawing Room The wall coverings and drapes date from the 18th century

Art and culture, the emblems of a civilised society, should inform humanity and bring joy to many, regardless of privilege or class. This building aims to do just that. It will be used and enjoyed by many people from many walks of life and for many generations.

•

•

The new 650-seat theatre, just beyond the historic orchard, is modelled on the four-tiered horseshoe shape of La Scala, Milan, with a vibrant acoustic and a generous orchestra pit.

A 99-year lease from the Mary Roxburghe Trust greatly expands what is possible to achieve. The collaboration will breathe new life into this enchanting, secret arcadia.

•

Far from being an exclusive, single-use opera house, the Theatre in the Woods will be a springboard for dynamic, eager young people to enable them to grow to their full potential. It will host diverse visiting companies.

•

It will be a springboard for new public engagement activities in collaboration with Surrey Arts, as well as the work of Pimlico Opera in prisons and primary schools.

•

•

Just 23 miles from London, the Theatre in the Woods will be accessible to people of all ages. Horsley station is one mile away. The journey from Waterloo takes 45 minutes; the return fare is £13.20. Each night of the season there will be 50 affordable seats for under-30s.

Grange Park Opera is a not-for-profit organisation.

Sister charity Pimlico Opera, founded 1987, has presented co-productions with prisons for 26 years and taken 50,000+ public into prison. Each week the Primary Robins project gives a singing class to 1,600 children aged 7-11 in schools in deprived areas.

ADVE RTI S E RS 2016 Kirker Holidays Linklaters LLP Laurent-Perrier Champagne Lime Wood Group Ltd LONMART Insurance Rathbone Investment Management Rothschild Wealth Management

S U PPORTING YOU NG E R ARTI ST S & YOU NG OPE R A FAN S 2016 The Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation Stephen & Pat Crew T V Drastik The Dyers’ Company The Golden Bottle Trust Dr Jonathan Holliday & Dr Gwen Lewis The Holmes Family

The Haven, Hampshire British Red Cross Action Against Cancer The Childline Ball 2016 Lord Taverners Committee Royal British Legion Pavoirs Burns Night Dinner

Tudor flagstones run from the entrance through to the gardens

GR ANG E PARK OPE R A TIC KE T S FOR C HARIT Y E VE NT S

Mayor of London’s Fund for Young Musicians Childline & NSPCC Joe Glover Charity Barbican Centre Trust, Halloween Ball The Egmont Trust East Anglia Children’s Hospice Rugby Portobello Trust Fine Cell Work (in prisons) British Youth Opera Royal College of Music: Soiree d’Or Honeypot Children’s Charity Bone Cancer Research St Peters School Project Help for Heroes Hampshire XLP Youth Charity Gala Dinner BUGS (Burns Unit Group Support) Homestart, Winchester Anthony Nolan Trust Children with Cancer Robert Poulton Foundation Breadline Charity Young Epilepsy Reed’s School Foundation

2016

One of two dog kennels at the front of the house

Action for A-T (Ataxia Telangiectasia)

19

ELM CAPITAL ASSOCIATES LTD

PRIVATE EQUITY ADVISERS

www.elmcapital.com Contact Us 26 St James’s Square, London, SW1Y 4JH Tel: +44(0) 207 901 8940 Email: info@elmcapital.com

FOREWORD SIR DAVID DAVIES, FOUNDING CHAIRMAN, GR ANGE PARK OPER A

I

t is impossible to write about Grange Park Opera without writing first and foremost about Wasfi Kani. I make no excuse therefore for the panegyric that follows.

Back in the early 1990s I’d heard vague and tantalising stories about this redoubtable lady, born of Indian parents who had left at Partition, and who was raised in the East End of London in Cable Street. Wasfi learned the violin at 12, played in the National Youth Orchestra at 18 and worked her way to Oxford to take a degree in music. Whilst running a computer consultancy in the City, she concluded that music was her passion and that the best way to realise this was to become a conductor and start her own opera company. Pimlico Opera was born in 1987.

From this it was only a short step for Wasfi to work with Leonard Ingrams at Garsington Opera and then take the seminal decision to set up her own opera festival. 1997 was the year when hope turned into action. After one false start – at what would have been known as Coles Opera – Wasfi discovered The Grange, a desiccated ruin under the ownership of the Baring family and the guardianship of English Heritage and its Chairman, the formidable Jocelyn Stevens. On 6 January 1998 Grange Park Opera was incorporated. The founding Trustees were Wasfi, Mary Ann Sheehy, the celebrated tenor Philip Langridge and myself, who had taken on the position of Chairman, seduced as ever by Wasfi’s charm and persuasion.

“With your guidance I could confidently devote the next 10 years of my life to creating an event of national standing”. Were truer words ever written?

Feverish activity continued through the first six months of 1998, and on Tuesday 7 July what had first been an orangery, then a picture gallery, became a fully-fledged opera house with five nights of Figaro conducted

by Elgar Howarth opening the festival with patrons enjoying the comfort of the old red-plush Royal Opera House seats bought by Wasfi personally.

No wonder Jocelyn wrote to Wasfi “your drive and passion are an example to us all”.

And then during the millennium year Wasfi brought her grand plan to the board: the auditorium to be turned through 90˚ with capacity increasing from 360 to around 540 seats. In November 2000 the project was agreed by the board, which had been expanded to include Simon Freakley and Iain Burnside, and, in January 2001, the appeal was launched under the Chairmanship of William Garrett. The original target of £3 million was soon increased to £4 million: £2.2 million towards the building of the theatre and £1.8 million towards a new endowment fund. Donations were grand and generous with Donald Kahn becoming the project’s principal sponsor with a pledge of £500,000, Christopher Ondaatje starting the first of his eight sponsorships, Carphone Warehouse becoming cornerstone sponsors and ICAP, in 2004, starting their first year of major sponsorship which continues until today.

Supporting quietly behind the scenes have been John and Anya Sainsbury and Vivien Duffield amongst many others. Huge thanks to all these important donors but also to the many members who between them have contributed more than £16 million over the years. In 2005, as I handed over the Chair of GPO to William Garrett, I wrote, “the company operates at a break-even with a healthy Endowment Fund available in case of unexpected difficulties”. Nine

years later (in March 2014) those difficulties arose – but more on that subject later.

With the Endowment Fund established for the benefit of two specific charities (Grange Park Opera and Pimlico Opera) the Trustees made the decision to use funds to raise the game artistically.

In 2007 the London Symphony Orchestra was included as part of the festival, with the English Chamber Orchestra recruited to play for the operas, followed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in 2012. In 2008 Philip Langridge appeared on stage in Blue Beard (two years before his untimely death); Bryn for one night in 2008, again in 2011, leading to his tumultuous, neverto-be-forgotten Fiddler in 2015. Similarly Simon Keenlyside appeared for one night in 2012, and we await with great anticipation his appearance in Oliver! this year. Finally, Joseph Calleja (whom I first heard at Wexford when we was just 19) appeared for a night in 2013 and will return next year for the opening of the new opera house. These are some of the world’s greatest artists of recent years and their performances have electrified our patrons – and let’s not forget Ray Davies of The Kinks.

As well as meeting all of our obligations under the lease, we have spent large amounts of money on major conservation projects: the restoration of the 1890 ceiling of the theatre, the windows on the south elevation of the theatre and the main staircase in the house reinstalled after its sale in 1972. Other works undertaken by GPO for the improvement of the estate include, 3–phase power, fencing, septic tanks, running water to the house, heating in the basement and floorboards throughout the main house. The picture on page two tells its own story.

In March 2014, we were informed by our landlords, Lord Ashburton and his son, Mark Baring, that unless certain conditions were met, they would not renew the lease due to expire in 2018. The fulfilment of these conditions would have effectively handed over control of the charity to the Baring family as their conditions included that they appoint a new chair, new trustees and a new chief executive.

They also required that the Grange Park Opera Endowment Fund be dissolved and merged with GPO. The Grange Park Opera Endowment Fund is governed by separate trustees.

The Trustees of GPO strongly felt that these conditions could not be met as they were completely against Charity Commission guidelines. How can it be that landlords dictate the governance and

management of a charity? The landlords proposal was therefore rejected. William Garrett decided to step down as Chairman and the trustees asked Simon Freakley to succeed him. For many months Simon attempted to work with Lord Ashburton and Mark Baring to negotiate a new lease, and significant concessions were made.

However, in March 2015 Lord Ashburton and Mark Baring served notice to terminate the lease early and therefore this 2016 season is our last at The Grange. This was not an issue of rent, but an issue of control of two charities.

It is sad to be leaving The Grange, but let me emphasise that this is not of GPO’s choosing. Once the lease was terminated in March 2015, GPO had no option but to devise Plan B – and Plan B is the move to West Horsley Place. Remember that in doing this we are leaving behind a fullyfunctioning theatre and some £700,000+ spent on conservation projects and infrastructure.

West Horsley Place, where we will establish a new home, is a 15th century timber-frame house set in 300 acres of rolling Surrey farmland and woods between Leatherhead and Guildford. It was the Grade 1 listed home of Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, which she left on her death at the age of 99, to her great-nephew, Bamber Gascoigne, the celebrated author and television presenter.

Bamber has made the property over to the Mary Roxburghe Trust as a centre for the performing arts and the teaching of crafts of all kinds, and in the words of the Financial Times “with his love of opera has given his blessing to Wasfi’s vision”.

And so, with my thanks to all those who have made the success of GPO possible – the staff and management and board of the charity over 18 years, the contribution in the early years of John and Sally Ashburton – we now move on. The financial target we have set to build the new theatre is £10 million. Vivien Duffield and I have agreed to be CoChairman of the new appeal and we and the board will support Wasfi whose formidable reputation as a fundraiser is self-evident. We have made a good start and we are particularly grateful to Bryn Terfel and Joanna Lumley who have agreed to be patrons to this appeal.

Together with staff, management, board, small donors and big donors we have created one of the jewels in the opera calendar.

GPO at West Horsley will be even better.

23

Navigating the Politics of Planning

HardHat are proud to be supporting Grange Park Opera’s Planning Application for a wonderful new opera house at West Horsley Place.

The leading specialist communications consultancy for the property, development, energy and infrastructure sectors.

With offices in London, Cambridge, Leeds and Southampton, HardHat manages political, media and community relationships for some of the country’s most respected companies.

HardHat, The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT T: +44 (0) 20 7636 6603

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The Elixir of Love 2006

55

OPER AS 1998 – 2016

Janis Kelly as Elizabeth Maria Stuarda 2005

27

Simon Keenlyside as Fagin Oliver! 2016

NOTHING ENDURES BUT CHANGE HER ACLITUS 475 BC Grange Park Opera has staged 55 productions with more than 450 performances. 17,307 people came to the 2015 festival; 80 people from the local area worked there (of 400 in total), 97 schoolchildren performed there and 473 young people under the age of 30 attended, in many cases to see their first opera.

1998 Gala Opening Mozart Figaro’s Wedding Grimethorpe Colliery Band 1999 Ravel L’Heure Espagnole Poulenc The Breasts of Tiresias Rossini The Barber of Seville Grimethorpe Colliery Band 2000 Gilbert & Sullivan The Mikado Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin Handel Rinaldo 2001 Mozart Così fan tutte Bellini I Capuleti e i Montecchi Messager Fortunio 2002 Verdi La Traviata Cole Porter Anything Goes Britten The Turn of the Screw 2003 Puccini La Bohème Gilbert & Sullivan Iolanthe Chabrier Le Roi malgré lui 2004 Rossini La Cenerentola Tchaikovsky The Enchantress Bernstein Wonderful Town AND AT NEVILL HOLT (NH) Mozart Così fan tutte 2005 Mozart Don Giovanni Rodgers & Hammerstein South Pacific Donizetti Maria Stuarda Donizetti The Elixir of Love (NH)

2006 Mozart Le Nozze di Figaro Massenet Thaïs Donizetti The Elixir of Love Bruce Ford (in recital) Rossini Il Barbiere di Siviglia

(NH)

2007 Mozart The Magic Flute Prokofiev The Gambler Verdi Falstaff Handel Semele (in concer t) London Symphony Orchestra, Kings Singers, O Duo, Boy Blue, Kit & the Widow Bellini I Capuleti e i Montecchi (NH) 2008 Offenbach Blue Beard Dvorak Rusalka Puccini La Fanciulla del West Brideshead Revisited (film) Bryn Terfel (in recital) Royal Ballet with Mara Galeazzi Purcell Dido & Aeneas / Eccles Judgement of Paris

(in concer t)

Verdi Falstaff

(NH)

2009 Cavalli Eliogabalo Janacek The Cunning Little Vixen Bellini Norma Wagner Der Fliegende Holländer (in concer t) Ray Davies of The Kinks, Ballet Boyz, Harry the Piano, O Duo, Brahms sextet by members of London Symphony Orchestra Verdi Rigoletto (NH) 2010 Puccini Tosca Strauss Capriccio Prokofiev The Love for Three Oranges Jazz with Henry Armburg Jennings Band Puccini Madama Butterfly (NH)

2013 Poulenc Dialogues des Carmélites Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin Bellini I Puritani Joseph Calleja (in recital) Messager Fortunio 2014 Verdi La Traviata Britten Peter Grimes Massenet Don Quichotte Tchaikovsky The Queen of Spades 2015 Bock & Harnick Fiddler on the Roof Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin Saint-Saëns Samson et Dalila Puccini La Bohème 2016 Lionel Bart Oliver!

Puccini La Fanciulla del West Verdi Don Carlo Wagner Tristan & Isolde (in concer t) Javier Camarena (in recital)

Richard Suar t as Don Inigo L'heure Espagnol 1999

2012 Puccini Madama Butterfly Mozart Idomeneo Tchaikovsky The Queen of Spades 15th Birthday Party with Simon Keenlyside Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin (NH)

LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING YOU AT THE THE ATRE IN THE WOODS

2011 Verdi Rigoletto Dvorak Rusalka Wagner Tristan & Isolde Bryn Terfel (in recital) Puccini Tosca (NH)

29

I Capuleti e i Montecchi 2001

The Turn of the Screw 2002

T H E E A R LY DAY S

The Breasts of Tiresias 1999

31

Rinaldo 2000

The Barber of Seville 1999

The Mikado 2000

Figaro's Wedding 1998

Eugene Onegin 2000

CosĂŹ fan tutte 2001

THE FOUNDING DONORS 1998 SYSTEMS UNION Group Ltd ASHE PARK MINER AL WATER • BARING ASSET MANAGEMENT • BRITISH STEEL • BT ALEX BROWN • HAYS plc • WILDE SAPTE

Mr Mark Andrews Mr Felix Appelbe BSc FRSA Mr Peter Arengo-Jones OBE Mr David Buchler Mr William F Charnley Professor Ian Craft Lydia & Miles d’Arcy-Irvine Sir David & Lady Davies

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33

CosĂŹ fan tutte (Nevill Holt and on tour) 2004

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37

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H A L F WAY . . .

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39

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45

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49

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Eugene Onegin 2013

Samson et Dalila 2015

55

Fortunio 2013 (revival of 2001 production in the old theatre)

The Queen of Spades 2012

Photo credit: Iris Velghe / Illustrator credit: Alice Drapanaski

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L I O N EL B A RT

OLIVER!

S P O N SO R E D BY A LI X PA RTN E R S Orchestral arrangements by William David Brohn By arrangement with Cameron Mackintosh and the Southbrook Group

CONDUCTOR ∙ ADAM ROWE DIRECTOR ∙ JEAN-PIERRE VAN DER SPUY DESIGNER ∙ RICHARD KENT CHOREOGRAPHER ∙ LIZZI GEE LIGHTING DESIGN ∙ DAVID PLATER SOUND DESIGN ∙ TOM MARSHALL ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR ∙ ALEXANDRA SPENCER-JONES

TH E G R A N G E PA R K O PE R A S H OW B A N D

Book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart “freely adapted” from Dickens’ Oliver Twist First performance 30 June 1960, New Theatre (now the Noel Coward Theatre), London Performances at The Grange on June 2, 3, 11, 12, 19, 23, 24, July 1, 2

OLIVER TWIST ∙ WESLEY KENT-HARGREAVES ≈ David & Clare Kershaw; Who will buy? ≈ Christopher Swan FAGIN ∙ SIMON KEENLYSIDE ≈ John L Pemberton NANCY Bill’s doxy ∙ JODIE JACOBS BILL SIKES a villain in his prime ∙ SIMON LIPKIN THE ARTFUL DODGER Fagin’s brightest pupil ∙ CHARLIE BARNARD ≈ Simon & Victoria Robey MR BUMBLE workhouse beadle ∙ JEFFREY LLOYD-ROBERTS ≈ Anonymous MRS CORNEY workhouse mistress ∙ SOPHIE-LOUISE DANN MR BROWNLOW a wealthy old gentleman ∙ PAUL BENTLEY ≈ Adam & Lucy Constable MR SOWERBERRY undertaker ∙ GARETH SNOOK MRS SOWERBERRY ∙ GEMMA MORSLEY BET ∙ PEROLA CONGO CHARLOTTE ∙ CARRIE-ANN WILLIAMS CHARLEY BATES ∙ KIER EDKINS-O’BRIEN NOAH CLAYPOLE undertaker’s apprentice ∙ JONATHAN STIRLAND NIPPER ∙ DAITON KELLY MR GRIMWIG doctor ∙ GARETH SNOOK BULLSEYE ≈ Mrs Peter Cadbury MRS BEDWIN Brownlow’s housekeeper ∙ GEMMA MORSLEY THE GIN ≈ Paul & Lydia Goodson OLD SALLY pauper ∙ BECCA MARRIOTT THE GRUEL ≈ Dominic & Katherine Powell

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O LI V E R! Hailed as a classic since its 1960 première, Lionel Bart's masterpiece has almost eclipsed the original Charles Dickens' story of the orphaned boy Oliver Twist.

Act 1 Our story begins in a workhouse for the poor and destitute. A line of pale-faced wretches wait ravenously to be fed, suffering the tortures of slow starvation, begging for Food, glorious food.

Overseen by the parish beadle, Mr Bumble and the matron, Widow Corney, the children are served their daily portion of gruel, but for Oliver, one bowl is not enough leaving him to ask for more. Outraged the Beadle tells Oliver that ‘Never before has a boy wanted more’ and via his proposal to Corney he takes to the streets advertising a Boy for sale.

Oliver is sold to the local undertakers, the Sowerberries, who petrify and aim to exploit him. They leave him alone in the dark, surrounded by coffins asking Where is love?

Having run away from the undertakers and walked to London, the exhausted Oliver meets The Artful Dodger, a pick-pocket, who introduces him to the hustle and bustle of London. He takes him to meet Fagin, a Jewish fence, and his gang of apprentices who educate Oliver to Pick a Pocket or Two. Nancy and Bet, two street girls working for Fagin, tell the gang that despite the hardships of their existence, It's a fine life.

Dodger and Nancy send up the local gentry. Fagin sends the boys to work telling them to Be Back Soon. It's Oliver's first outing – and he is caught. Not for pick-pocketing – but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dinner interval

FAGIN’S GANG

Dominic Bryant Ewen Guthrie Ryan Kenny Tooey Morris Harvey Pearce Ben Perkins Ben Rober ts Ryan Trevatt WORKHOUSE CHILDREN

Theo Culshaw Jasmine Finney Tommy Finney Sophie Head Thomas Lineker-Bennett Millie Morris Iona Powell Lily Sowton Maisie Steel

Act 2

Robbie Stone

Entertaining the locals, Nancy sings Oom-Pah-Pah until the mood is destroyed by the arrival of her man, the prolific and feared criminal, Bill Sikes. Dodger tells them all of Oliver's arrest and subsequent safe-housing at the Brownlow residence in Bloomsbury. For fear of being exposed, Fagin and Bill plot to

Rhianna Stonehill Hector Taggar t Rebekah Wakely Lucy Walker

London: A Pilgrimage, 1872 Illustrated by Gustave Dore (1832-1883)

get Oliver back. In an act of defiance Nancy refuses to get involved, with violent consequences. Despite this, she expresses her devotion to Bill.

In Bloomsbury, Oliver is nursed back to health, cared for by a wealthy elderly gentleman, Mr Brownlow, and his housekeeper, Mrs Bedwin.

Celebrating his good fortune, Oliver asks the world outside Who Will Buy? He ventures out and is captured by Nancy and Bill, who take him back to Fagin's Den. They argue; Fagin contemplates his future (Reviewing the Situation).

Bumble and Corney – now married – discover that Oliver is the heir to a rich family and conspire to extort money from Mr Brownlow.

Nancy attempts to return the boy; Sikes stalks her and captures Oliver.

However, in the chase Sikes is shot.

1968 movie Oliver!

Oliver is restored to his benefactor who, as fortune would have it, is his own grandfather. Without his gang, a home or money, Fagin reflects . . .

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“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”

Anthony Horowitz The House of Silk

LET’S START WITH SOUP

‘THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD SO HUNGRY, THAT GOD CANNOT APPEAR TO THEM EXCEPT IN THE FORM OF BREAD.’ MAHATMA GANDHI

1795 William Hillyer opens the soup kitchen near

Russell Square for men building the Foundling Hospital. The rich can buy tickets to give to the poor, exchangeable for soup at the shop. He uses the latest technology: Rumford’s kitchen range which can feed 300 a day from a room 15 x 11ft 1797 When the kitchen moves to Fagin’s haunt,

Fulwood’s Rents. Hillyer is using 400–500lb meat / week, and sends 32 gallons of soup / week to a parish in Surrey (which extends to Kennington). In 1799 The Times advertises his soup for 6d a gallon 1812 Dickens born, Portsmouth 1813 Wagner born, Leipzig; Verdi born, Le Roncole 1816 Parliamentary committee on juvenile offending

which is burgeoning despite stiff measures against offenders. A pickpocket can be sentenced to hang 1824 Dickens family in London. Unable to support his

large family, his father is sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Charles, the only family member not to go with him, works in a factory near Charing Cross pasting labels on boot polish. After four months there is an unexpected inheritance; the family is released

manufacturers in the cellar, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlour, coblers in the back, a birdfancier on the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a musician in the front kitchen, and a charwoman with five hungry children in the back one . . . filth everywhere . . . men and women lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, swearing” 1837 Sept Diary of Rev F E Witts (1783-1854) “An escape took place from the Stow Workhouse last night: a blind sailor having eloped with a female pauper who has left behind her two bastard children. In the present unfinished state of the new workhouse the parties had found an opportunity of communicating with each other. . . In the course of the night each stole from their respective dormitories . . . and both escaped. . . . The woman has left her two children chargeable and has therefore committed a felony and an act of vagrancy” 1837-9 Oliver Twist published as a serial; Verdi’s wife

and children die; Samuel Morse demonstrates electric telegraph 1838 The Great Removal: American Indian tribes

giraffe. It dies in 1829 and George IV in 1830

escorted to new Indian Territory; Audubon’s Birds of America

1829 London, the nucleus of an expanding global

1838 Enslaved men, women and children in the

1827 Mehmet Ali Pasha sends George IV a gift of a

empire, has sordid social fabric. Sir Robert Peel, founder of Metropolitan Police “The real truth is, the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment” 1833 William Wilberforce dies, having seen the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act 1836 An insomniac, Dickens wanders the street of

London at night. He campaigns for public health reforms and writes of “wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper, every room let out to a different family. Fruit and sweet-stuff

British Empire became fully free. British taxpayers paid slave-owners £20 million in compensation (£1.5 billion in 2016 pounds) 1839 Almost half of London funerals are of children under 10. Around St Giles 2,850 people live in 95 slum dwellings 1839 May Rev F E Witts “. . . left home by 8 on my way to London [the first part of the journey was on a Magnet coach] reached the station house on the Great Western Railway at or near Maidenhead a little before 5. The station is at the 25th milestone from London.

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Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, J M W Turner (1775-1851) A Great Western Railway locomotive crosses the River Thames on Brunel’s Maidenhead bridge, completed in 1838, but not brought into use until 1 July 1839. The original Maidenhead Station, which Rev Witts used, lay east of the Thames, not far from what is now Taplow station

The railroad is carried on a very high embankment across the meadows between Maidenhead and Bray. I believe it will soon be completed as far as Twyford [Berkshire]. The coach drove into the station yard where the passengers alighted, leaving their luggage with the coach which proceeds a little onwards and reaches the level of the railway by a road constructed for the purpose. There the carriages are placed each on a railway truck, ready to be hooked on to the train when it comes to that point. Meantime, the passengers receive a railway ticket to London which purports to be worth 5s 6d. . . . The distance to Paddington 22miles is traversed in 50 minutes.

The coach in which I travelled held only myself and Mr Palmer, MP for Berkshire. At the Paddington station the coach is met by a pair of horses, the passengers resume their seats and the journey is continued by the Edgeware Road to Oxford Street, and I took a coach at the Green Man and proceed to Ibbetson’s Hotel, Vere Street . . . Dinner and tea and to bed” 1841 The census shows a single house in Fulwood’s Rents (where Fagin

was said to have lived) with a family living in each room: laundress, 2 sons, servant; marble polisher & wife; clock lamp maker, wife (chandlers shop keeper), 2ch; mother & 2 dtrs; bookbinder & wife; pen knife cutler & wife, 2ch; tailor, wife, 2ch; bootcloser, wife, 3ch.

1842 Dickens first trip to America. His Notes condemn slavery,

correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”

Victor Hugo Les Misérables

1847 Verdi in London to conduct I Masnadieri 1848 California Gold Rush 1849 Wagner’s creditors issue a warrant for his arrest; he flees Dresden 1860 Nov Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton

“When I begin to think at all I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the mob is going on (meaning by mob, chiefly Dukes, crown princes, and such like persons) that I choke ; and have to go to the British Museum and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous; one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.”

1863 While the railways are transporting

people and goods around the country at unprecedented speeds, in cities there is a great snarl up. The answer: move the whole problem underground. The world’s first underground railway connects Paddington station – a London rail terminus – to Farringdon Street, minutes from the Bank of England

1845 Staircase of the British Museum in Montagu House

1864 Wagner’s financial position transformed

by a new patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria 1865 April 10 Cosima & Richard Wagner

have their first child, Isolde; April 15 Lincoln assassinated in a Washington theatre by John Wilkes Booth; May 15 Scheduled première of Tristan delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner’s creditors; Jun 10 Première of Tristan, Munich, conducted by Hans von Bülow – even though Wagner has run off with his wife; Dec Verdi in Paris “I have heard the Overture to Tannhauser by Wagner.

He’s mad!!!”

1865 Settlers press West, railways are built,

above Detail L’abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1849 François-Auguste Biard (1799-1882) below 1898 The construction of the Central Line near British Museum station

buffalo and native Indians slaughtered.

Thirteenth Amendment to US Constitution prohibits slavery; Southern states limit the freedom granted to African-Americans; Ku Klux Klan founded In Glasgow Joseph Lister applies a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution to the leg wound of a boy injured by a cart. After four days, he sees that no infection has developed; after six weeks he observes the boy’s bones have fused back together: the dawn of antiseptic surgery 1867 Don Carlos première, Paris

Verdi to his foreman at Sant’Agata “I leave tomorrow for Paris and I repeat once again

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Age 12 Henry Leonard Stephenson breaking in to houses; 2 months in prison

A snarl up on London Bridge c 1880

Age 14, Henry Miller; theft of clothing 14 days hard labour

1863 The world’s first underground railway: Paddington to Farringdon Street Exceptionally clean

James Scullion sentenced to 14 days hard labour at Newcastle City Gaol for stealing clothes. “After this he was sent to Market Weighton Reformatory School for 3 years.”

Folly Ditch where Bill Sikes meets his end

Mary Catherine Docher ty; stealing iron 7 days hard labour

CHILD PRISONERS 1870s

Wagner to his housekeeper for a housecoast he wishes to wear whilst finishing The Ring. “I need 12 yards, quilted with eiderdown and sewn in squares . . . lined with lightweight white satin” and the width of the coat at the bottom had to be “six lengths, ie very wide . . . a puffed ruche all the way round [and] the flounce must be particularly opulent and beautifully worked . . . a foot in width [with] three or four beautiful bows” near the waist. The sleeves were to have “puffed trimmings, opulent” and there had to be “a wide sash, ten feet long.”

Marx completes Das Kapital in London; the first collection of Slave Songs of the United States (Negro Spirituals); Alfred Nobel patents dynamite 1868 End of public hangings in Britain

Southampton Row 1908 when Fulwood Rents, a mile away, was demolished

the orders given, to see if for once I can’t make myself understood and obeyed: 1. You will watch over the horses and the coachman in whom I have little confidence in the matter of orders. Let him exercise the horses every two days without going to Busseto. 2. You will tell Gerino that he was wrong to hand over the key of the engine [machinery which could be used if GV was present] that now he must clean it and lock it up until further orders.

3. You will repeat to the gardener what I said to him. The garden closed: no one must enter, nor must the people in the house go out, except the coachman for the short time needed to exercise the horses. If anyone goes out, he can stay out for always . . . Take note that I am not joking”

1870s Though Belgium had taken prisoner mugshots as

early as 1843, by the 1870s the practice was in widespread

•

1908 Sep 4 The Gazette Times of Pittsburgh

‘Fulwood’s Rents,’ the old buildings immortalized by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist as the haunt of Fagin the Jew, are soon to come down to make room for modern offices. Historically, there are few old London buildings with so interesting a history as “the Rents,” as they are still called in the neighbourhood. Before Dickens’ time, Francis Bacon lived in these buildings. It was here that Bacon drew up a catalogue of his furniture, the value of which he placed at £300 – worth about double the sum in those days as compared to present value. In the very early days, the neighbourhood was one of the “swell” parts of London, the district being mainly residential. Fulwood House – the town mansion of James Fulwood – occupied in the time of James I the quiet seclusion of Gray’s Inn, the famous seat of legal learning. The house of Fulwood was one of the finest in England, and had a splendid oak staircase, which was destroyed by fire some years afterwards.

In the time of Dickens, London had, as it were, “grown up” and the “Rents” became one of the lowest quarters of the metropolis, inhabited by vagabonds,

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1902 Wooden Railway Bridge on the Columbia to Pittsburg line

thieves, and the characters of the underworld so vividly portrayed by the great novelist. Dickens lived in Furnival’s Inn, just around the corner from Fulwood’s Rents, and used to know a lodger in the group of buildings with the unsavoury reputation.

It was while paying a visit to this acquaintance that Dickens formed the idea of making the place the scene of a “Thieves Kitchen.” Before Dickens’ time, Jack Sheppard, the famous bandit, had found a hiding place within the old rookery, so Dickens was not far wrong in locating more modern thieves in the buildings. Today Fulwood’s Rents stand just back of Chancery Lane “Tuppenny Tube” station, and American visitors frequently alight there to be “guided” to the very spot where Oliver Twist learned to steal. In the disappearance of these old buildings, London will lose one of its most historic and interesting landmarks.

1910 La Fanciulla del West première, New York

Premières: Rimsky-Korsakov Schéhérazade, designs

by Bakst, with Ballets Russes in Paris

1960 Jun 30 OLIVER! opens and runs for 2,618

performances Sputnik V orbits the earth with two dogs, Belka & Strelka (above) France tests first A-bomb in Sahara Desert; Polaris test missile launched Penguin Books prosecuted for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover (and acquitted) John F Kennedy defeats Nixon in US presidential election The Flintstones airs on TV Farthing ceases to be legal tender 1961

UK census 51m; India census 438m Britain applies to join Common Market Berlin Wall built Doric portico of Euston Station demolished

Elizabeth Arden opens her first beauty salon on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan

Beeching appointed chair of British Transport

In Old California, the first film shot in the California village of Hollywood

1962

Charles Stewart Rolls becomes the first man to fly over the English Channel

Beyond the Fringe première, Edinburgh Festival

•

1960 Jun Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream

première, Aldeburgh Festival; Hitchcock's Psycho première; BBC Television Centre opens

Commission The new Coventry Cathedral is consecrated First episode of Z-Cars The Orient Express makes its last trip after 78 years The last trolleybuses run in London

OPPOSITES, OPPOSITES WHERE MOMMA WON’T SIT, POPPA SITS LIONEL BART (BLITZ!)

M

orris Begleiter, Lionel Bart’s father, a Jewish tailor from Galicia in what is now Western Ukraine, arrived in England with his family in 1914. He was fleeing an invading Russian army, and looking desperately for a safer and more hospitable place to live.

On arrival in England he was immediately interned in the Isle of Man as an alien.

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”

Aristotle

His wife, Yetta, and the rest of the family, settled in the East End of London, where they were joined by Morris as soon as the war ended and he ceased to be perceived as a threat to national security.

Morris’s apprentice in the early days, Willy Goldman, paints a vivid picture of the Jewish tailor as ‘a short, plump, fussy man’ who could read little English beyond the back page of The Star, the labels sent in by his customers, and the names of all venereal diseases. He told Goldman, who was 14 at the time, that he had practised the sexual act in 17 positions, and enjoyed “betting on horses, drinking brandy and taking vapour baths.”

Lionel, very much the Benjamin of the family, was born in 1930. His mother, who is likely to be right, described him as “Our seventh child, God bless him”. Lionel’s account of his place in the family is more fanciful and various: “We 15 kids slept in three beds, head to feet”; “I was the youngest of 12, three died in infancy”; “I was the youngest child of 11”; “I was the youngest of 8 children, 4 boys and 4 girls”; and so on.

Lionel’s early home life must have been lively. Morris’s standard reply to criticism was “If you don’t like what I say, you can kiss my arse”. Yetta gave as good as she got, which must have been a great deal. Lionel in a BBC interview said “My house was like a Marx Brothers movie”.

A lively but not always a very funny one, it’s easy to think.

Before alarm clocks were affordable, a knocker-upper would ensure you got to work on time. c 1900

Lionel, whose spontaneous fantasies about everything make him a major source of inaccuracies for any potential biographer, described his father as “a relic from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I think Vienna was the centre, the hub of his universe when he was a young fellah. And I think he was in the army.” Old soldier or not, Morris was now a tailor and he established his workshop in the shed by the outside lavatory of their house in Stepney, where, in good times he produced 50 coats a week.

From the first he was interested in the 30 to 40 Yiddish theatres in the area. “I used to make a beeline for the pit and lean over and watch the fiddlers and the drummers and be really close up to the actors so you could see the greasepaint. I had the buzz even then.”

At Dempsey Street Mixed Infants Lionel stood out for his

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cheek, his gift for sharp repartee, which made even the teachers laugh, and his ability to invent naughty versions of all the popular songs of the day. “From an early age, when I could first put onesyllable words together, I used to take great delight in my prowess at getting an edge on the other street urchins around me because I was good at thinking up and singing spontaneous naughty-words versions of the then current pop songs, like ’Lady in Red’ and ‘Sally’. Every audience for one of my shows represents, to me, an extension of that gang of kids in the East End of London. Every laugh means a free turn on someone’s roller skates, and every first night is like a kerbside debut performance of a brand new naughty song. You see, I was the first in our gang to know all the rude words of ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’, ‘Eskimo Nell’, and ‘Maggie May’”.

He must have shown striking gifts, for when he was six his headmistress told Yetta “Your son is an artistic genius, whose talent must be nurtured”. These prophetic words caused Morris to buy the boy a violin, on which he was hopeless. He never learnt to read music. At the height of his fame he would hammer out a tune with one finger and leave the arranging to the professionals.

Hitler’s bombing of the East End caused Lionel to be evacuated many times, off to the country, but he always rushed home, at which point, the rumour ran, the bombing intensified.

Lionel’s headmistress had failed to be precise as to where his genius lay, but in his early teens it seemed to be for painting and drawing, for he won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art on the Charing Cross Road, where he found himself drawing a naked Quentin Crisp in the life class.

He joined a boys’ club on Fordham Street and wrote songs for their weekend camps. Lionel’s first exhibition of paintings was mostly of pregnant women – “I was attracted by the look in their eyes and their allover glow” – but he didn’t stay long; his behaviour at the School of Art led to his expulsion, and, anyway, he was soon called up for National Service.

It was while he was in the RAF that he went with his friend, John Gorman, to David Lean’s film of Oliver Twist in Gloucester. Gorman records that as they were walking away from the cinema, Lionel said: “One day, I’m going to write a musical based on that story, and it will be better than any American musical.”

After the RAF, Lionel teamed up with Gorman, who was a qualified screen-printer, to form G & B Art Services: the business title is a more likely source of Lionel’s stage name than his story about passing Bart’s Hospital on the bus. Soon his artistic work was playing second fiddle to his association with left-wing theatre groups, where he was first employed as a scene painter. Gorman was a cardcarrying communist and pushed Lionel in that political direction. Lionel joined the Unity Theatre Club, which, as a members-only club, was free from interference from the Lord Chamberlain.

When asked why he gave up painting, Lionel said tellingly, “I did so because painters work alone and I like a good mob working round me”. At Unity he had a good mob working round him and he thrived.

For the Christmas show of 1953 Lionel contributed several good songs and a performance as one of the Ugly Sisters which struck sparks because of the way an elaborate décolleté revealed his hairy chest – “like a yak all over”. Around this time he started to affect his much imitated whisper, halfway between Tommy Cooper and Brando as Don Corleone.

Helping to put shows together at Unity caused Lionel to understand his special talent, turning catchy tunes to pointed music-hall rhymes, and capturing the cheeky argot of the cockney East End which was his home. He also tasted the excitement of the theatre and of being with creative theatrical people, for Unity brought him into contact with, amongst others, Alfie Bass, Warren Mitchell, Johnny Speight and Bill Owen, who later became famous as Compo in Last of the Summer Wine.

Lionel was soon producing songs for the Billy Cotton Band Show, and, more important to the blossoming British Pop scene, working with Larry Parnes, the agent and music publisher. Parnes had Lionel writing for and promoting several young British singers, including Tommy Steele (Rock with the Caveman, A Handful of Songs), Marty Wilde, Cliff Richard (Living Doll), Anthony Newley, Adam Faith, and Russ Conway.

The Goons and a noisier style of Pop music were taking over from Billy Cotton and Two-way Family Favourites as staples on the radio at the end of the Fifties. Lionel was in the vanguard of British Pop, just before the arrival of the Beatles and the Stones and elephant jokes: How do you get four elephants

10 June 1965 Lionel Bart at his home in Fulham photographer Allan Warren b 1948

into a Mini? Two in the front and two in the back.

They don’t seem so funny now! In 1957, he won three Ivor Novello awards, a further four in 1958, and two in 1960. ‘Living Doll’, sung by Cliff Richard, was number 1 in the UK Singles Charts for six weeks from July 1959, selling over a million copies in that time.

But Lionel was happiest with that ‘good mob’ working round him, and he soon found himself invited to join Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. This was an old Victorian theatre which had been extended to incorporate a wet fish shop. Joan, who chain-smoked Gauloises, was a pathological anarchist, who tyrannised her young actors. Over coffee during rehearsals they discussed blowing up the Houses of Parliament and how to improve the second scene in the third act; for the acting was serious, inspirational and often wildly improvisatory. The combination appealed to Lionel: “They had about 16 pages of a script written by Frank Norman of a play called Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. And they wanted to make it into a musical, or a play with a lot of songs, anyway. But we only had two and a half weeks to write it, rehearse it and stage it, and that was the game. I thought, ‘well I’m up for this’ and I just downed everything and I reported for work.

Lionel used to boast that he had written his greatest hits while, as it were, buttering his breakfast toast – like a sneeze: spontaneous. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Mozart wrote most of La Clemenza di Tito on the coach between Vienna and Prague. Writing and putting on a musical in

two and a half weeks was just the way he liked to work; it meant he could muck in and show off.

Fings is a murky tale of gangsters, prostitutes, and pimps, gambling, fighting, and bribing bent coppers; full of innocent knockabout fun in an energetic EastEnd vernacular. The cast included Richard Harris, Barbara Windsor, James Booth and Yootha Joyce.

Everyone involved vouches for the high spirits and the camaraderie, and the pace at which they worked. They swapped characters, they played it posh; they tried it mock-Swedish. Lionel said “I mean I was up there on the stage, improvising with the actors. We were like a family. And I had to report in every morning with at least two new songs which had developed out of their improvisations. I was great, teaching ’em the songs, doing a bit of dancing with them. They were all clowns. They had this incredible style of picking up from each other. If a chandelier fell down, they’d use it.” It was like a prolonged brilliant bawdy music-hall burlesque. Lionel was developing a taste for ingenious rhymes: “In my house I’ve got rubber plants and cactuses, believe me, Sir, I preaches what I practises”. The audiences loved it and shouted “More, more, more!”

The improvisations didn’t stop when the performances started and the Lord Chamberlain’s office had difficulty keeping track of the suggestiveness. One or two of his complaints have entered theatrical folk-lore: “The builder’s labourer is not to carry the plank of wood in the erotic place and at the erotic angle that he does, and the Lord Chamberlain wishes to be informed of the manner

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1990 Lionel Bart with photographer, Allan Warren's dog, Hoover

in which the plank is in future to be carried.” “Tosher is not to push Rosie backwards against the table when dancing in such a manner that her legs appear through his open legs in a manner indicative of copulation”. Barbara Windsor, only 22 at the time, couldn’t understand this last remark, not knowing what ‘copulation’ meant. Let’s hope she had found out ten years later when her bikini top flew off in Carry On Camping.

July 1959. “I fled with a mate to a little fishing village called Los Boliches near Torremolinos and I went with one brown Italian cotton suit and I rented a place for about £2 a week with a maid. And I wrote Oliver there, all the Fagin material and the songs and the ballad ‘As Long As He Needs Me’, which I suppose is about my own dying love, but then I heard a little Spanish urchin on a beach singing ‘Living Doll’ in Spanish. And I thought bloody hell, what is that tune?’

At one performance, the Lord Chamberlain himself had been spotted in the audience laughing, and it wasn’t long before his ultimate boss, The Queen, came along too.

There was a lot more to be done, of course; the surprise was that Lionel had trouble selling the idea. Joan Littlewood didn’t fancy it and eleven other companies refused it. Jack Hylton fell asleep when they played him the tape. People thought British musicals were a dying form. In the end Donald Albery took it, and handed it to his team

To write Oliver!, which as we have seen was a longstanding project, Lionel went off to Spain in

of director Peter Coe and designer Sean Kenny. Kenny’s miraculous and complicated mobile set received its own curtain call at each performance of the original run.

Georgia Brown, the jazz singer, who Lionel had known since childhood, was chosen as Nancy. Casting Fagin was a problem: Rex Harrison, Sid James, and Peter Sellers all turned it down. Ron Moody, the final choice, sang “Nessun Dorma” at the audition – Lionel left the room – and had a huge success with the part. Danny Sewell, who had been a boxer, was Bill Sikes. It’s said that Michael Caine cried for a week when he heard he’d been turned down. Barry Humphries played Mr Sowerberry, the undertaker; Tony Robinson, Baldrick in Blackadder, was one of the boys.

Lionel had learnt to adapt his Music Hall style. The songs were catchy, sock-it-to-em, cockney ballads, sung thumbs behind the braces. The internal rhymes were often outrageously bold – ‘Nobody tries to be la-de-da or uppity, there’s a cuppa tea for all.’ Many scenes took place in near darkness; very different from the bright, spotless gleam of American musicals. The combination of Dickens, squalor, and the energy, inventiveness, and joyous high spirits of the boys proved a complete winner. It felt more working-class cockney East End than a musical can ever be. It made Lionel’s fortune.

People say that Lionel couldn’t cope with the money and the fame.

Rumour has it that at times he earned £16 a minute from Oliver! Not many people could adapt to sudden wealth on that scale. He built himself a large ‘Fun Palace’ in Seymour Walk, off the Fulham Road, where he enjoyed being immensely generous, and didn’t seem to notice when he was being robbed. He took up poker and narcotics of all kinds. He lost millions, as well as the excitement and discipline of work. He became good at distracting people, stopping them from getting on, where before he had been the energetic collaborator. He foolishly signed away the rights of Oliver! in an attempt to finance his less viable later creations. He had probably always been lonely; it showed more in the sicknesses of his later life.

But from time to time the old Lionel reappears, just briefly. When, in 1990, the National Youth Theatre put on Blitz!, which Noël Coward had described as longer and noisier than the real thing, Lionel was delighted to be asked for advice. He joined the company for lunch in a café, and Simon Nelson, who was later to become the BBC’s controller of multiplatform commissioning, asked him what may have seemed a naïve question: “How do you go about writing a song?” Lionel grinned excitedly, picked up the menu, and on the spot improvised a lively song with complicated internal rhymes, mentioning most of the items on the menu. He suggested they each have a try too, and paid for their lunch as he left.

MICHAEL FONTES was a master at Wincheter College for for ty years. He now runs Le Orchidés de Najac, studying and photographing the wild flowers and butterflies of Najac in Aveyron, France. He has been writing for the festival programme every year since 1999.

LIONEL BEGLEITER b 1 August 1930; d 3 April 1999 CAMERON MACKINTOSH (b 1946) began his theatre career as a stagehand at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in his late teens. He swept the stage after performances at the original production of Oliver! His first big success as a producer came with his 1977 revival of Oliver! – his name was still sewn in the back of the pot boy’s costume.

Mackintosh had acquired 50 % of the rights when, in the early 1990s, he visited Bart and explained that, for a planned revival, new material was needed for Jonathan Pryce as Fagin. This version opened at the London Palladium in 1994 and Bart was given a share of the royalties.

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THE NUTTERY Inspired by John Julius Norwich’s propensity for collecting odds and ends

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME Produced by German designers Benedikt Gross, Philipp Schmitt, and Raphael Reimann from Stuttgart-based Moovel Labs, using data from OpenStreet Map. The map connects 486,713 starting points of roads to Rome.

193 0 N E W YO R K (right) Unemployed & homeless men queue for a free dinner at the municipal lodging house.

1926 LO N DO N An underground train is transported through London.

1934 B U S N U M B E R S 1956 5 M B H A R D D I S K (right) IBM's 305 RAMAC cutting-edge hard disk weighed close to a ton and commanded an annual fee of $35,000. A download of an episode of The Archers is 12MB.

1953 KO R E A N WA R

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BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTR A

DEL WEST

Libretto by Civinini & Zangarini Based on The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco First performance 10 December 1910, The Met, New York Performances at The Grange on June 4, 9, 17, 26, 29, July 6, 9

MINNIE owner of The Polka ∙ CLAIRE RUTTER ≈ Francis & Nathalie Phillimore RAMERREZ a bandit calling himself DICK JOHNSON ∙ LORENZO DECARO left half ≈ Mr & Mrs Richard Morse; right half ≈ Lulu & Ed Siskind JACK RANCE sheriff ∙ STEPHEN GADD ≈ his head & body Mr Quentin Black; Minnie della mia casa ≈ Minnie & Joe MacHale NICK bartender ∙ ALBERTO SOUSA ≈ Diane & Christopher Sheridan ASHBY an agent of the Wells Fargo Transport Co ∙ JIHOON KIM SONORA miner ∙ MICHEL DE SOUZA ≈ Brian & Jennifer Ratner TRIN miner ∙ SIMON GILKES SID miner ∙ LOUIS HURST BELLO miner ∙ HARRY THATCHER

JAKE WALLACE a travelling minstrel ∙ THOMAS HUMPHREYS

HARRY miner ∙ PAUL MILOSAVLJEVIC

JOSÉ CASTRO from Ramerrez’ gang ∙ MATTHEW THISTLETON

JOE miner ∙ ADAM TUNNICLIFFE

THE PONY EXPRESS RIDER ∙ SEUMAS BEGG

HAPPY miner ∙ THOMAS ISHERWOOD LARKENS miner ∙ LANCELOT NOMURA BILLY JACKRABBIT an American Indian ∙ LOUIS HURST WOWKLE his squaw ∙ HANNA-LIISA KIRCHIN ≈ an anonymous donor

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L A FA N C I U LL A D E L W E S T In the Californian goldfields of the 1840s, Minnie, the golden-hearted barmaid, fends off the attentions of the sheriff in one of Puccini’s most accessible (and copied) scores. The one thing Minnie doesn’t have is someone to love … until a dark, handsome stranger walks into town.

But is he all he seems? The original Spaghetti Western.

Act 1 A mining camp during the California gold rush The miners are drinking and playing cards at the Polka Bar when news comes via the Wells Fargo agent Ashby that a bandit named Ramerrez is operating in the area. There is a $5,000 reward on his head. A quarrel breaks out between Sheriff Jack Rance and Sonora, one of the miners, over Minnie, the owner of the bar. It is only the arrival of Minnie herself that averts bloodshed. Minnie calms everyone down and leads a bible class.

Rance declares his love for Minnie, but she knows he’s married and rebuffs him. A stranger named Dick Johnson arrives; Minnie vaguely recognises him. They dance. Johnson – really Ramerrez – foregoes an opportunity afforded him to rob the bar; he and Minnie are falling in love.

Act 2 Minnie’s cabin Later that evening, Minnie and Johnson are having dinner. A sudden snowfall forces Johnson to stay. As he goes to the bedroom, Rance bursts in, claiming Johnson is Ramerrez.

Minnie gets Rance out of the cabin then confronts Johnson.

He admits the truth and she throws him out. A shot is heard and Johnson returns, injured. Minnie hides him in the loft.

Rance comes looking for him. Johnson’s presence is betrayed by blood from his wound dripping through the ceiling.

Desperate, Minnie invites Rance to play poker: if he wins, he gets her and Johnson; if she wins, she and Johnson go free.

Minnie cheats her way to victory and Rance upholds their deal. Minnie rushes upstairs to the loft and finds Johnson lying on the floor unconscious.

DINNER INTERVAL

Act 3 A forest Having been nursed back to health by Minnie, Johnson finds himself running from Rance and his men once again. This time, he is captured by Ashby. The sheriff and his men discuss what Johnson’s punishment should be, and it is unanimously decided that he must be hanged. Johnson asks them not to tell Minnie so that she can believe he is out living a life of freedom. The sheriff is angered by Johnson’s last request, but the other men and miners give it some thought. Just before they kick the box out from under his feet, Minnie comes in with a pistol in her hand and quickly runs up to Johnson’s side, demanding his life be spared. For years she has shared their troubles and dangers: how can they now deny her the only thing she has ever asked of them?

Early panning, showing some Chinese miners

One by one the miners relent and Minnie and Johnson ride into the sunset to start a new life together.

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1853 Daguerreotype by John H. Fitzgibbon (1816–1882) Gilman Collection Klondikers carrying supplies ascending the Chilkoot Pass, May 1898

‘GOLD CONJURES UP A MIST ABOUT A MAN, MORE DESTRUCTIVE OF ALL HIS OLD SENSES AND LULLING TO HIS FEELINGS THAN THE FUMES OF CHARCOAL.’ CHARLES DICKENS, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

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n La Fanciulla del West we find ourselves in the Golden West, the West of the fields of newly-discovered gold; in a new state, California, wrenched by the United States from Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the MexicanAmerican War. This treaty, following the defeat of the Mexican army, brought, in addition to California, the future states of Texas, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, as well as large parts of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

The Golden West was further west than the Wild West of Buffalo Bill and John Ford. Beyond the Plains, beyond the Rocky Mountains, beyond even the Sierra Nevada, it was further west than the Wild West and wilder still. In California the Pacific tectonic Plate meets the North American Plate, hence the mountains, the earthquakes and the gold.

On the first dramatic discoveries in early 1848, prospectors did literally rush from wide and far into a desolate land where Indians (to use the term employed in Puccini’s libretto) outnumbered whites by ten to one. San Francisco in 1847 was a small Mexican coastal settlement of a thousand people, called Yerba Buena, situated on perhaps the finest natural harbour in the world. By 1850 the population had risen twentyfold. In the few years following the first strike more than three hundred thousand people came to California.

The new settlers were mostly young men.

Working the icy rivers – the Sierra Nevada deserved its name – was tough, and the prospectors left their families behind.

They took a few friends with them, for companionship and for protection in a lawless land. Only about 3% of the early immigrants were women and the early Californian censuses show men in the state outnumbering women by ten to one.

The miners had travelled great distances; much further than the wagon-train settlers.

Russians and Mexicans were already in California, but the rush brought East Coast Americans, as well as people from many other countries, some running from troubles at home: Irish fleeing the potato famine, Chinese despairing of repeated crop failures.

A rough coming they had of it at any time of the year, each of the three main ways long and perilous. The railway was only completed in 1869.

Some crossed the plains and the mountains, through Indian territory – killing more Indians on the way than they suffered fatalities themselves – far beyond the points where the wagon trains usually stopped. Some came part way by ship, down the East Coast to Panama, across the isthmus, then up the West Coast to San Francisco.

The wagon trains populated the West slowly.

People went where previous settlers had found land to develop. Many years passed before a community amounted to more than a few log cabins in an area of cleared forest.

Others made the whole journey by ship, round Cape Horn. On arrival the ships’ crews would often desert for the gold fields.

By 1850 there were 675 ships untended in San Francisco harbour, one of which came to serve as the town’s prison.

The gold rush was dramatic and sudden, the largest mass migration in US history.

Sacramento, only a few huts in 1848, had a population of nine thousand by 1850 and twenty-four thousand by 1860, despite all that disastrous floods and a cholera epidemic could accomplish.

Many died en route. The combination of malaria, cholera, smallpox, snakes, crocodiles, poisoned arrows and primitive seaboard sanitary conditions took its toll. Many died at the mines too: the work was backbreaking, long, cold and often fruitless, and the living conditions primitive. When miners struck

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On arrival ships’ crews would often desert for the gold fields.

By 1850 there were 675 ships untended in San Francisco harbour, one of which came to serve as the town’s prison lucky they often gambled or drank their money away in the saloons, usually the first buildings erected near the diggings.

Many miners drank prodigious quantities, two pints of rough spirit a day being quite usual.

The gold found its way swiftly into the local economy and provoked dramatic inflation: a labourer back in New York typically earned one or two dollars a day, but individual hotel rooms in San Francisco were rented to professional gamblers for $10,000 a month – the equivalent of £200,000, 2016 sterling. One citizen of San Francisco died insolvent to the tune of $41,000 in the autumn of ’48. His administrators were slow to settle his affairs and his real estate advanced so rapidly meanwhile that, after repaying his debts, his heirs had a yearly income of $40,000 [£800,000, 2016 sterling].

One of the early miner’s letters home give a vivid account of life at the diggings: Many, very many, that come here meet with bad success & thousands will leave their bones here. Others will lose their health, contract diseases that they will carry to their graves with them. Some will have to beg their way home, & probably one half that come here will never make enough to carry them back. But this does not alter the fact about the gold being plenty here, but shows what a poor frail being man is, how liable to disappointments, disease & death.

There is a good deal of sin & wickedness going on here, Stealing, lying, Swearing, Drinking, Gambling & murdering. There is a great deal of gambling carried on here. Almost every public House is a place for Gambling, & this appears to be the greatest evil that prevails here. Men make & lose thousands in a night, & frequently

small boys will go up & bet $5 or $10 [£100 or £200 in 2016 sterling] – & if they lose all, go the next day & dig more. We are trying to get laws here to regulate things but it will be very difficult to get them executed.

Living in tents, among dangerous, armed, and often drunken men, in a lawless country, far from their wives, the miners suffered extreme homesickness, vouched for touchingly by the accounts of long queues at the postal stations. Homesickness comes early in Fanciulla, in Jake Wallace’s haunting song (Che faranno i vecchi miei? – What are my family doing?) – Puccini took the tune from the Zuni Festive Sun Dance. The miners wonder why the Englishman is so silent.

There’s an easy explanation – Ripensa la sua vecchia Cornovaglia e alla madre lontana che l’aspetta . . . He’s thinking of his dear old Cornwall and his mother waiting for him.

Brannan, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, printed a special edition of the California Star touting ‘immensely rich’ gold deposits in the Sierra. He then set up shop at Sutter’s Mill, selling shovels, picks, and pans to the prospectors, thereby becoming the first of the Gold Rush millionaires. Like many of the satellite businessmen, shopkeepers, hoteliers, bankers, Brannan made far more than the miners themselves. He made so much that Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, sent a message from Utah demanding a tithe for the ‘Lord’s Treasury.’ Brannan told the messenger ‘You go back and tell Brigham that I’ll give up the Lord’s money when he sends me a receipt signed by the Lord.’ Brigham Young excommunicated him.

This being America, many miners cloaked their covetousness in religious or nationalist zeal. As the protestant missionary, James Woods, put it, California had to be delivered from ‘a few scattered and degenerate sons of Spain, and a few enterprising adventurers, and a few tribes of wretchedly degraded Indians’.

Churches were the second buildings to be erected, after the saloons. The new state would need an injection of sound American Protestant principles to drive out what was left of Mexican Catholicism. Minnie’s reading lesson to the miners from the Bible is a touching gesture towards the known religious loyalties of some miners.

The more respectable miners were appalled at the army of prostitutes which arrived to relieve these lonely young men of their gold and their sexual tensions. Inevitably the population had stratified on familiar lines: the solid bourgeois separated themselves from the gamblers, petty crooks, thieves and drunks, and the prostitutes split similarly. The ‘women of colour’, blacks, Chinese, Latinas and Indians, served the squalid ‘hog ranches’ near the diggings, rather different from the taffeta and plush establishments of San Francisco and Sacramento. To the classy bordellos came women like Rosario Améstica, alias Fosita, Anacleta, Rosa Montalva, Pancha, or Juana, who sailed from Valparaiso to San Francisco in December 1848. According to one passenger she promenaded on deck during the voyage ‘like a ship of war in a steady tail wind’, sang ‘marvellously bawdy songs’ accompanying herself on the guitar, and ‘by the time we reached San Francisco had had dealings with everyone on board, except us, that is.’

A disbanded Mormon battalion from the Mexican war – their only real battle had been with a herd of heretical wild bulls – featured large in the first discoveries. They helped develop the early seams, and Sam

Henry Sheldon, a protestant missionary, noted that at the horse races in San Francisco, the prostitutes rode in ‘the most splendid carriages, and on the most showy studs.’ The ratio of harlots to honest women

Jake Wallace was the stage name of Jacob Lynn, Jr., a popular West Coast banjo player and minstrel, a real forty-niner, known to David Belasco, the author of the play.

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was so great that the latter had to ’conduct themselves with the strictest propriety or be cast from the pale of good society’.

In the very early days, justice, such as it was, was dispensed by the miners themselves. Disputes were settled by courts of all the local miners assembled, the decisions often strikingly impartial. It became accepted that a claim could be established simply by hammering four stakes into the ground. There being no cadastral system, such claims could be hard to protect: they lapsed if unworked, and, if you found gold, you risked being ‘ jumped’.

Anyone who wasn’t a white American suffered during the rush. When civil authority arrived it replaced the Mexican alcades with American Marshals and Sheriffs – Rance’s appointment must have been very recent.

Sheriffs didn’t have an easy time. There was a celebrated case during the summer of 1850, when Sheriff McKinney, arriving with twenty deputies to deal with a violent dispute, was shot and killed, along with two of his deputies. Instructions to sheriffs included this revealing injunction: Never hit a prisoner over the head with your pistol, because you may afterwards want to use your weapon and find it disabled.

The new state legislature was quick to institute a murderous racism which deprived minorities of the right to representation in the courts. Many Mexicans, dispossessed of their land, thereby lost any legal recourse, and turned to banditry. Ramerrez/Dick Johnson may be based on the famous Joaquín Murieta, whose gang terrorised the diggings for several years.

The Indians suffered acutely. The rougher miners regarded squaws as fair game, so many were raped. The Indian men then murdered their dishonoured squaws. In 1849 Indians had outnumbered the settlers ten to one.

Within five years, there were two settlers

for every Indian, and a severe shortage of Indian women. This reversal is only partly explained by the influx of settlers and a smallpox epidemic. Indians were murdered all over the States, but on the West Coast this violence took the form of organized civilian campaigns. Although soldiers were only occasionally involved, reading accounts of these murders and massacres makes one wish Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had been less gentlemanly at Little Bighorn.

California was a free state, but the slaveowners, who brought their slaves with them to work the mines, soon demanded a law barring slaves from claiming their freedom within state boundaries. If a slave bought his freedom, he was still not safe from arrest, and had no legal means of redress should his master claim him back.

The Chinese suffered too. Mark Twain, who spent some time as a miner, gives a powerful account of the treatment of the Chinese in California: They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it - they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dustlicking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.

The Chinese developed a phrasebook to help them in their everyday dealings with Americans. The section on interviews with government officials contains the following sentences: I have made an apology but still he wants to strike me.

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1849 Early Miners panning for gold

1855 Niagara Falls

I cannot trust you.

He took it from me by violence.

He assaulted me without provocation.

He claimed my mine.

He tries to extort money from me.

He cheated me out of my wages.

He was murdered by a thief.

He refused to pay the money which he owes me.

The Indians didn’t know what to make of the Chinese: were they white, and so enemies, or a different Indian tribe, and so friendly?

They believed that whites couldn’t swim, so they would throw the Chinese into a river, to decide the issue. The Chinese in turn were terrified of Indians, fearing their pigtails would prove irresistible to the scalp-hungry natives. Most of the Chinese couldn’t swim.

Having their claims widely jumped and with no possible legal redress, many Chinese men migrated into service trades: laundries, hairdressing or tailoring. Chinese gangs, the fighting tongs, ferried children as young as twelve across the Pacific, stripped them naked on the dockside in San Francisco and auctioned them to pimps, often for as much as $3,000 dollars each – $60,000 today. The little Chinese girls were expected to ‘look after’ 10 clients a day – the clients paid around $20 a time, of which the girls sometimes received as much as 25 cents.

Puccini’s opera is explicitly set in the very early Gold Rush years – Ai piedi delle Montagne delle Nubi (Cloudy Mountains) in California. Un campo di minatori, nei giorni della febbre dell’oro, 1849-1850. Belasco sanitises the atmosphere of a society in which armed men, fiercely loyal within their groups, like wild African dogs, fought each other for the best pickings.

The opera includes a Pony Express rider, and Ashby, a Wells Fargo agent, but Henry Wells and William Fargo didn’t found Wells Fargo until 1852, and the Pony Express wasn’t set up until 1859 when it reduced the time taken for mail between the coasts from several months down to around ten days. It was itself superseded for urgent messages by the arrival of the telegraph in 1861. These unimportant anachronisms remind us that Belasco, born in 1853, couldn’t have known the early days he chose as his setting.

Minnie is a great wonder of the operatic stage, and would have been a great wonder in Gold Rush California too. Her associations with Rance and with Ramerrez must have enhanced her security, but she rules the miners by force of personality, and by her kindness, sitting with them when they are lonely, looking after them when they are ill, writing letters home for the ones for who cannot read or write. She tellingly mentions each of these at the end of the opera in her great plea to them to free Ramerrez.

Puccini makes the most of Ramerrez’s moment on the scaffold – Ch’ella mi creda is one of his greatest arias (it was Caruso’s top-selling 78), and to Italians far from home, lonely, and missing their salamis and their mothers, it became a sort of anthem.

Vincent Seligman, author, twenty years later, of a book on Puccini, describes his time in the army, and recalls having goosebumps ‘one icy winter’s night on the Salonika Front in 1917; there, in the heart of Macedonia, which cannot have been so very unlike the wilds of California, an Italian brigade was moving up to take over a section of the line from us, and as the troops marched past, the words of Ramerrez’s prayer, sung in perfect unison, echoed through the still air, muffling the tramp of the men’s feet.’

California’s success was built upon theft from its former inhabitants, represented in the opera by Indians reduced to servants, Billy

Jackrabbit and Wowkle his squaw, and a Mexican reduced to banditry. In Fanciulla we find ourselves far from the polarized blacks and whites of early romantic opera. The opera’s Californian background imposes on us a more subtle moral mix. Belasco, a Sephardic Jew, understands our sympathy for people who have been put upon: for the disappointed, the outcasts, the victims. Ramerrez, the outlaw on the scaffold, is not so far from that little Japanese girl in Puccini’s other Belasco opera, waiting in Nagasaki for the return of the father of her child.

Just as the Americans stole the land to make their state, so Minnie cheats at cards and lies to her putative lover, the Sheriff, in order to free her true lover, her Mexican bandit, in time to ride zigzag into the sunset with him. Belasco had a nice sense of the dramatic value of historical truth.

MICHAEL FONTES was a master at Wincheter College for forty years. He now runs Le Orchidés de Najac, studying and photographing the wild flowers and butterflies of Najac in Aveyron, France. He has been writing for the festival programme every year since 1999.

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LINCOLN SELIGMAN shares a great great grandfather with Mark Seligman.

He was called to the Bar and worked as a shipping lawyer till aged thir ty, when he jumped ship to become a painter and sculptor. He has worked on large scale murals and hanging sculptures for atrium spaces in Europe, Hong Kong and Beijing. He has also designed sets for New English Ballet Theatre at Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden. www.lincolnseligman.co.uk

David & Sybil Seligman and Puccini, 1907

SYBIL SELIGMAN

The 2015 Festival Programme catalogued a few of Puccini’s many women. Sybil Seligman was the one that stood out. As luck would have it, it transpires she was the great aunt by marriage of audience member Mark Seligman.

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ybil Seligman was Puccini’s closest friend and confidante for nearly a quarter of a century. Very attractive and a London Society hostess, she was married to David, of the Seligman banking house. My father wrote in 1987 that ’reputedly, she was Puccini’s mistress’. What is certain is that Sybil and Puccini had a lasting friendship and that she became an important facilitator for his operas, all of which is recorded in over 700 letters from Puccini to Sybil. These were translated into English by her son, Vincent, and formed the basis of his 1938 book Puccini Among Friends.

Sybil was born Sybil Beddington in 1868 and, aged 23, married David Seligman. That makes her my great aunt by marriage. The Beddingtons were successful Anglo-Jewish wool and tobacco merchants. The family was originally called Moses but in 1868 Sybil’s father, Samuel, changed his name to Beddington, then a village in Surrey where they owned land.

It gave rise to some joshing at the time: when Samuel first appeared on the floor of the Stock Exchange after his change of name, some wit said “And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Good Morning Mr Beddington’ ”.

Sybil’s husband, David Seligman, came from a family that made its name and money in 19th century America. His father was one of eight brothers who went from Germany to America in the 1820s. There they founded a banking house, J&W Seligman, that went on to fund Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War and to open offices across the USA and back into Europe.

SYBIL MEETS PUCCINI David and Sybil married in 1891 and, in 1904, Sybil met Puccini through the introduction of her singing teacher, the composer Sir Paolo Tosti. Sybil was herself very musical which came from her mother, a pupil of Paderewski, and who regularly entertained Caruso for lunch at their London house.

As Sybil was passionately fond of opera, it was only natural that her friendship with Puccini “should ripen quickly”, in her son Vincent’s words. Vincent almost certainly sanitised, or decided not to publish, some of Puccini’s early letters. Sybil’s youngest sister, Violet, was reported to say ten years after Sybil’s death that Sybil and Puccini were indeed lovers. The affair was apparently cut short due to the fear of scandal in London and it became a working friendship.

Sybil, often with her young son Vincent and husband David in tow, was a regular visitor at Torre del Lago in Tuscany

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and at the various villas that Puccini built there following the success of Bohème.

She particularly enjoyed his succession of new motor cars, travelling at his side with a massive bonnet to protect her from the Italian sun. Puccini would also visit Sybil and David at their house on Upper Grosvenor Street. Puccini regarded London as a giant emporium and Sybil provided him with an endless supply of goods which she sent to him in Italy. These ranged from ’elixir for the morale’ and cigarettes (Turkish Abdullah from a company that the Beddingtons had founded) to shooting tweeds, an English Setter and a piano.

LA FANCIULLA IS CHOSEN More important, Sybil was a regular provider of ideas for new operas and a facilitator for getting them underway. La Fanciulla del West started with a visit by Puccini to New York in January 1907 for the American opening night of Manon Lescaut. The Seligman bank in New York provided introductions and even a letter of credit for his use whilst there. Towards the end of his stay, Puccini was taken to Broadway to see Belasco’s play The Girl of the Golden West. It occurred to him that this could be the basis of a new opera, although his focus at the time was on an opera about Marie Antoinette.

Later in June in London, Puccini and Sybil discussed at length the relative merits of ‘The Girl’ and Marie Antoinette. Puccini had obtained a copy of The Girl’s script from Belasco, and Sybil arranged to have it translated (badly) into Italian. With her husband’s American background and help, she found Native American songs. She also suggested the curious hybrid title by which the opera came to be known. Sybil eventually persuaded Puccini to take the project forwards in preference to the ‘sad and hackneyed’ Marie Antoinette.

TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH By the time that Sybil was persuading Puccini to write Fanciulla, the Seligmans in the US had financed numerous railroads, including controlling the San Francisco line, now part of the Santa Fe Pacific railroad. There is a one-horse town in Arizona called Seligman, located on both the Santa Fe railway and later on the famous Route 66 Highway, which looks suspiciously like Fanciulla’s fictional mining town.

Puccini was always very slow to take his operas forward, producing only seven fulllength operas in his entire career (compared with the 19 written by Verdi in a 16 year period). But Fanciulla was particularly slow due to the Doria affair. Puccini was accused by his wife Elvira of having an affair with their devoted young maid, Doria Manfredi, who was thrown out. Elvira took to slandering her and Doria killed herself with poison. A post mortem showed Doria to be a virgin – later information indicates Puccini was having an affair with Doria’s sister, Giulia – and her family brought defamation proceedings.

Elvira was found guilty and sentenced to five months and five days in prison. After much consultation with Sybil, Puccini paid off the prison sentence and took Elvira back.

The Doria affair delayed the completion of Fanciulla by a year. It was eventually not until December 1910 – nearly four years after Puccini’s visit to Broadway – that the opening night took place at the Metropolitan in New York: the first major European opera première in America. Caruso headed up the cast. Telegraphing Sybil after the opening night, Puccini wrote: GREAT TRIUMPH FIFTYFIVE CALLS. It was indeed the success of the New York season, and was repeated no less than eight times. Fanciulla made its first appearance at Covent Garden in London the following May, complete with a dedication to Queen Alexandra which Sybil had arranged.

1977 The author at Seligman, Arizona, thought to be the model for Fanciulla’s fictional mining town.

The Seligmans financed the gold rush and a number of US railroads including the railway running through Seligman. They named a locomotive, The Seligman as a riposte to their partner Cornelius Vanderbilt who had named a locomotive The Commodore.

Puccini was even to receive a letter and diamond and ruby pin from Queen Alexandra which genuinely touched him.

THE LAST YEARS Puccini and Sybil continued to meet and correspond for the next 15 years, and Sybil continued to come up with ideas for new operas. One of these was indirectly provided by Sybil’s elder sister Ada, Oscar Wilde’s closest confidante, whom he called his Sphinx. After Wilde’s incarceration in Reading Gaol, Ada was there to welcome him back and he subsequently lived in her nursery wing. In 1912, Sybil obtained permission for Puccini to use Wilde’s Florentine Tragedy as the story for a new opera, but it was abandoned.

And so Sybil and Puccini grew old together, Puccini by then complaining regularly of the horrors of old age. The most poignant letter of the 700 is the last, written by Puccini’s step daughter, Fosca at 4pm on 28 November, 1924 in Brussels after a tracheotomy operation to cure his throat cancer. In it, she writes that, after three horrible days, Puccini’s fever has abated and the doctors are delighted. The letter is half finished for, whilst she is out of the room asking for Sybil’s address, Puccini collapses. The radium that was internally administered following the operation was too much for his weakened heart. Through the night he fought his losing battle with Death and, by the early morning, Puccini - The Maestro - was dead.

MARK SELIGMAN, Sybil’s great nephew by marriage, has spent most of his life in banking like Sybil’s husband and son. ‘And like Puccini, I suffer from the triumph of hope over experience when it comes to ambitious trips in old motor cars.’ Sybil’s husband, David, was Mark’s grandfather’s brother.

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THE ROYAL EXCHANGE English School 17th Century – probably Robert White

Following the Great Fire of 1666 the first new building was, appropriately, Greshams’ palace of finance, The Royal Exchange. This is the only known 17th century painted view of this magnificent building.

As with Grange Park Opera’s Theatre in the Woods at West Horsley Place, it was an ornament to a new age: a phoenix rising.

Derek Johns specialises in the rare and unusual. Based in the heart of St James’s we are always available by appointment. fineart@derekjohns.co.uk

In tune with your investment needs for the long term Rathbone Investment Management is delighted to support Grange Park Opera.

For more details please contact Will Kendall on 01962 857 000 or email will.kendall@rathbones.com

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The value of investments and income arising from them may fall as well as rise and you might get back less than you originally invested.

Rathbone Investment Management is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

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V ER D I

D O N C A R LO

S PON SORED BY ICAP plc their twelfth year of support

CONDUCTOR ∙ GIANLUCA MARCIANÒ ≈ Mr & Mrs Peter Nutting DIRECTOR ∙ JO DAVIES SET DESIGNER ∙ LESLIE TRAVERS COSTUME DESIGNER ∙ GABRIELLE DALTON MOVEMENT DIRECTOR ∙ LYNNE HOCKNEY LIGHTING DESIGN ∙ ANNA WATSON

BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTR A

Libretto by Méry & du Locle, based on the play Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien by Friedrich Schiller First performance in French 11 March 1867, Salle Le Peletier, Paris First performance in Italian 4 June 1867, Royal Italian Opera House, Covent Garden Performances at The Grange on June 18, 22, 25, 30, July 3, 7, 10 FILIPPO II King of Spain ∙ CLIVE BAYLEY ≈ Ruth Markland Aria Ella giammai m’amo ≈ Mr & Mrs Grant Gordon

DON CARLOS Infante of Spain ∙ STEFANO SECCO ≈ François Freyeisen & Shunichi Kubo RODRIGO, MARQUIS OF POSA friend of Don Carlo ∙ DAVID STOUT ≈ Mr & Mrs Ernst Piech THE GRAND INQUISITOR ∙ ALASTAIR MILES ≈ Barbara Yu Larsson; His admonition ≈ Adam & Carola Lee ELISABETTA (ELISABETH DE VALOIS) a French princess ∙ VIRGINIA TOLA ≈ Judith Lawless & Kevin Egan Her jewel casket ≈ David & Simone Caukill PRINCESS EBOLI an aristocrat at court ∙ RUXANDRA DONOSE ≈ Hamish Parker A MONK Ghost of Emperor Charles V ∙ JIHOON KIM ≈ Noreen Doyle TEBALDO page to Elisabetta ∙ CARRIE-ANN WILLIAMS HEAVENLY VOICE ∙ JESSICA ROBINSON ≈ Jeremy & Rosemary Farr COUNT OF LERMA Spanish delegate to France ∙ ALBERTO SOUSA FLEMISH DEPUTIES ∙ MICHEL DE SOUZA, THOMAS HUMPHREYS, ADAM JONDELIUS, ALASTAIR MERRY, JAMES QUILLIGAN, HARRY THATCHER ≈ Raymonde Jay and an anonymous donor ROYAL HERALD ∙ PHILIP CLIEVE COUNTESS OF AREMBERG a lady-in-waiting ∙ SARAH LAMBIE

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DO N C A R LO A bitter father-son rivalry ignites when Don Carlos finds that his intended bride, Elisabeth, has been promised to his father, King Philip II. Act 1 Dawn, the cloister of the Monastery of Yuste Don Carlos, the heir to the throne of Spain, is in love with his young stepmother, Elisabeth de Valois. His friend Rodrigo, the Marquis of Posa, attempts to distract him and begs him to take steps on behalf of the oppressed Low Countries. Carlos asks Elisabeth to intervene with the King, Philip II. Carlos then gives his emotions free rein, at which Elisabeth reproves him, even though she loves him also. Carlos flees. The King arrives and is furious that he finds the Queen alone. Rodrigo pleads for the Low Countries with the King, but Philip tells him of his worries about Elisabeth and Carlos.

Act 2 Evening, the Queen’s gardens, Madrid Carlos has received an anonymous letter and is waiting for the Queen in the garden. The letter’s writer was the princess Eboli, who is also in love with him. Carlos reveals that he loves Elisabeth and rejects Eboli, who swears vengeance. Rodrigo asks Carlos to entrust any incriminating documents concerning the Low Countries that he might possess to him. An autoda-fé is about to begin; deputies from the Low Countries approach and beg the King for aid. He sends them away, at which Carlos draws his sword and demands to be sent to the Low Countries. Rodrigo disarms him. Philip creates Rodrigo a duke and has Carlos arrested.

DINNER INTERVAL Act 3 Dawn, the King's study, Madrid Philip obtains help from the Grand Inquisitor in setting up a trial for his son. Princess Eboli has passed Elisabeth’s jewel box on to the King; a portrait of Carlos is inside. The King confronts the Queen with it, at which she faints. Eboli then confesses everything, including the fact that she has been the King’s mistress. Elisabeth banishes her from the Court.

The incriminating documents have been found in Rodrigo’s

Act 4 Night, the cloister of the monastery of Yuste Elisabeth and Carlos bid each other farewell in the gardens of the monastery of San Yuste.

They are taken by surprise by the King and the Grand Inquisitor, but a mysterious monk appears (the ghost of Charles V?) before the guards can take Carlos prisoner and drags him away into the monastery.

Philip II (1556) Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), Prado, Madrid

possessions. He goes to see Carlos in prison, knowing that his own last hour is upon him. A gun fires and Rodrigo falls; mortally wounded, he dies in Carlos’ arms. Philip enters and goes to give Carlos back his sword, but Carlos rejects him, having realised that Rodrigo has died to save him. The populace storm the prison and Carlos flees.

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Don Carlos (1565), unknown Spanish painter

“The whole history of the world is a perpetually recurring struggle between liberty and the lust for power and possession�

Schiller

DON CARLOS

‘THE LIBERTY OF MAN IS NOT SAFE IN THE HANDS OF ANY CHURCH. WHEREVER THE BIBLE AND SWORD ARE IN PARTNERSHIP, MAN IS A SLAVE.’ ROBERT INGERSOLL

W

hen Jesus comes back to Earth he performs great miracles in Spain and the people adore him, but the Inquisition arrests him and sentences him to be burnt. Because, as the Grand Inquisitor explains at the trial, Jesus is interfering with the mission of the Church. He is preventing it from fashioning an environment in which man can live peacefully and die peacefully, free from the curse of knowledge. Beyond the grave we will find nothing but death, but the church wishes to keep this secret from us, and entice us with the reward of heaven and eternity.

Thus argues Ivan, the rationalist brother, the atheist, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This Grand Inquisitor, this terrifying old man, places his own personal power, that of the Inquisition itself, before all normal Christian considerations, of generosity, of kindness, or of love.

Dostoyevsky borrowed him from Schiller, whose play is the source of Verdi’s opera.

The Grand Inquisitor for Dostoyevsky is as much an atheist as Ivan.

However, Dostoyevsky’s dislike of the Grand Inquisitor was nugatory compared to Verdi’s dislike of Pope Pius IX. Verdi was a radical liberal politician – he became a member of the Italian senate – closely associated with the process of Italian unification. The plight of the Netherlands in Don Carlo will have evoked for him the struggle of the young Italian state to free the Veneto from Austrian domination. Verdi deplored the Pope’s opposition to Italian unification and detested his Syllabus Errorum of 1864, which sided with the old monarchies. This was the document of which Gladstone said: no one can now become Rome’s convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another. Verdi saw the Pope as opposing not

only the new Italian nation but freedom of conscience and discussion in general.

For Verdi, the Grand Inquisitor represented the Catholic Church at its most ruthless and unchristian. It was Verdi who insisted on the inclusion of the scene between the King and the Inquisitor, and on the auto da fé, absent from Schiller’s play. He told his librettists that he wanted a scene of magnificent spectacle like the coronation scene in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète. After all, he was writing Don Carlo for Paris. The auto da fé allowed Verdi also to include the burning of heretics. This was historically inaccurate, for in Spain unrepentant heretics were burned after the ceremony was complete, not that this made the process less painful.

Both Don Carlo and Verdi’s next opera, Aida, highlight the composer’s distaste for organised religion. His wife, the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, wrote of him: ‘He is a jewel among honest men; he understands and feels himself every delicate and elevated sentiment. And yet this brigand permits himself to be, I won’t say an atheist, but certainly very little of a believer, and that with an obstinacy and calm that make me want to beat him.’

Nevertheless, when we think of the Requiem or of the music for the ghostly monk at the start of Act I of Don Carlo, it’s hard to believe that the composer lacked religious feeling. In Don Carlo the Voice from Heaven receives the souls of the burning heretics, just as in Aida, Amneris calls on Heaven to carry out her curse of the vile priests who bury alive Radames and Aida: Impious priesthood, curses light on ye all!

On your heads Heaven’s vengeance will fall!

Verdi built a private chapel on his estate at Sant’Agata, probably to spare Giuseppina the need to go to public mass at Busseto,

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where she was disliked, and, like his landlord neighbours, he asked his people to attend mass. He went himself, grudgingly, because it was a condition of keeping a private chapel, but he took a dislike to the local priest, and insisted, for important ceremonies, on Giovanni Avanzi, the parroco of the next parish, a robust Italian patriot.

The Spanish version of the Inquisition, as presented in the opera, was established during the reigns of the Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) and of his son Philip II, the champions of the Catholic faith in Europe.

Around it Protestant countries developed a ‘black legend’, a view that the Catholic Church used the Inquisition to impose a ferociously repressive, cruel and ultimately antichristian conformity on its members.

This Protestant propaganda, very influential in England, Spain’s great antagonist in the late sixteenth century, is projected typically by works like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), which devotes an entire chapter to The Execrable Inquisition of Spayne. The Inquisition stands accused on several grounds: that people could be tried for any trivial indication of heresy; that people were usually accused so that they could be robbed, or out of personal pique or jealousy. Foxe describes the procedures as disgraceful, the trials rigged, the ‘proof ’ invented, and the prisoners tortured into confessing even to errors they had not committed. Foxe warns that this odious system could be imposed upon any country espousing the Catholic faith.

Spain had a serious problem of conformity, of course. At the time portrayed in the opera (c. 1565), the southern, Moorish, parts of the country had only recently been conquered: Ferdinand and Isabella had captured Granada in 1492. As the combined Castilian and Aragonese kings came to dominate the whole of Spain, they required Moors and Jews either to convert to Catholicism or to

leave the country. The Inquisition’s task was to guard against false conversions and to impose religious conformity upon the people.

The Muslim threat remained very real. Spain controlled the whole of Southern Italy, and thus constituted the main defence for Europe against the Turkish menace in the Mediterranean: it was Philip II’s half-brother, the Emperor Charles V’s illegitimate son, Don John of Austria, who commanded the European fleet against the Turks at Lepanto (1571).

Philip II took the view, conventional for the time and not so out-of-date today, that heretics, religious minorities, threaten national security. The Inquisition defined heresy as a deliberate denial of an article of the true Catholic faith, and a public and obstinate persistence in that error. The Inquisition gave you the opportunity to recant before it burned you alive.

What Foxe and some modern English schoolmasters fail to mention is that the problem of religious conformity was even greater in England than in Spain. In England when the country turned Protestant on the accession of Elizabeth I, the old religion again became the new heresy. Elizabeth allowed her freebooting pirates like Drake and Raleigh to plunder Spanish colonies and attack the Spanish treasure fleet. Spain understandably felt a need to retaliate, and looked to English Catholics for support.

Philip II had either to invade England or to engineer the death of Elizabeth by other means. In April 1570 Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in Excelsis declaring Elizabeth of England a heretic, and threatening excommunication on any of her subjects obeying her orders. The stakes were high and Sir Thomas Walsingham, the Queen’s secretary, established an English Inquisition, a network of agents and code breakers

Auto-da-fé held in Plaza Mayor, Madrid in 1680 (1683) Francisco Rizi (1608–1685)

responsible for identifying Catholic threats, and punishing recusant priests and noblemen. The procedures to impose conformity on such a large section of the population were stringent, and behind them lay the threat of the hideous public butchery of being hanged, drawn, and quartered. The English Inquisition was just as terrifying and terrible as the Spanish one, and more underhand. Over the 40 years of Elizabeth’s reign around 294 priests were imprisoned, 200 executed and 91 banished. As in Spain, open heretics, the people unwilling to disavow their beliefs, were often the cream of their various societies, like the Jesuit priest, Robert Southwell, a sublime English poet, executed by the English Inquisition in 1595.

We should also not forget that the French, not to be outdone by the English or the Spanish in religious intolerance, murdered at least 6,000 Protestants in the St Bartholemew’s Day massacre over several weeks in 1572.

However, the extremely public nature of the Inquisition, the formal trials, the accusations, and the auto da fé, the Act of Faith, with its public humiliations and subsequent burnings, led to a lot of public disgust in other parts of Europe, keener to look at the beam in someone else’s eye than at that in their own.

Schiller took the idea for his verse play Don Karlos (1787) from several versions of the story springing from a novella by César

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Vichard de Saint-Réal (1639-1692), the French historian and novelist. Saint-Réal’s book came out in 1672, and started a fashion in stories of court intrigue. Madame de La Fayette that same year began the masterpiece of the genre, The Princess of Cleves.

Saint-Réal had speculated on the delicate situation of the Spanish Infante, Philip II’s son, Don Carlos. Originally betrothed to the young French princess, Elisabeth de Valois, he found himself displaced when his father decided to marry Elisabeth himself. In Saint-Réal’s novella, the passionate love of the two young people has to be indulged in secret, to evade the jealousy not just of the king, but also of Eboli, in love with Don Carlos, and of Don John of Austria, in love with Elisabeth.

Saint-Réal has Philip II, an appalling brute, learning of his son’s support for the Dutch rebels, push Carlos to suicide, before turning on his queen and poisoning her himself.

The cloister of the Monastery of Yuste, where Charles V retired in 1556, and the setting of Acts 1 and 4 of the opera

This story says more for Saint-Réal’s imagination than for his respect for historical truth. The real Don Carlos, a victim of Hapsburg inbreeding – he had only four great-grandparents instead of the recommended eight – was ugly, deformed and sickly. He liked mutilating horses and whipping little girls – this

Aerial view of El Escorial (1563-84), Philip’s Monastery/Palace

caused doubts at court about his ability to father a child, and must have given prospective consorts pause for thought. He became extremely unstable and dangerous after a bad fall at the age of sixteen; trepanning had been necessary to save his life. He then started writing letters of support to the rebels in the Low Countries – he’d been promised the governorship, a further source of grievance – and he was rumoured even to be plotting against the King’s life.

When Philip went in the night to arrest his son he did so in full armour and a helmet.

Carlos was then incarcerated for everyone’s protection. Philip wrote to the Pope to explain that the prince was ‘totally lacking the capacity for ruling over states’. Philip had effectively deprived himself of a successor.

In confinement Carlos developed eating disorders, then repeatedly soaked himself in icy water and lay on cold flagstones. He was

too disturbed to be actively responsible for anything, but he effectively brought about his own death in July 1568, within six months of his incarceration.

Elisabeth and Carlos had no intimate relationship, though the prince had given signs of a crush on the Queen – giving her costly presents – while Elisabeth was clearly upset

by Carlos’s imprisonment. Elisabeth had found Philip difficult initially, but rather because she couldn’t live with the occasional presence of his former mistresses, than because she had lovers of her own. Her death, in childbirth, only three months after that of Don Carlos, was convenient to those who, like the Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange, wished to pretend that Philip had poisoned them both.

The Spanish court had deemed Philip’s grief at both deaths deeply sincere.

Schiller, like Verdi, an anticlerical republican,

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was attracted by the dramatic possibilities of court intrigue set against a background of political and religious tyranny. The theme of freedom for the Netherlands dominates the play, which inevitably simplifies the tangled complexity of Dutch politics. The seven provinces spoke two languages, Dutch and Walloon, and followed various religious alignments. The Calvinists quarrelled with the Lutherans, while the nobles, who were mostly French-speaking and often had strong links with Spain, quarrelled with each other.

Freedom for the Netherlands was no simple concept. Claims that it meant freedom from the Inquisition were countered by the feeble argument that it was the Dutch Inquisition which applied to Holland (as though that made much difference), and by the more telling one that the Dutch Inquisition had been inactive since 1564.

However, implementation of the anti-heresy laws wasn’t left entirely to the Inquisition, and Philip II could hardly ignore such things as the violent iconoclasm of the Calvinists, or the Pope’s demands that they be severely punished for destroying statues, windows, and churches. The Spanish reaction when it came, under the generalship of the Duke of Alba, was extremely harsh. For instance, in late 1572 all the citizens of first Zutphen and then Naarden were murdered by the Spanish army.

The naturally conservative Philip wanted to keep the province, for good practical reasons: Spain levied taxes from the Low Countries, though often not enough to pay for their administration; the Spanish Crown was in hock to Antwerp’s bankers, who consequently dealt with much of the New World gold on its arrival in Europe; and Holland was the natural springboard for a campaign against Elizabeth I in England.

Both Verdi and Schiller, absorbed in an attack on political and priestly tyranny, were attracted to the character of Rodrigo

Posa, the great friend of Carlos and of freedom. Posa had no historical equivalent in the Spanish court. Some think that he represents Egmont, Goethe’s hero in another Enlightenment political manifesto, and Philip’s own general in their victory over the French at the Battle of St Quentin (1557). The Dutch Count was executed by the Spanish for his part in the revolt, at the insistence of Cardinal Espinosa, Bishop of Sigüenza, the Spanish Grand Inquisitor, and so ex officio the villain of Schiller’s piece.

Schiller makes Posa the voice of Enlightenment freedom. Verdi responds by making Rodrigo’s music simple and giving it a particular tonal quality, accompanying him often on the high brass. Rodrigo’s tunes are memorable and his music has a direct quality, almost like an earlier Verdi, suggestive of honesty, but perhaps also of naivety, particularly when compared with that of the King or of the Grand Inquisitor.

The confrontation between the King and the Inquisitor in Verdi sees the King pleading for the life both of his friend, Posa, and of his son, Carlos. Both are guilty of supporting the rebels, and the Inquisitor threatens the King with the horrors of the Inquisition, should he refuse to surrender them. This great scene comes at the very end of Schiller’s play, after Posa’s murder, which gives the Inquisitor occasion for a more cunning cruelty: he reproaches the King for having Posa assassinated rather than handing him over to the Inquisition. His torture and burning would have provided an incomparable disincentive for other dangerous liberals.

The Grand Inquisitor was the King’s appointee, so his threat against the King would not historically have held water, but the fact that he makes it speaks eloquently of Schiller’s wish to personalize the confrontation.

Verdi, who had experience of politics, finds a

Elisabeth de Valois (c 1605). She was born 1545 Fontainebleau, died 1568 (aged 23), buried in El Escorial Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1553–1608)

nobility in Philip not present in Schiller’s King.

Verdi understands the loneliness of power, and Philip’s aria wonderfully projects not just his sleeplessness but its causes, his anxieties about his isolation, about his queen’s feelings for him, and about having to subordinate her to the need to manage the state. Philip is the only case in all Verdi opera where the character bearing the main psychological weight of the work is a bass. Simon Boccanegra faces a similar conflict between personal obligation and the business of state,

but he in a baritone; Philip’s music suggests a deeper darkness, a desolate nobility and an endearing sense of tragic weariness.

In his History of the Revolt of the Netherlands, Schiller wrote ‘The whole history of the world is a perpetually recurring struggle between liberty and the lust for power and possession’. Verdi understands not just the lust for power, but also its pains and trials, and this extra dimension brings to his opera much of its grandeur and subtlety.

MICHAEL FONTES

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T R I S TA N

WAG N ER

UND

IS

S W A N S O N G AT T H E G R A N G E I N CONC E RT

CONDUCTOR ∙ MARTYN BRABBINS

BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTR A

SOLDE

AND

CHORUS

Libretto by Wagner based on the romance by Gottfried von Strassburg First performance 10 June 1865, Nationaltheater, Munich Performances at The Grange July 13, 16

TRISTAN Breton nobleman, adopted heir of King Marke ∙ BRYAN REGISTER ISOLDE Irish Princess betrothed to Marke ∙ ANJA KAMPE ≈ Stephen Gosztony & Sue Butcher BRANGÄNE Isolde’s maid ∙ SARA FULGONI KURWENAL Tristan’s servant ∙ STEPHEN GADD MARKE King of Cornwall ∙ CLIVE BAYLEY ≈ Christopher & Anne Saul MELOT a courtier, Tristan’s friend ∙ FELIX KEMP A YOUNG SAILOR | A SHEPHERD ∙ ADAM TUNNICLIFFE A STEERSMAN ∙ LANCELOT NOMURA THE TRISTAN CHORD ≈ Nerissa Guest LIEBESTOD ≈ Johnny & Marie Veeder

Isolde's love song of death is the final aria of the final act of our final opera at The Grange

W E LO O K F O RWA R D TO S E E I N G YO U I N T H E T H E AT R E I N T H E W O O D S 109

TR I S TA N U N D I SO LD E Ireland has defeated Cornwall in war.

The Irish prince Morold, his weapons blessed by the princess Isolde, travels to Cornwall to claim tribute from King Marke. His nephew, Tristan, kills Morold and sends his head (instead of the claimed tribute) to Ireland.

But Tristan has been wounded and only Isolde, who had blessed Morold’s weapons, can heal him. Disguised as a minstrel, Tantris, he allows his boat to be swept onto the coast of Ireland.

Isolde nurses him and is gripped by an unspoken love – even when she realises his identity. She knows she should kill him to avenge Ireland’s disgrace – but she cannot. She cures him and allows him to return home.

Tristan was also seized by love for her.

Some time later, King Marke, whose own wife has died, is persuaded by his courtiers to claim Isolde as his wife, and Tristan is sent to Ireland to bring her to Cornwall.

Isolde is mortified that Tristan is doing this.

Act 1 En route from Ireland to Cornwall Tristan is captaining the vessel but has refused to speak to Isolde. His loyal Kurwenal mocks Isolde about the slaughter of Morold.

She tells Brangäne that Tristan has betrayed their love.

Brangäne suggests they use a potion to re-ignite their love. It was amongst the remedies given to them by Isolde’s mother.

Instead Isolde asks for a potion of death.

Cornwall is in sight and Isolde sends a message to Tristan: she will only allow him to present her to King Marke if he first comes to see her.

She asks Brangäne to prepare a death potion for them both; thus Tristan will pay for his betrayal of Isolde. Tristan explains his aloofness: ‘where I have lived, custom dictates that he who

accompanies the bride home must keep his distance from her’. He senses the drink of ‘atonement’ is poisonous – but welcomes it.

that after the death of his first wife, it was Tristan himself who had urged him to remarry and set about finding a worthy bride.

The two wait for the poison to take effect and they confess their love. Brangäne tells them that she substituted a love potion for the death potion and the lovers are oblivious to all else.

Neither of the lovers will tell Marke about their past encounter and Tristan asks Isolde if she will follow him into the world of Night.

Tristan challenges Melot and allows himself to be wounded so that he might finally be released from the agony of Day.

Act 3 Tristan’s family home in Brittany The wounded Tristan has been brought here

by Kurwenal. He has sent for Isolde who alone can drag Tristan back from Night to Day. When the shepherd spots her boat, he will change his soulful tune to a happier one.

DINNER INTERVAL Act 2 King Marke’s palace Isolde has arranged an assignation with Tristan while her husband is hunting.

Brangäne warns Isolde that Melot, Tristan’s supposed friend, has laid a trap; during the night hunt, King Marke will catch the lovers together. Brangäne won’t signal to Tristan that it is safe. Isolde is impatient and does it herself.

Isolde and Tristan are together and welcome the world of Night: the world of passion and ecstasy. The world of Day keeps them apart.

Brangäne warns them to be careful.

When Kurwenal tells Tristan that Isolde is on her way, he is ecstatic. Tristan curses the potion that kept them both from death. The shepherd changes his tune. Tristan pulls off his bandages, calls her and dies in her arms.

Marke has been told the truth by Brangäne and arrives with Melot to forgive the lovers.

Kurwenal mistakenly construes Marke’s approach as vengeful, kills Melot, and dies defending Tristan’s body.

Marke laments the death all around him.

Isolde describes the ascent of Tristan’s soul and the waves sweeping around her.

Transfigured, she joins Tristan in death.

Kurwenal rushes to warn them. King Marke interrupts the lovers. He is not angry, but begs Tristan to explain and reminds Tristan

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MATHILDE WESENDONCK

In 1849 a warrant was issued in Dresden for Richard Wagner's arrest (money troubles). He fled first to Liszt in Weimar, then Paris, and then Zürich where he began Tristan. His landlord's wife Mathilde Wesendonck was his inspiration . . . in the greenhouse.

1852 RW meets Otto Wesendonck who has made

1854 August Completes Walküre Act 1

Sept Finishes Rheingold. Karl Ritter presents a sketch dramatic treatment of Tristan & Isolde 1856 Finishes Walküre. Begins Siegfried

A special tie between her [his wife Minna) and our friends [Wesendoncks] had been formed by the introduction of a very friendly little dog into our house, which had been obtained by the Wesendoncks

MY LIFE

1857 April Otto W places a cottage on his new estate (Asyl) at Wagner's disposal – there are delays in its refurbishment. Wagner is cross

June to Liszt I may safely assume that a thoroughly practicable work such as Tristan will be soon bring in decent revenues and keep me afloat for a while July Otto and Mathilde move into their villa which had been embellished by stucco workers and upholsterers from Paris. At this point a new phase began in my relations with this family which was not really important, but nevertheless exercised considerable influence on the outward conduct of my life (MY LIFE) Wagner spent so much time in the vlla that servants took instructions from him regarding meal times, heating, lighting. This displeased Otto and "necessitated a certain measure of precaution in an intimacy which had now become exceedingly close.

These precautions were occasionally the source of great amusement to the two parties (MY LIFE)

Villa Wesendonck, Asyl, Zürich

1853 RW meets Cosima, 16, the illegitimate daughter of Countess Marie d’Agoult and Franz Liszt

Mathilde Wesendonck (1828-1902) with son Guido (1855-1858) Pastel by Ernst Kietz (1815-1892), 1856

a considerable fortune in the silk business in New York. Otto pays off Wagner's creditors

Finishes Siegfried Act 2; sets aside the Ring for Tristan Sept Hans von Bülow marries Cosima, now aged 20 RW completes first version of poem for Tristan and presents it to Mathilde Wesendonck Oct begins composing Tristan Nov MY LIFE I was interested in the expected crisis of the American money market . . . the consequences of which . . threatend to endanger the whole of my friend Wesendonck's fortune Begins Wesendonck Lieder on Mathilde’s poems

Oil study for Tristan and Isolde, Herber t James Draper (1864-1920) The 1901 painting was destroyed in WW2

Richard and Mathilde meet in the greenhouse

Dec Performs Traume (one of the Wesendonck songs subtitled ’studies for Tristan und Isolde’) with chamber orchestra under Mathilde's window for her birthday. He does the same for Cosima 13 years later (with Siegfried Idyll) 1858 Jan Completes Tristan Act 1

Mar to Cosima I am now spending the mornings setting my misery to music April RW sends Mathilde a pencil sketch for instrumentation of prelude to Tristan accompanied by a note. His wife sees it and gave a vulgar interpretation to my words. RW makes his wife promise to keep silent and sends her to Germany for a cure. It is too risky to meet up with Mathilde April to Mathilde MORNING CONFESSION Just out of bed . . . And so it went on througout the night. In the morning I regained my senses. . Love! My soul rejoices in this love which is the wellspring of my redemption.

Then the day came, with its miserable weather, the pleasures of your garden were denied me The Wesendoncks go to Italy for several weeks May Begins Tristan Act 2. He tells Minna he no longer wishes to live with her August To Venice for the first time. Supported by Karl Ritter’s mother Aug Cosima, unhappy in her marriage, asks Karl Ritter to help her drown herself in Lake Geneva Sept To Mathilde Here shall Tristan be completed. And I shall return with it to see you, to console you, and to make you happy! Here shall you bleed to death, here shall your wounds be healed and closed. From here the world shall learn of the sublime and noble distress of supreme love, the lamentations of most sorrowful bliss.

1859 Mar Act 2 Tristan finished. Departs Venice It was now necessary to make new decisions . . where I was going to compose the third act

Apr to Mathilde This Tristan is turning into something dreadful. That last act! I'm afraid the opera will be forbidden - unless the whole thing is turned into a parody by bad productions. Completely good ones are bound to drive people crazy August Goes to Lucerne and completes Tristan Sept Moves to Paris 1862 Begins love affair with Cosima von Bülow 1865 Tristan première, conducted by Hans von Bülow

Im Triebhaus (In the Hothouse)

by Mathilde Wesendonck translated Uri Liebrecht set by Wagner around the time of Tristan Act 2 Crown of leaves arching high, Canopies of emerald, Children, come from distant parts, What is it that breaks your hearts?

Silently your branches bow, Tracing symbols in the air, The mute witness to your suffering, A sweet fragrance rises there.

Yearning with desire You stretch your arms out wide And, captive to delusion, hug Emptiness, the barren void.

I know that well, poor plant, It is one fate we share; Though glowing light surrounds us, Our homeland lies elsewhere.

And as, happily, the sun deserts The empty light of day, He who knows real anguish Finds, in the dark, a silent hideaway.

The silence grows, a rustling web Fills the darkened space with dread: Along the edges of the leaves I see heavy droplets quiver.

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Opera, Art and Gastronomy in Emilia-Romagna

A SIX NIGHT HOLIDAY | 10 OCTOBER 2016 Our holiday to the annual Verdi Festival will include performances of Don Carlo, Il trovatore and Giovanna d’Arco with the option to see a rare performance of I masnadieri.

Based at the 4* Hotel Palace Maria Luigia in the centre of Parma, our holiday will include visits to the important art collection at the Palazzo della Pilotta and the Teatro Farnese. In Busseto we will see the Villa Verdi before visiting the Museo Nazionale Giuseppe Verdi. Lunch is included at the Hotel I due Foscari, once owned by one of the greatest Verdi singers of all time, Carlo Bergonzi. A further day will be spent in Cremona.

Price from £1,797 per person for six nights including return flights, accommodation with breakfast, two dinners, two lunches, stalls tickets for three performances, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Lecturer and a local guide.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Drottningholm Court Theatre A FIVE NIGHT HOLIDAY | 22 AUGUST 2016 We are pleased to present our first tour to the beautiful early 17th century opera house at Drottningholm to mark its 250th anniversary this summer.

Based at the 4* superior First Reisen hotel, we will visit Stockholm’s old town Gamla Stan, the Royal Palace, Academy of Fine Arts, the Vasa museum and Ulriksdal Palace. On the day of the performance, we shall visit Drottningholm Palace, have a tour of the theatre on the shores of beautiful Lake Mälaren and enjoy a pre-performance dinner in the restaurant.

Price from £1,995 per person for five nights including return flights, accommodation with breakfast, three dinners, one ticket for the performance, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Lecturer.

THE 65TH WEXFORD OPERA FESTIVAL A FOUR NIGHT HOLIDAY | 25 OCTOBER 2016 with Elaine Padmore, former Director of the Wexford Opera and the Royal Opera House The programme for the 2016 Wexford Opera Festival promises to be a vintage one. The common theme of illicit love links three rarely performed operas.

Performances this year include Donizetti’s Maria de Rudenz, Samuel Barber’s Vanessa and Félicien David’s Herculanum. We stay at White’s Hotel, located just a few minutes’ walk from the National Opera House where performances are given. Elaine Padmore will join the tour as our special guest and will tell us about her years in Wexford.

Price from £1,368 per person for four nights including return flights, transfers, accommodation with breakfast, four dinners, stalls tickets for three operas and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.

LA SCALA, MILAN FOUR NIGHT HOLIDAYS 18 September & 13 November 2016 La Scala, Milan opened in 1778 with an opera by Salieri and since then many of the greatest Italian operas have received their first performance on its hallowed stage. During 2016 our holidays will include performances of Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

Included in our tour to Milan are visits to the Duomo, Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ at Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the wonderful La Scala Museum. We shall also visit Basilica Sant’Ambrogio, the Castello Sforzesco and Casa Verdi, founded by Giuseppe Verdi and dedicated to taking care of musicians who have devoted their working lives to opera.

Price from £1,638 per person for four nights including return flights, accommodation with breakfast, two dinners, one opera ticket, all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities and the services of the Kirker Tour Leader.

Speak to an expert or request a brochure:

020 7593 2284 quote code GGR www.kirkerholidays.com

JAVIER CAMARENA WITH ANGEL RODRIGUEZ (PIANO) Javier Camarena was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, and his father was a nuclear plant technician.

He completed his musical studies at Universidad de Guanajuato and in 2004 he won the National Contest Carlo Morelli, in Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. There, he also made his professional début as Tonio in La fille du régiment and in 2006 joined the International Opernstudio in Zurich.

His remarkable voice has gained him leading roles, sharing credits with world renowned singers, working with some of the most outstanding conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta in a repertoire that includes works by Bellini, Bizet, Donizetti, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini and Verdi.

Camarena has appeared in some of the most important opera houses and concert halls including Staatsoper Wien, Opera de Paris, Bayerische Staatsoper, Semperoper Dresden, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, London’s Wigmore Hall and the Salzburg Festival.

June 10, 2016

He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York in October 2011 in Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Camarena became the rage of the opera world in 2014, when he joined the ranks of Pavarotti and Flórez to become the third singer in 70 years to perform an encore at the Met when, during two consecutive performances of Cenerentola he stopped the show singing Ramiro’s aria Si ritrovarla io guiro. Months later he repeated the same feat, at Madrid’s Teatro Real, in La fille du regiment singing 18 perfect high Cs. On March 12, 2016 Camarena became the second singer in the history of the Met to perform multiple encores (Don Pasquale). Other recent appearances include Il viaggio a Reims (Opernhaus Zürich) and future projects include his debut in I Puritani (Madrid) and Barbiere di Siviglia at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

"No wonder he is our tenor-sensation du jour"

FINANCIAL TIMES

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TRUSTEES GRANGE PARK OPERA Simon Freakley Chairman

THEATRE CONSULTANTS THEATRE IN THE WOODS

Alison Ritchie Dec Costello Joanna Barlow Jon Clarke Tony Bugg Nick Ewins Iain Burnside Sir David Davies Founding Chair º Dame Vivien Duffield HEAD OF MUSIC Jeremy Farr Philip White Hamish Forsyth ASSISTANT CONDUCTORS Emma Kane Philip White Oliver!

ENDOWMENT FUND William Garrett Chairman

Heike Munro Mark Lacey Marie Veeder

Patrick Milne Fanciulla Samuel Draper Carlo Miles Clery-Fox Tristan ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

Matthew Eberhardt Carlo

SETS

Oliver! & Fanciulla scenery constructed by Adrian Snell painted by John Waterworth & Rod Holt Oliver! additional set construction Theatre Royal Plymouth Carlo scenery constructed and painted by Visual Scene Additional cloths painted by

Prompt Side

PROPS SUPERVISOR

Abby Louise Price Susannah Lombardelli º

Glyndebourne Productions Nicola Killeen fabric dyeing COSTUME HIRE

Cosprop Angels Costumes The National Theatre THANKS TO

Dick Shipley Fanciulla trees Jez Wingham Freedom flying Hillier Nurseries Carlo tree Colin Fletcher º FRONT OF HOUSE

Jill Hardy

LONG MARQUEE SUPERVISOR

Diana Hargreaves Laura Deards Oliver!

THE RESTAURANT Jeremy Cooke Fanciulla Wendy Griffin-Reid Fanciulla Kathryn Stokes Manager Alice Turner Oliver!

Fiona Maddocks Anna-Maria Casson Carlo Sophie Dormer Deputy Cat Beveridge Carlo Ian Maurice DEPUTY STAGE MANAGERS Harry O’Sullivan Bar Manager Miles Clery-Fox Tristan Dr Shirley Radcliffe Patrick Milne Chorus Repetiteur Claire Litton Fanciulla KEARNEY’S EVENT CATERING Diane Norburn Oliver!

COMPANY SECRETARY David Kearney LANGUAGE Jane Andrews Carlo Brian Matthews Marcel Taylor, Simon Lakey Matteo dalle Fratte ASMs TREASURER Fanciulla, Carlo Champagne Laurent-Perrier Bella Burton Fanciulla Fiona Russell Wine Stone, Vine & Sun OLIVER! CHILDREN Robert Perkins Oliver!

Décor Alexander Creswell Jo Hawes Casting º Louise Quartermain Carlo Programme Rebecca Thomas CHIEF EXECUTIVE º Printing John Good º Wasfi Kani OBE TECHNICAL STAGE MANAGER GROUNDS COSTUME SUPERVISORS GENERAL MANAGER Declan Costello Richard Loader Caroline Hughes Fanciulla Helen Sennett DEPUTIES John & Victoria Salkeld Yvonne Milnes Oliver!

SYSTEMS & DATA INTELLIGENCE Scott Darkins David Manston sweet peas Deborah Andrews Carlo Chris Campbell Niall Mulcahy TENT KEEPER DEPUTY COSTUME John Sherrard Michael Sennett ARTISTIC ADMINISTRATOR SUPERVISORS Scott Cooper STAGE TECHNICIANS TRAIN SET Ruth Young Fanciulla Isaac Marley Burrough Megan Doyle Oliver! & Carlo Steve Penn & Gordon King BOX OFFICE MANAGER Sam Court Caroline Sheahan º WARDROBE MISTRESS Alexander Harris METEOR BOARD Katie Griffin BOX OFFICE & DINING Dominic Kelly Carolina Lane Assisted by Bek Palmer Charlotte Pomroy James Plumbridge Samuel Atiko Fergus Cross Simon Woods DRESSERS Arthur Kay Becky Ryan EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR George Meagher HEAD OF LIGHTING Lyndsey Pook Alison Ritchie Fanciulla, Oliver! Dan Last Fred Gifford Bernard Davies Carlo, Tristan Belle Lupton WIGS CHIEF ELECTRICIAN Kitty Vaughan Darren & Pav Stalmach-Ware PRODUCTION MANAGER Paul Hyland Jack Gardener The Wig room Ltd Dan Franklin LIGHTING PROGRAMMER Helen Keelan º DEPUTY COMPANY MANAGER Sarah Brown Wig Mistress & Makeup EGGCUPS volunteers Holly Wade Rebecca Rungen Deputy Inge Hunter DEPUTY ELECTRICIANS Angela Larard LONDON COMPANY MANAGER Joe Sheppard COSTUME Workroom Susie & Derek Lintott Bernard Davies Pip Walsh Kim Jones Cutter Sue & Peter Paice Daniel Cunningham Roslyn Moreton Maker FINANCE CONTROLLER Caroline Perry Elizabeth King Student Sewer Cathy Bassett SOUND TECHNICIANS Clare Read Anna-Maria Ganzinelli Daniel Higgott Jude Sergeant MEMBERSHIP, MARKETING, PRESS Student Sewer Nick Lodge Di Threlfall Annabel Larard Additional Costume Makers Jane Powlett KEYBOARD PROGRAMMER APPEAL SECRETARY Jackie Holt, Pauline Parker Jo Seligman Stuart Andrews Jack Rush Karen Crichton Sue & Hugh Brown Elspeth Threadgold LIGHTING HIRE Richard & Steve Dean DEVELOPMENT OFFICER Roxy Cressy, Lara Bradbeer Andrea Harris White Light Ananya Mukhopadhyay Darcy Clothing, Lizzie Holmes SOUND HIRE Les Woolford Orbital Sound PIMLICO OPERA John Derrick Chairman

REPETITEUR

STAGE MANAGERS

FIRST VIOLIN

Amyn Merchant Leader Mark Derudder Joan Martinez Katerina Nazarova Kate Turnbull Magdalena GrucaBroadbent Jennifer Curiel Tim Fisher Julie Gillett-Smith Kate Hawes Laura Kernohan Jeff Moore SECOND VIOLIN

Carol Paige * Jens Lynen David Chadwick Penny Tweed Ingrid Button Austeja Juskaityte Vicky Berry Rebecca Clark Lara Carter Janice Thorgilson Anya Birchall Agnieszka Gesler Zuzanna Pyrc VIOLA

Tom Beer * Ellen Blythe Jacoba Gale Eva Malmbom

Nigel Giles John Murphy Judith Preston

CLARINET

TIMPANI

Kevin Banks * Christine Roberts

Geoff Prentice *

CELLO

BASS CLARINET

Jesper Svedberg * Philippa Stevens Garry Stevens Alba Acevedo Lorna Davis Kate Keats Coral Lancaster Yvonne Parsons Naomi Watts

Ausias Morant

Matt King * Alastair Marshallsay Sacha Johnson Tim Barry Helen Edordu Ben Lewis Scott Lumsdaine

DOUBLE BASS

Nicolas Fleury * Ruth Spicer Robert Harris Kevin Pritchard Edward Lockwood

CELESTE

TRUMPET

Dougie Scarfe

David Daly * Nicole Boyesen David Kenihan Nickie Dixon Jane Ferns FLUTE

BASSOON

Tammy Thorn * Emma Selby Eanna Monaghan Kim Murphy CONTRA BASSOON

Kim Murphy HORN

Anna Pyne * Owain Bailey * Robert Manasse

Chris Avison * Peter Turnbull Matt Williams Rob Johnston

PICCOLO

TROMBONE

Owain Bailey * OBOE

Edward Kay * Holly Randall Emily Cockbill COR ANGLAIS

Holly Randall

Kevin Morgan * Robb Tooley BASS TROMBONE

Kevin Smith TUBA

Andy Cresci *

PERCUSSION

HARP

Eluned Pierce * Kate Smith Joanna Smith * denotes Section Principal º CEO HEAD OF CONCERTS & PROGRAMMING

Heather Duncan ORCHESTRA MANAGER

Adam Glynn LIBRARIAN

Kim Matthews SENIOR STAGE MANAGER

Scott Caines STAGE MANAGER

LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST, DON CARLO, TRISTAN & ISOLDE

THE BOURNEMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Richie Burton

WOODWIND 1

Tim Taylorson WOODWIND 2

John Crossman WOODWIND 3

Mark Lacey WOODWIND 4

Dai Pritchard WOODWIND 5

Connie Tanner HORN 1

Kevin Elliott

HORN 2

KEYBOARD

VIOLA

Lindsay Kempley

Roger Davison

Jason Glover

TRUMPET 1

GUITAR

CELLO

Fraser Tannock

Graeme Taylor

Claire Constable

TRUMPET 2

ACCORDION

BASS

Karen Street

Catherine Ricketts

Toby Coles TROMBONE 1

Rob Harvey

PERCUSSION 1

º

Mark Taylor

ORCHESTRAL MANAGEMENT

TROMBONE 2

PERCUSSION 2

Steven Haynes

Bobby Ball

TROMBONE 3

VIOLIN

Adrian Hallowell

Nancy Taylor

OLIVER!

THE GPO SHOW BAND

Mark Lacey Mark Taylor

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BIOGRAPHIES

STEPHEN BARLOW Conductor Fanciulla Studied: Trinity College‚ Cambridge and GSMD. Was cofounder of Opera 80. Current Artistic Director of Buxton Festival, recent and future projects include Cenerentola (Stuttgart), Koanga (Wexford), Leonore, Lucia di Lammermoor, Louise, Jacobin, Barber of Baghdad, Intermezzo, La Colombe and La Princesse Jaune (Buxton); Peter Grimes, Boheme, Falstaff‚ Norma, Capriccio‚ Rusalka, Tristan und Isolde, Queen of Spades and Carmelites (Grange Park Opera); Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Beijing); Otello (Birmingham) Rape of Lucretia (Irish Youth Opera) and Midsummer Night’s Dream (GSMD); Rake’s Progress (Reisopera); Carmen, Faust, Nabucco (Australia) and Bluebeard’s Castle (Auckland Philharmonia). He has appeared at Glyndebourne, ROH, ENO, Opera Northern Ireland, Scottish Opera and Opera North as well as conducting his own opera King (Canterbury Cathedral) and his Clarinet Concerto with Emma Johnson and the Ulster Orchestra. Recordings include Joseph James’ Requiem and his own composition Rainbow Bear with his wife‚ Joanna Lumley‚ as narrator.

CHARLIE BARNARD Dodger Oliver!

Trained: Street Vibes Dance School. Theatre credits: West End debut as Tommy Matilda the Musical. TV credits: Street dancer Got to Dance (Sky One). Charlie has auditioned for Sylvia Young’s Theatre School and will be starting in September. He has won many street dance competitions, participated as a street dancer at Guilfest Festival and has worked with Papworth Charity Trust.

CLIVE BAYLEY Filippo II Don Carlo König Marke Tristan Born in Manchester, Clive sings regularly with the major opera companies in repertoire from Monteverdi to Ligeti. Previously for Grange Park Opera : King of Clubs Oranges, Gremin Onegin, title role Don Quichotte and Swallow Grimes.

Elsewhere: Daland Dutchman, Lindorf/Coppélius/Miracle/Dapertutto Hoffmann, Ratcliffe Budd, Cadmus Semele, Ferrando Trovatore, Collatinus (also TV), Pistol, Hunding, Sparafucile, Arkel, Palémon Thaïs, Narbal Trojans, Sarastro, Raimondo Lucia, Bluebeard, Dikoy (ENO); Agravain Gawain, Biterolf Tannhäuser, Colline, Foltz Meistersinger, Carbon Cyrano de Bergerac, Thoas Iphigénie en Tauride, Sylvano Calisto, Hunding (ROH); Louis VII Euryanthe, Calchas Iphigénie en Aulide, Rocco (Glyndebourne); Doctor Wozzeck (Metropolitan Opera); Astramados Grand Macabre (San Francisco); Raleigh Gloriana (Hamburg, ROH); Arkel, Ulisse, Titurel, Sylvano Calisto, Geronte Manon Lescaut, Achilla Giulio Cesare, Doctor (Munich); Fasolt (Strasbourg);

Claggart, Dosifey, General Gambler (Frankfurt); Claggart (Gothenburg); Daland (Copenhagen); Commendatore (Bergen); Gesler Guillaume Tell, Doctor Wozzeck, Dn Basilio Barbiere, Dikoy (WNO); Sparafucile, Ebn Hakia Iolanta, Raleigh (also TV/CD), Ferrando, Wurm Luisa Miller, Figaro, Biterolf, Antinous Ulisse, Hunding (Opera North).

PAUL BENTLEY Mr Brownlow Oliver!

Paul's West End credits include The Admiral and Chairman of the Bank in Mary Poppins, the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe and Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore (Olivier Award Nomination).

He has played principal roles in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and Aspects of Love, Sondheim's Follies, Assassins and Company; Ken Ludwig's farces Over the Moon and Lend Me A Tenor; and Dame Edna in The Spectacle. On television he has played the High Septon in Game of Thrones, and also appeared in Chucklevision, Doctors, Band of Brothers and Doctor Who. Radio includes Macheath in The Threepenny Opera and Morton in The Good Companions. His films include Jack Brown and the Curse of the Crown with Honor Blackman and The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep.

MARTYN BRABBINS Conductor Tristan Chief Conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic and Music Director of Huddersfield Choral Society.

He was Artistic Director of Cheltenham International Festival of Music 2005-2007, Associate Principal Conductor of BBC SSO 1994-2005, and Principal Guest of Royal Flemish Philharmonic 20092015. He studied composition in London and conducting with Ilya Musin in Leningrad, winning first prize at the 1988 Leeds Competition. Since then Brabbins has become a frequent guest with leading orchestras across the globe, with recent highlights including Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, LSO and BBC SO at First Night of the Proms.

Other opera productions this season include Rake’s Progress (Budapest), following on from performances in 14/15 of Die Schweigsame Frau (Essen) and Boris Godunov with Sir John Tomlinson in the title role. He is a regular visitor to the opera houses of Amsterdam, Lyon, Antwerp and Frankfurt, and made his Bavarian State Opera debut in 2013.

PÉROLA CONGO Bet Oliver!

Trained BRIT School of Performing Arts and Technology, Stageworks Studios & Arts Educational Schools, London. Credits: the Carol Bells Are Ringing and Little Sally Urinetown. This is her professional debut.

GABRIELLE DALTON Costume Designer Don Carlo Credits: The Haunting Hill House (Everyman Playhouse), Richard III (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Fiddler on the Roof, Don Quichotte, Idomeneo (Grange Park Opera), Marriage of Figaro (Opera North), La fanciulla del West (Opera North), A Doll’s House (Young Vic/West End/BAM New York), Joshua, La Voix Humaine, Dido and Aeneas, Les Noces, Ruddigore, Let ‘em Eat Cake and Of Thee I Sing (Opera North), Carmen (Salzburg Festival, Opera North, De Vlaamse Opera), Magical Night and The Red Balloon (ROH2 and tour) Joe Turners Come & Gone (Young Vic), Le Nozze de Figaro (Opera National de Bordeaux, Genoa, Tel Aviv, Champs Elysées Paris and Barcelona), Turandot (National Reisopera) and Barber of Seville (Savoy Opera).

SOPHIE-LOUISE DANN Widow Corney Oliver!

West End credits: Bend It Like Beckham (Phoenix); Made in Dagenham (Adelphi); Lend me a Tenor (Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Role in a Musical; 42nd Street (Dominion); Jolson (Victoria Palace); Forbidden Broadway (Menier Chocolate Factory/Albery), numerous leading roles for D’Oyly Carte (Savoy). Other credits: Hairspray (Curve); Sunday in the Park with George (Châtelet); The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe (Kensington Gardens); Closer Than Ever (Jermyn Street); Salad Days (Tête-à-Tête), The Original Chinese Conjuror (Almeida Opera/Aldeburgh Festival); The Beggar’s Opera (Holland Park) Spend, Spend, Spend (West Yorkshire Playhouse – TMA Award), and seasons at Chichester and Regent's Park Open Air. TV, Film & Radio credits: Doctors, Trapped!: Ever After, Mr Bean, Goodnight Sweetheart, The Phantom of the Opera. A regular guest on Radio 2’s Friday Night is Music Night, and her onewoman show From Classic to Coward to Current has been performed in London, New York and LA. JO DAVIES Director Don Carlo As director and associate director, Jo has worked for ROH, ENO, RSC, RNT, Bristol Old Vic, Donmar Warehouse, Regent's Park, West Yorkshire Playhouse, in the West End and on Broadway.

Credits include: Kiss Me Kate (Opera North/WNO); Marriage of Figaro (Opera North); Carousel (Opera North/Barbican/Théâtre du Châtelet); The Roaring Girl (RSC); Silly Kings (National Theatre Wales); The Two Widows (Angers Nantes Opera); Ruddigore (Opera North); The Country (Salisbury Playhouse); Aida (ENO, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera); La Vie Parisienne, Cunning Little Vixen, Rape of Lucretia (RCM); Le Nozze di Figaro (Classical Opera Company); A Night at the Chinese Opera (RAM); La Fanciulla del West (OHP). She has also worked with

and assisted many notable directors, including Deborah Warner, Alan Ayckbourn, Adrian Noble, Nicholas Hytner and Phyllida Lloyd.

MICHEL DE SOUZA Sonora Fanciulla Flemish Deputy Don Carlo Began his musical training with Canarinhos de Petropolis boys’ choir, then graduated in organ from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he also studied singing. He completed a Master’s degree in Opera at RSAMD followed by a year as an Emerging Artist at Scottish Opera where he sang Forester Vixen, Escamillo and Marullo. He was a member of ROH Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, 2012/14, singing Schaunard Bohème, Captain Onegin, Angelotti Tosca, Flemish Deputy Don Carlo, City Crier Gloriana, Servant Capriccio, going on to sing Mandarin Turandot, King El gato con botas, Moralès Carmen, 1st Nightwatchman Die Frau ohne Schatten, Baron Douphol Traviata, Angelotti, 2nd Commissary Carmélites.

Other roles include Don Giovanni, Guglielmo, Count Figaro, Belcore L'elisir d'amore, Marcello Boheme and Valentin Faust. Michel is part of the ensemble at Grand Théâtre de Genève.

LORENZO DECARO Lorenzo Decaro Dick Johnson Fanciulla has sung the leading roles in operas by Verdi and Puccini in some among the most important Italian and European theatres, including Teatro alla Scala, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Teatro Filarmonico di Verona, Teatro San Carlo di Napoli, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Teatro Regio di Torino, Teatro Massimo di Palermo, Teatro Petruzzelli di Bari, Opéra de Nice. He has worked with conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Roberto Abbado, Riccardo Frizza, Nicola Luisotti, Gianandrea Noseda, Stefano Ranzani; and with stage directors Daniele Abbado, Gianfranco de Bosio, Jean Louis Grinda, Maurizio Scaparro, Graham Vick and Robert Wilson. Recent engagements include Cavaradossi Tosca (Teatro La Fenice di Venezia), Calaf Turandot (Festival Puccini di Torre del Lago), covering the roles of Gabriele Adorno Simon Boccanegra and Radames Aida (Teatro alla Scala), Macduff Macbeth (Teatro Comunale di Bologna), Pinkerton Madama Butterfly (Lucca, Livorno and Rovigo).

RUXANDRA DONOSE Eboli Don Carlo Born in Bucharest, Romania and studied there at the Conservatorul Ciprian Porumbescu. Recent highlights include Komponist Ariadne auf Naxos and Donna Elvira Don Giovanni (ROH); Carmen (ENO); Idamante Idomeneo (Ravinia Festival) and Octavian Der Rosenkavalier (Bayerische Staatsoper). Recent concert engagements include Marguerite La Damnation de Faust

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(Verbier Festival), and L’heure Espagnole (LSO). This season she made her house debut at the Bolshoi as Eduige Rodelinda, as well as singing Ramise Arminio (Karlsruhe). She will open the Philharmonia’s 70 th Season with Beethoven 9 (RFH) and returns to Dallas Symphony Orchestra for La Damnation de Faust.

SARA FULGONI Brangäne Tristan Has appeared at ROH, WNO, ENO, La Scala Milan, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Teatro Petruzzelli, San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona, Palau de les Arts Valencia, Opernhaus Zurich, Bayerische Staatsoper, Nederlandse Opera, De Vlaamse Opera, Geneva Opera, Opera National du Rhin and La Monnaie Brussels. She has recorded for EMI, DG, Philips and Chandos, and both Mahler 8 and Urlicht from Des Knaben Wunderhorn with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Decca). She began the season in the world premiere of Nicholas Lens' Shellshock Requiem (La Monnaie). She appeared as Judith Bluebeard's Castle (Orquesta di Castilla y Leon) and Dalila Samson et Dalila (Grange Park Opera). Future highlights include the premiere performance of a new song cycle by Ben Parry and Beroe The Bassarids (Teatro dell'Opera di Roma).

STEPHEN GADD Rance Fanciulla / Kurwenal Tristan Born in Berkshire, Stephen Gadd won the Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship, and was a finalist in the inaugural Plácido Domingo Operalia Competition.

For Grange Park Opera: Peter Grimes, Madama Butterfly, Queen of Spades and Tristan und Isolde. Elsewhere he has appeared at Brooklyn Academy of Music and Drama, Baden Baden, Buxton, Glyndebourne, Lucerne and Salzburg festivals, and at ROH, ENO, Glyndebourne, OHP, Opera North, WNO, Dallas Opera, Finnish National Opera, Netherlands Opera, Den Norske Opera, Angers Nantes Opera, Paris Opera, Opéra national du Rhin, and the Opéras of Metz, Montpellier, Rennes and Rouen.

He sings in concert with major orchestras in the UK and Europe. Recently released is his recording of Mahler 8 with the Philharmonia Orchestra, whilst his recording as Lysiart Euryanthe (Orchestra of Polish Radio) under Łukasz Borowicz was nominated for an International Classical Music Award. TV appearances include La Traviata: Love, Death & Divas (BBC).

LIZZI GEE Choreographer Oliver!

Film credits: Pride (Pathe Films).

Theatre credits: Future Conditional (Old Vic), Around the World in 80 Days (St James Theatre), Goodnight Mr Tom (Duke of York/Phoenix/ Chichester/UK tour), Running

Wild, A Christmas Carol (Chichester), Cinderella, Peter Pan (Wimbledon), But First This (Watermill), Annie Get Your Gun (UK tour), Winter’s Tale (RSC/UK tour), All Male HMS Pinafore (Union Theatre/UK tour), Rocket to the Moon (National Theatre), Love Story (Duchess), Onassis (Novello), Buddy (UK tour), Vernon God Little (Young Vic), All Male Pirates of Penzance (Union Theatre/UK tour/ Australia), Daddy Cool (Shaftsbury Theatre), Sunshine On Leith (Dundee Rep/UK tour), Billy Elliot (Tap coach and resident choreographer), Oliver!, Sound of Music, Wizard of Oz (Cyprus), Hair (Frankfurt), Million Dollar Quartet (Noel Coward). TV: Children’s Baftas, Channel 4’s Fit Farm, ITV’s Feelgood Factor, The Legend of Dick and Dom, Diddy Movies and BBC’s The Big Performance, Nigerian Iced Tea Commercial.

LYNNE HOCKNEY Movement Don Carlo Trained: Royal Ballet School. Her choreographic career has encompassed opera‚ theatre‚ film and television‚ working with directors as diverse as James Cameron‚ Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sir Peter Hall. Most recent and future engagements include her own production of La Cenerentola (Erfurt), Hall’s Cenerentola (Glyndebourne and Berlin), Midsummer Night's Dream (Glyndebourne) and Otello (Castleton Festival) all as Revival Director; Der Rosenkavalier (Bolshoi); Otello (Korean National Opera); Giulio Cesare (Erfurt); Traviata and Vie Parisienne (Magdeburg); Billy Budd (Opera North); Don Quichotte (Nederlandse Opera, Grange Park Opera); Tancredi‚ Iolanta‚ Francesca da Rimini and Orfeo ed Euridice (Theater an der Wien); Otello and William Tell (Graz); The Maiden in the Tower (Buxton); Jenufa (Glyndebourne); Jenufa, Boheme and A Little Night Music (Malmö) and Eugene Onegin (Lyon and Grange Park Opera). Her film credits include The Village‚ Titanic‚ True Lies‚ Town & Country‚ Wild Wild West and Rocky & Bullwinkle.

JODIE JACOBS Nancy Oliver!

Trained: London School of Musical Theatre. Most recently seen as Paulette Bonafonte Legally Blonde (Upstairs at the Gatehouse and Kilworth House Theatre) - Offie Award nomination; The Girl The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town (St James Theatre); Ms Gardener Carrie the Musical (Southwark Playhouse) - Best off-West End Production, What's On Stage Awards; Regina Rock Of Ages (original London cast) Broadway World Best Supporting Actress Award; Sister Mary Robert and cover Deloris Sister Act (Aberystwyth Arts Centre), Rusty Footloose (UK tour), Florence Chess (Channel Islands tour), Emily Arden State Fair (Trafalgar Studios), Grizabella Cats (Channel Islands tour), Holly The Wedding Singer (original UK cast), cover Audrey Little Shop of Horrors (Duke of York & Ambassadors), Lead Vocalist Night of 1000 Voices (RAH), cover Eva Peron Evita, (Adelphi) Serena Fame (Aldwych) Fantine Les Miserables (Channel Islands tour) cover Scaramouche & Meatloaf We Will Rock You (Dominion).

ANJA KAMPE Isolde Tristan Born in Zella-Mehlis, Thuringia, she made her international breakthrough in 2003 as Sieglinde Die Walküre performing with Placido Domingo (Washington National Opera). Since then, she has sung this role, amongst others, in Los Angeles, Munich, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, San Francisco and at the Bayreuth Festival. She is celebrated for her signature roles Senta, Leonore Fidelio, Kundry, Tosca and Isolde, with which she is a regular guest at Bayerische Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper, Teatro alla Scala Milan, New National Theatre Tokyo, Staatsoper Berlin, ROH Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, Teatro Real Madrid, and in Brussels, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Zurich. Future plans include her debut as Katerina Izmailova Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Bayerische Staatsoper 2016) under Kirill Petrenko, and her debut as Brünnhilde Die Walküre (Salzburg Easter Festival 2017) under Christian Thielemann.

SIMON KEENLYSIDE Fagin Oliver!

Born in London, his roles include Prospero The Tempest, Count Almaviva, Don Giovanni, Papageno, Pelléas, Onegin, Wozzeck, Hamlet, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Posa, Giorgio Germont, Ford, Rossini’s Figaro, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Belcore and Oreste Iphigénie en Tauride. Plans include Don Giovanni (Metropolitan Opera), Giorgio Germont (Munich), Count Almaviva (Milan), and returns to Vienna as Don Giovanni, Macbeth and Golaud. Recordings include War Requiem, Elijah, American musical theatre numbers; Schubert, Strauss and Brahms Lieder; Fauré and English songs with Malcolm Martineau and Schumann Lieder with Graham Johnson. His opera discs include Boheme, Don Giovanni, Figaro, Zauberflöte, Billy Budd and Macbeth. He won the 2006 Olivier Award for outstanding achievement in Opera. In 2007 he was given the ECHO Klassik award for male Singer of the Year, and in 2011 was honoured with Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year Award. He was appointed CBE in 2003.

RICHARD KENT Designer Oliver!

Recent work includes Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline (Globe), Cocktail Party (Print Room at the Coronet), Communicating Doors (Menier Chocolate Factory), Outside Mullingar (Theatre Royal Bath), Man to Man (Wales Millenium Centre), Multitudes (Tricycle), Anything Goes, Macbeth (Sheffield Crucible), This Is My Family (Sheffield Crucible and UK Tour), Bad Jews (Ustinov Bath), The Colby Sisters Of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Tricycle), Merchant of Venice (Singapore Repertory Theatre), The El. Train (Hoxton Hall) Handbagged, A Boy and His Soul, Paper Dolls (Tricycle), Mrs Lowry and Son (Trafalgar Studios 2), Neighbors (Hightide Festival and Nuffield), Dance of Death

(Donmar Trafalgar), Josephine Hart Poetry Week (ARTS), 13 (NYMT, Apollo), Clockwork (Hightide Festival), Titanic – Scenes from the British Wreck Commissioners Inquiry: 1912 (MAC Theatre, Belfast), Richard II (Donmar), Mixed Marriage (Finborough Theatre), Decline and Fall (Old Red Lion), Stronger and Pariah (Arcola), Gin and Tonic and Passing Trains (Tramway). He was Associate to Christopher Oram from 2008-2012.

WESLEY KENT-HARGREAVES Oliver Oliver!

Wesley is 12 years old and lives in Surrey. Last summer he played Gavroche Les Miserables (Youth East Surrey Operatic Society). At Christmas he played Scrooge A Christmas Carol in his school production. More recently, he played the title role in Macbeth (Hawth Youth Theatre). In January he reached the final audition to be Charlie in the West End production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Oliver is his first professional performance. Wesley also plays piano, enjoys learning foreign languages and likes writing creative stories.

JIHOON KIM Ashby Fanciulla A Monk Don Carlo The Korean bass is an alumnus of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at ROH where he was engaged for a further two seasons totalling nearly two hundred performances with the company. At Covent Garden his roles include such Armed Man Die Zauberflöte, Alessio La Sonnambula, Balthazar La Favorita, Ortel Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Nightwatchman Die Frau ohne Schatten, Fourth Chevalier/Monk Robert le Diable, Sciarrone Tosca, Colline La Boheme, Zaretsky Eugene Onegin, Don Prudenzio Il Viaggio a Reims, Flemish Deputy Don Carlo, Montano Otello, Doctor Macbeth and Robert Les Vêpres siciliennes. He recently appeared as The Old Hebrew Samson et Dalila (Valencia). He has collaborated with some of the leading conductors: Pappano, Minkowski, Bychkov, Oren and Bustioni; and directors: McVicar, Vick, Pelly, Kent and Loy and La Fura dels Baus.

SIMON LIPKIN Bill Sikes Oliver!

Simon trained at the Sylvia Young Theatre School and then at the Arts Educational. Theatre includes: Lou Lubowitz in Miss Atomic Bomb (St James Theatre); The Lorax in The Lorax (Old Vic Theatre); The Proprietor in Assassins (Menier Chocolate Factory); Touchstone in As You Like It (Southwark Playhouse); Barlow in I Can’t Sing (London Palladium); Lonny in Rock Of Ages (Original West End Cast); Galahad in Spamalot (Original UK and International Tour); Nicky and Trekkie Monster in Avenue Q (Original West End Cast); I Love You, You’re

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Perfect, Now Change (Arts Theatre, London); The Wedding Singer (Original UK Cast); Willard in Footloose (UK Tour); A Christmas Carol (West End); Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (West End); Alice In Wonderland (Nuffield Theatre); Austentatious (The Landor); News Revue (Canal Café) and Leopold in Never The Sinner at the Kenneth Moore Theatre.

TV and film include: Doctor Who, The Bill, Casualty, The Royal Variety Performance, Children In Need, Muppets Most Wanted for Disney, The Harry Hill Movie, That Puppet Game Show and Nativity III. Simon also voices characters on the Cartoon Network’s show The Amazing World Of Gumball.

JEFFREY LLOYD-ROBERTS Mr Bumble Oliver!

Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts was born in Wales and read music at Lancaster University before studying at the RNCM, where he received several awards. Concerts include performances with the CBSO, BBC SO, BBC Philharmonic, Orquesta Sinfonica de Barcelona, Musikfabrik, Malaysian Philharmonic and with conductors including Matthias Barnett, Sir Simon Rattle and Vassily Siniasky. He has worked regularly with all the major UK opera companies including Julietta (ENO), title role/ Peter Grimes (Opera North); Anna Nicole (ROH) and a new production of Mahagonny (ROH) and Billy Budd (Glyndebourne). His many roles with Grange Park Opera include Peter Quint / The Turn of the Screw, Lenski / Eugene Onegin, Yuri / The Enchantress (Tchaikovsky), Nicias / Thaïs, Alexei/The Gambler, Prince/Rusalka, Tchekalinsky/Queen of Spades, and Erik/Die Fliegende Holländer (in concert).

He made his debut in Salzburg singing Erik/Die fliegende Höllander and returned to sing Arthur/ Birtwistle’s Gawain.

He has sung at the Cheltenham Festival, Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms, most recently with the UK premiere of Birtwistle Angel Fighter in 2011.

Future roles include Prince/Manservant/Marquis Lulu (ENO).

GIANLUCA MARCIANÒ Conductor Don Carlo Gianluca Marcianò is Artistic Director of the Al Bustan Festival, Beirut. Previous posts include Tbilisi State Opera & Ballet Theatre, Georgia, where he conducted concerts with Andrea Bocelli and operas including La Forza del Destino, Cavalleria Rusticana, Nabucco, Attila, Il Trovatore, Mitridate, Re di Ponto and Aida. Recent engagements include a major new production of Turandot (Ópera de Oviedo), Ernani (Lithuanian National Opera) and Pagliacci (Moscow). In the UK, he has conducted Samson et Dalila, Eugene Onegin, La traviata, Madama Butterfly, I Puritani, Eugene Onegin, Queen of Spades and Tosca (Grange Park Opera), Madama Butterfly and La bohème (ENO), La Traviata (Opera North). Highlights of the 2015/16 season include Nabucco (Ópera de Oviedo) Ernani (Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre).

TOM MARSHALL Sound Design Oliver!

Sound Designer: Legally Blonde (Curve), Tell Me on a Sunday (UK tour) Silver Sword (Belgrade, Coventry & tour), Sweet Charity, Water Babies (Curve, Leicester), Oliver! (Watermill, UK tour), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (UK tour), Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Playhouse), Hired Man (St James), West Side Story (Manchester), My Favorite Year (Bridewell), Tailor Made Man (Arts Theatre), Legally Blonde (Arts Educational), Pushing up Poppies (Theatre 503). Associate Sound Designer: Bodyguard (London, UK tour & Cologne), Close to You (Menier & Criterion), Love Me Tender (UK tour), Gypsy, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Savoy), Made in Dagenham (Adelphi), Stephen Ward (Aldwych), Fiddler On the Roof (UK tour), Highland Fling (Glasgow), Passion Play (Richmond), I Dreamed a Dream: The Susan Boyle Story (UK tour), Vampirette (Manchester), Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain (Garrick), Chess (Toronto), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Novello), Never Forget: The Take That Musical (UK tour & Savoy), Daddy Cool (Shaftesbury Theatre & Berlin).

STEPHEN MEDCALF Director Fanciulla Current and future engagements include Leonore Buxton Festival, Herculanum Wexford Festival Opera, Manon Lescaut Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia and Asociación Bilbaína de Amigos de la Ópera, Bilbao; Falstaff Accademia della Scala on tour to Royal Opera House Muscat and Aida Landestheater Niederbayern. Past work includes new productions at Teatro alla Scala, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, RAH, Opera North, Salzburger Landestheater, GFO, Teatro Regio di Parma, Théâtre du Châtelet, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Teatro Real Madrid and ROH. Stephen was Director of Productions at ETO and Head of Opera Production at GSMD, where he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for education. For Grange Park Opera: Magic Flute, Capriccio, Onegin and Boheme.

ALASTAIR MILES Grand Inquisitor Don Carlo is one of the UK's most renowned singers returning regularly to the operatic stages and concert platforms of Europe, the USA and the Far East. Highlights of his career include Giorgio I Puritani and Raimondo Lucia di Lammermoor (Metropolitan); Cardinal Brogni La Juive, Padre Guardiano La Forza del Destino, Prefetto Linda di Chamounix, Zaccaria Nabucco and Philippe II Don Carlos (Wiener Staatsoper); title role Saul, Arkel Pelléas et Mélisande, Creonte Medea in Corinto, Timur Turandot, and Zoroastro Orlando (Bayerische Staatsoper) and Lord Sydney Il Vaggio a Rheims (La Scala). As a concert artist he has appeared with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including Giulini, Muti, Harnoncourt, Chung,

Rattle, Runnicles, Masur, Gergiev, Gardiner, Harding, Norrington, Davis and Dohnanyi. His discography currently stands at over ninety recordings.

FRANCIS O’CONNOR Designer Fanciulla Trained: Wimbledon School of Art. Credits: Samson et Dalila, Eugene Onegin, Fortunio, Capriccio, Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, South Pacific, Iolanthe (Grange Park Opera); Romeo and Juliet (Singapore); The Weir (Edinburgh); Big Maggie (Dublin); Kiss Me Kate (Dortmund); Talking Heads (Bath and tour); Druid Shakespeare (Irish tour); Carmen (Biel, Switzerland); Oklahoma (UK national tour). Many collaborations with Garry Hynes, Druid Theatre, Gate and Abbey theatres in Ireland; RSC; Garsington and Buxton festivals. Designs in New York and on Broadway include Beauty Queen of Leenane, Translations, The Cripple of Innishmaan, The Silver Tassie. Awards include three Irish Times Awards, Boston Globe and Critics Circle Award. His designs for the opera Pinocchio nominated for Der Faust Prize, Germany.

DAVID PLATER Lighting Design Fanciulla and Oliver!

Previously Head of Lighting at Donmar Warehouse, and has been Resident Lighting Designer for Ballet Black since 2001.

David's nominations for design include Olivier, Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations for Best Lighting Design for Bring Up The Bodies (Winter Gardens Broadway, Aldwych, West End); Knight of Illumination Award for Richard II (Best Play Lighting) in 2012; This is My Family (Best Musical Lighting) in 2013. Extensive lighting designs include The Mentalists (Wyndham's), The Cocktail Party and Terra (Print Room), The Glass Supper (Hampstead), Billy Liar (Manchester Royal Exchange), Richard III and Twelfth Night, Roger Rees: What You Will, and 13 The Musical (Apollo Theatre), Richard II, Four Quartets, and Three Days of Rain (Donmar Warehouse), Loyal Women (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs), Macbeth (Sheffield Crucible), Mrs Lowry & Son, The Silence of the Sea, Stacy/Fanny & Faggot (Trafalgar Studios), and The Chair Plays, (Lyric Hammersmith).

BRYAN REGISTER Tristan Tristan is American and studied at Manhattan School of Music. Future highlights include Tristan (Tokyo Nikikai Opera Theatre) under Jesús Lopez Cobos; his debut for Frankfurt Opera, a return to Theater Kiel for Siegmund Die Walküre and his debut at Wexford Festival. Recent highlights include Beethoven 9 (RLPO); Florestan Fidelio (Opera Omaha), his first Tristan (Theater Kiel); title role Lohengrin (Hong Kong Arts Festival and

Savonlinna Opera Festival) and Florestan Fidelio and Drum Major (ENO), under Edward Gardner. Previous operatic highlights include Siegmund (Greenwich Symphony Orchestra), Erik Der Fliegende Holländer (Opera Roanoke) and Don José Carmen (Virginia Opera).

PETER RELTON Revival Director Fanciulla Peter has been involved with Grange Park Opera for 10 years: firstly as a member of the Chorus and now as a revival director.

Last summer he transferred Fiddler on the Roof from Grange Park to RAH for the BBC Proms.

Previous GPO revivals include Queen of Spades, Tosca and Rigoletto. Peter has directed revivals of Satyagraha and Barber of Seville (ENO – the latter broadcast live in cinemas). He has directed Boheme, Falstaff and La Rondine (Opera North), Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (Festival de la Vezere), La Voix Humane (Les Azuriales Opera Festival), Cenerentola and Tosca (Opera Brava), Pearl Fishers and Nabucco (Northern Opera), Marriage of Figaro, Traviata, Magic Flute and Tosca (Opera Nova). He has also directed scenes at RCM and RAM. As assistant director: ENO, ROH, Opera North, Scottish Opera, GFO and RNT. As a revival director he has also worked in Austria, Holland and Germany.

ADAM ROWE Conductor Oliver!

Adam read music at the University of Hull, graduating with first class honours. Recent theatre credits as Musical Director and Conductor include: Miss Saigon (Prince Edward Theatre), Les Miserables (Queens Theatre) Wicked (national tour), Barnum (Chichester Festival Theatre), The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s Theatre), Mary Poppins (national tour), Only the Brave (Edinburgh Festival), The Producers (national tour), Cats (national and international tours, Portugal and Italy), My Fair Lady (national tour), Beauty and the Beast (RSC), West Side Story, Me and My Girl and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Cheltenham Everyman) where he was composer in residence and Musical Director. He was Associate MD for both The Phantom of the Opera 25th Anniversary Concert (RAH) and Les Miserables 25th Anniversary Concert (O2 Arena).

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CLAIRE RUTTER Minnie Fanciulla Born in South Shields, Claire Rutter began her career at Scottish Opera and elsewhere in the UK has appeared with ENO, Opera North and WNO, as well as establishing a close relationship with Grange Park Opera, where she has appeared in I Puritani, Norma, Madama Butterfly, Tosca and La Traviata.

She made her US debut as Fiordiligi Così (Dallas Opera), being nominated for the Maria Callas Award, and her international engagements have included appearances at Opera Australia, Opera Flanders, Finnish National Opera, Opéra de Bordeaux, Opéra de Montpellier, Opéra de Rennes, Opéra national du Rhin, Norwegian Opera, Theater Basel, Florida Grand Opera, Minnesota Opera and Santa Fe Opera. Her performance as Lucrezia Borgia (ENO) was the first opera to be broadcast by Sky Arts, her recording of The Kingdom (Hallé) won a Gramophone Award and her Aïda (RAH) is now available on BBC DVD. STEFANO SECCO Carlos Don Carlo Born in Milan, he has sung many important roles worldwide, including: Rigoletto (Monte-Carlo), La Boheme (Munich, Turin, Rome), La Traviata (Seattle, Venice, Turin), Madama Butterfly (Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Hamburg, Toronto, Florence, Barcelona) Lucia di Lammermoor (Rome), Roberto Devereux (Marseille), Don Carlo (Oviedo), Macbeth (Milan, Madrid, Bilbao) and Simon Boccanegra (Bilbao and in Los Angeles with Placido Domingo in the title role). He has sung Verdi’s Requiem (Frankfurt and in Moscow with La Scala); Rossini’s Stabat Mater (Teatro dell'Opera di Roma) and Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette (Auditorium Parco della Musica). His voice was used in the 2010 film The Perfect Host by Nick Tomnay, singing Quando le sere al placido from Luisa Miller.

GARETH SNOOK Mr Sowerberry Oliver!

Most recent: Charlotte Casa Valentina (Southwark Playhouse; Off West End/Broadway World nominations for Best Male in a Play).

West End appearances include Mr Buckton Made in Dagenham (Adelphi Theatre); Andre Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s Theatre/25th Anniversary DVD Universal Pictures); Lee Harvey Oswald Assassins and Peter Company (both directed by Sam Mendes at Donmar Warehouse/Noel Coward Theatre); Alex Aspects of Love (Prince of Wales); Harry My Fair Lady (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane) and created the role of Artie Green Sunset Boulevard (Adelphi) all for Trevor Nunn; Dino The Rink (Cambridge); Grantaire/Bamatabois Les Miserables (Palace); Harry The Hired Man (Astoria); Skyrocket Guys and Dolls (RNT at Prince of Wales); Gus/Bustopher Jones Cats (New London); Girlfriends (Playhouse); Closer Than Ever (Jermyn Street/Criterion/Vaudeville); Pete Show Boat

(RAH). Recent TV: Law & Order: UK, Emmerdale and the new TV series Taboo. Film: Les Miserables.

ALBERTO SOUSA Nick Fanciulla / Lerma Don Carlo born in Madeira, Portugal, and studied at GSMD Opera Course with Laura Sarti. As an alumnus of the Solti Te Kanawa Accademia he recorded a CD of Italian songs produced by Sir Richard Bonynge.

Alberto is also the recipient of the Audience and Runner Up Prizes at the Fulham Opera Verdi Competition. Recent engagements include a tour of Bel Canto recitals in Japan; La Traviata (Barga Belcanto Festival); three European tours of Orlando Paladino (Purpur Opera); Mozart's Requiem (Gran Teatre del Liceu); a UK tour of Faust (Swansea City Opera) and La Boheme (Clapham Opera Festival). Future projects include Simon Boccanegra (Fulham Opera) and a new production of Orlando Paladino in Fribourg.

ALEXANDRA SPENCER-JONES Associate Director Oliver!

Credits: Director, Action to the Word’s production of Anthony Burgesss’ A Clockwork Orange (Soho Theatre & world tour); won WhatsOnStage Best Emerging Artist Award for co-writing/directing the musical Constance & Sinestra and the Cabinet of Screams (New Wimbledon/ Edinburgh Festival). Currently developing Dracula, which recently played The Arts Theatre West End. Plans include Gobsmacked (Southbank and Sydney) this summer, having played Asia in 2015; and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Latitude Festival 2016). Other directing credits: Our Lady of 121st Street (Stratford Circus); All Day Permanent Red (OSD); Cloud 9 (Birmingham Crescent); The Oresteia: Parts I, II & III (also translator – CPT); The Merchant of Venice and Busstopkisser (CPT). Associate/Movement Director credits include: Bend it Like Beckham and The Wizard of Oz (West End); Peter Grimes (Grange Park Opera); La Perichole (Garsington).

DAVID STOUT Rodrigo Don Carlo Former Head Chorister of Westminster Abbey and studied Zoology at Durham University, sang with the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge and studied Opera at GSMD with Rudolf Piernay, where he was recipient of the Principal’s Prize. Highlights this season include Count Douglas Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff (Wexford Festival), title roles Le nozze di Figaro and Figaro Gets A Divorce (WNO). Recent highlights include the title role of Le nozze di Figaro and Fritz Kothner Die Meistersinger (ENO); Sandoval Le Duc d’Albe, Paolo Simon Boccanegra and title role Falstaff (Hallé, Sir Mark Elder); Sancho Panza Don Quichotte (Grange Park

Opera); St John Passion (Aurora Orchestra at King’s Place); Oromazes Rameau’s Zaïs (OAE) and Aeneas Dido and Aeneas (English Concert at Bristol Old Vic).

VIRGINIA TOLA Elisabetta Don Carlo Winner of the Operalia Prize in Barcelona, her career has taken her to theatres including Colon Buenos Aires, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia Valencia, Teatro Real Madrid, Washington National Opera, Opéra de Monte Carlo, Arena in Verona, La Monnaie, Los Angeles Opera, Teatro dell’Opera Rome, Regio Turin as well as Klagenfurt, La Plata and Santa Fe. Roles include Donna Elvira Don Giovanni, Contessa Figaro, Violetta Traviata, Desdemona Otello, title role Luisa Miller and Mimì Bohème, Lina Stiffelio, Abigaille Nabucco, Nedda Pagliacci, Amelia Ballo, Leonora Forza, Amelia Un Ballo in Maschera (Bologna), Ernani (Florence), Tosca (Rome), Don Carlo (Escorial, Madrid). Plans include Tosca (Genoa); Maddalena Andrea Chenier (Sassari); Lady Macbeth (Palermo); title role Adriana Lecouvreur (Buenos Aires); Nabucco (Liège). She performs in concerts all over the world, recently appearing in recital with Placido Domingo in Japan.

LESLIE TRAVERS Designer Don Carlo Trained: Wimbledon School of Art. Opera Designs include: Haunted Manor (Teatr Wielki, Polish National Opera); Elysium (Den Norske Opera); I Puritani (WNO/Den Jyske Opera); Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (OHP & ROH); Turn of The Screw (OHP); Grimes on the Beach (Aldeburgh Festival, Britten Centenary); Jenufa, Les Contes D’Hoffmann and La Boheme (Malmo); I Capuleti e i Montecchi, The Fortunes of King Croesus, Giulio Cesare, Albert Herring (Assembly Rooms), Marriage of Figaro. Pleasure (Opera North); Pleasure (ROH); The Children’s Crusade (Luminato Festival, Toronto); Don Giovanni (Garsington), L’arbore di Diana (Palau des les Arts Reina Sophia, Valencia); Salome (Santa Fe); Tannhäuser (Estonian National Opera).

Current designs: Billy Budd (Opera North/Nederlandse Reisopera); Marriage of Figaro (Kansas City Opera/ Philadelphia Opera/San Diego Opera); Clemenza di Tito (Opera St Louis); Magic Flute (Ekaterinburg State Opera); Fiddler on the Roof (Malmo Opera).

JEAN-PIERRE VAN DER SPUY Director Oliver!

Born: South Africa. Trained: Guildford School of Acting.

Credits include: Director Barnum (UK tour), Associate Director Miss Saigon (Prince Edward Theatre), Associate Director and Resident Director Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty's Theatre), Associate Director Barnum (Chichester Festival Theatre), Associate

Director Phantom of the Opera (25th Anniversary at RAH), Director Oklahoma! (GSA), Resident Director Miss Saigon (UK tour) and Children’s Director Mary Poppins (Prince Edward Theatre). He has worked on the Olivier Awards, West End Live, Royal Variety Show, Children in Need, This Morning, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and Good Morning America (CBS). Plans: Director Miss Saigon (Japan) and Associate Director Half a Sixpence (Chichester Festival Theatre). Jean-Pierre is one of the founders of the Bridge Project, a creative exchange programme with South African theatre practitioners and actors.

ANNA WATSON Lighting Designer Don Carlo Theatre credits: Dutchman/Fireface/ disco pigs /Sus (Young Vic); You For Me For You/Plaques & Tangles/A Time to Reap (Royal Court); The Chronicles of Kalki/…Sisters (Headlong/The Gate); The Roaring Girl (RSC); The Secret Agent (Traverse); Bank on it (Theatre-Rites/Barbican); Salt, Root and Roe (Donmar); On the Record/It felt empty when the heart went at first, but it’s alright now (Arcola); Paradise/ Salt (Ruhr Triennale, Germany); Gambling/This Wide Night (Soho Theatre); Rutherford and Son/Ruby Moon (Northern Stage); King Pelican/Speed Death of the Radiant Child (The Drum, Plymouth Theatre Royal). Opera credits: Orlando (WNO/ Scottish Opera); Ruddigore (Barbican, Opera North and UK tour); Critical Mass (Almeida); Songs from a Hotel Bedroom/ Tongue Tied (Linbury ROH); The Bartered Bride (RCM); Against Oblivion (Toynbee Hall).

PHILIP WHITE Head of Music Philip was Chorus Master of the Royal Danish Opera from 2004 to 2012 and for the last ten years has been Assistant Chorus Master at the Bayreuth Festival. In 1995 he was Assistant Chorus Master on Moses and Aron (Théâtre du Châtelet) and was invited back as Chorus Master for Oedipus Rex, Le Rossignol and Parsifal. After working with the Chorus of Radio France on Britten’s Spring Symphony he was nominated their Associate Chorus Master in 2001. He has notably prepared the chorus for Deutsche Grammophon’s recording of Messian’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Bizet’s Ivan IV, Honegger’s La Danse des Morts, Benvenuto Cellini (EMI), Théâtre du Châtelet’s production of Tannhäuser and Sting's album Sacred Love.

Since leaving Royal Danish Opera Philip has worked as Guest Chorus Master for Scottish Opera, Opéra de Lyon, Longborough Festival Opera, ENO, and as Guest Chorus Master for Moses und Aron (WNO).

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CHORUS PATRICK ASHCROFT Completed a PhD in cosmology at University of Cambridge before studying at GSMD. Prizes: John Scott Award (Scottish Opera) and Endowment Award (Grange Park Opera).

Credits: Ernesto, Nemorino, Almaviva, Don Ramiro, Roberto Devereux, Ferrando, Rodolfo and Luigi Il Tabarro.

PRZEMYSŁAW BARANEK Born in Bydgoszcz, Poland, studied in Milan. Worked with Giuseppe Verdi Symphonic Chorus of Milan and Accademia Teatro alla Scala. Roles Credits: Aeneas, Dulcamara, Leporello, Guglielmo. Now studies with Carlos Aransay. UK debut: Streshnev Khovanskygate: A National Enquiry (Birmingham Opera).

SEUMAS BEGG Pony Express Fanciulla Born Perth, studied RNCM. Credits: Monostatos Flute (Young Opera Venture), Spoletta Tosca (Heritage Opera), First Sailor Dido (Pint-Sized Opera). Chorus in Carmen, Vanessa, Xerxes, Paradise Moscow (RNCM); chorus Eugene Onegin & Mendel Fiddler on the Roof (GPO).

GEORGIA BISHOP From Jersey, studying GSMD. Credits: chorus La Boheme, Samson et Dalila (Grange Park Opera); Principessa Suor Angelica (GSMD), title role Carmen (PuzzlePiece Opera), cover Emily in Philip Venable’s new opera Psychosis 4.48 (Royal Opera at Hammersmith Lyric).

DAVID BOOTH Monk Don Carlo Trained Trinity Laban and RAM. Credits: Thursford's Christmas Spectacular; Wedding Singer Threepenny Opera (RAH and Champs Elysees) Dr Who 50 th Anniversary Prom (RAH); chorus Traviata, Don Quichotte, Onegin, Fiddler (Grange Park Opera); Pistola Falstaff (Black Cat Opera).

PHILIP CLIEVE Herald Don Carlo From Lancashire, studied RNCM (Frederic Cox Award finalist).

Credits: Barbrov Paradise Moscow, Dulcamara L’Elisir and Zeta Merry Widow (RNCM); Silvio, Paris and Defendant.

Performed with Academy of Ancient Music, Hallé Youth Choir, Southport Bach Choir and Formby Choral Society.

ROSEMARY CLIFFORD Rose Seller Oliver!

Trained GSMD. Credits: Popova The Bear (Opera Anywhere); Nancy Albert Herring (Hampstead Garden Opera); Hansel (Cooper Hall Emerging Artists); cover Gertrude Fortunio (GPO); Nelson Mass; Elijah; Requiem. Semifinalist LBS Singers’ Prize 2015 & Monteverdi Choir Apprentice 2014/15.

DARIO DUGANDZIC Born Sarajevo, specialises in contemporary works whilst more traditional roles include Alidoro, Papageno, Schaunard, Mozart's serfs Leporello, Simone and Nardo, Death Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Luka The Bear, Titone Bononcini's Cefalo e Procride, Betto, Fiorello, Dancaïro and Albert Werther.

ELEANOR GARSIDE Matron Oliver!

Studied University of Manchester and RNCM. Credits: Helene Koanga (Wexford); cover 1st Niece Grimes (Grange Park Opera); Papagena Flute (Young Opera Venture); Atalanta Xerxes, Miss Wordsworth (RNCM), Belinda Dido, Yum Yum Mikado and Mabel Pirates (Silk Opera).

SIMON GILKES Trin Fanciulla Born: Australia. Trained: Sydney Conservatorium & RCM. Credits: Quint Turn of the Screw, Fenton Merry Wives of Windsor, Don Ottavio, Grimoaldo Rodelinda, Bajazet Tamerlano, Arnalta Poppea, Curzio Figaro, Mari Les Mamelles, Upford Albert Herring, Aeneas, Schoolmaster Vixen, Frosch & Blind Fledermaus, L’Anglais Angelique.

JOHN HOLLAND-AVERY Monk Don Carlo Trained RNCM (Frederic Cox Song Prize). Credits: Third Boy Flute (ROH) while a Chapel Royal chorister. Scholarships from Portsmouth Cathedral, York Minster; Bass Lay Clerkship St John's College, Cambridge.

Recipient of an Independent Opera Voice Scholarship.

CHASE HENRY HOPKINS Born: St Louis, USA. Trained: Northwestern University (Chicago), Dutch National Academy & RCS. Credits: Oronte Alcina, Don Basilio Le Nozze di Figaro (Rene Jacobs at Royaumont Festival in Paris), and tenor soloist in Bach’s St John Passion and Mozart's Requiem.

MATTHEW HOWARD Born Nottingham; chorister Southwell Minster; studied TCM. Credits: ENO, GPO, Wexford, BYO. Roles: Tamino, Alfred (Puzzle Piece Opera), Acis (Mackerras), Orgando (Retrospect). Sings with Stile Antico, Cardinall's Musick, Eric Whitacre Singers, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, All Saints Margaret Street.

THOMAS HUMPHREYS Jake Wallace Fanciulla Deputy Don Carlo Chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; studied RAM, currently with Gary Coward.

First Prize and Art Song Prize Thelma King Award. Credits: Flora's Servant Traviata (GoT); roles and covers GFO, Buxton Festival Opera, ETO and OHP. Performs regularly in concert & recital.

LOUIS HURST Sid/Jackrabbit Fanciulla Monk Don Carlo Chorister Manchester Grammar School. Studied RNCM (Michael Oglesby, Drapers’ Guild and Musicians Benevolent Fund support), ENO Opera Works Programme 2015/16, currently with Stuart MacIntyre. Roles include a Lion, Greek King and even God. Conductors: Elder, Hickox, Brabbins, and Kraemer.

THOMAS ISHERWOOD Happy Fanciulla From Hertfordshire, studied RNCM and GSMD. Credits: Balthazar Amahl & the Night Visitors (NSO Orchestra Abu Dhabi), Sweeney Todd (Manchester University).

Support: Kathleen Ferrier Bursary for Young Singers, Oncken & Alexander Young prizes (RNCM) and Sidney Perry Foundation.

ADAM JONDELIUS Deputy Don Carlo From Stockholm, finishing an MA in Opera Performance at RWCMD, with Eric Roberts, Ingrid Surgenor, Michael Pollock and Angela Livingstone. After performing with Grange Park Opera, he looks forward to touring Scandinavia & China.

FELIX KEMP Melot Tristan Studied Trinity Laban (supported

by Kathleen Roberts Vocal Scholarship), Manchester University. Credits: Brigadier Le Pré aux Clercs (Wexford); Fiddler, Onegin, Spades, Grimes (Grange Park Opera); St John Passion (Norway), Judas Maccabaeus (France). Masterclasses: John Eliot Gardiner, Graham Johnson.

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HANNA-LIISA KIRCHIN Wowkle Fanciulla Studied RNCM, NOS, ENO's Opera Works, currently with Nelly Miricioiu. Credits: Fidalma Matrimonio Segreto (Dutch National Opera), Ruggiero Alcina (Longborough), Nigel Osborne's Bosnian Voices (LPO 10/10 ensemble), ensemble Orfeo (Munich). Awards: Miriam Licette Scholarship & RNCM Elizabeth Harwood Memorial Prize.

HARRIET KIRK Born: Berkshire. Trained: GSMD, ENO Opera Works. Credits: Chorus Fiddler and Onegin (Grange Park Opera); Rosina Barbiere, Tisbe Cenerentola, Third Lady Zauberflöte and Sorceress Dido; The Music Makers (Reading University Chorus and Symphony Orchestra), St John Passion (Polyphony) in London and Frankfurt.

SARAH LAMBIE Countess of Aremberg Don Carlo Trained: Cambridge University & Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Credits: Macbeths (Broadway Theatre), The Cherry Orchard (New Wimbledon Theatre); Yes, Prime Minister (UK No 1 Tour); Celebrity Night at Café Red (Trafalgar Studios); Twelfth Night, and Masters Are You Mad? (Grosvenor Park Theatre).

KRYSTAL MACMILLAN Strawberry Seller Oliver!

Trained West Australian Academy of Performing Arts & RAM. Credits: cover Clorinda Cenerentola (Clapham Opera Festival), Sandman Hansel & Gretel (Opera Holloway), Mary Warren The Crucible (Australian Premiere) & Blanche Carmelites (WAAPA), chorus Grimes, Spades, Onegin & Fiddler (Grange Park Opera).

BECCA MARRIOTT Old Sally Oliver!

Studied acting at Junior Guildhall & English at Oxford Graduated MMus Trinity Laban (Morag Noble Scholarship, Roy Pleasance Prize). Credits: Tosca (Soho Theatre), Manon Lescaut (Brent Opera), Donna Elvira (Moonlittle Theatre), Amelia Ballo in maschera (OperaUpClose).

ALASTAIR MERRY Deputy Don Carlo Studied music at Worcester College, Oxford and GSMD. Credits: eight year extra chorus with ENO; chorus WNO, as well as Netherlands Radio Choir, London Voices and BBC Singers.

He is also an active oratorio soloist and recitalist.

STEPHEN MILLS Born Basingstoke, trained Birmingham Conservatoire.

Credits: Sam Kaplan Street Scene, Bastien Bastien und Bastienne, Gherardo Gianni Schicchi, Chevalier Carmélites, chorus Boheme and Samson (Grange Park Opera). Finalist Kathleen Ferrier Youth Competition, Cecil Drew Oratorio Prize and Birmingham Conservatoire Singing Prize.

PAUL MILOSAVLJEVIC Harry Fanciulla Born Hobart, studied University of Tasmania and Sydney Conservatorium. Credits: Opera Australia; Netherlands Opera (Sydney Festival); Pacific Opera; NorthWest Opera; Opera North; WNO; Diva Opera; Pavilion Opera; Opera Rara. Roles: Vasek; Tamino; Alfredo; Spoletta; Cavaradossi; Artemidore. Covers: Eumete & Iro; Flute; Aceste; Henry Smith; Joe.

GEMMA MORSLEY Mrs Sowerberry Mrs Bedwin Oliver!

Born London. Credits: Carmen (OSE), Ciesca Gianni Schicchi (Fulham Opera), Maddalena Rigoletto (Opera Loki), Flora Traviata (Merry Opera), Dorabella Così (Oyster Opera), Second Lady Flute (Zeist Opera Festival), Fruma-Sarah Fiddler (Grange Park Opera & BBC Proms), Fleta Iolanthe (Tarantara Productions).

MARK NATHAN Studied RCM. Credits: Marcello Bohème, Jack Point Yeomen, Adonis Venus and Adonis, Koko Mikado, Pangloss Candide, Sir Joseph Pinafore, Artist Puppet Opera Triple Bill, Dottore Traviata, Gob Poisoned Kiss, Morales Carmen, Judge and Counsel Trial By Jury, Wagner Faust.

LANCELOT NOMURA Larkens Fanciulla Monk Don Carlo Studied Oxford University, Royal Acadeamy Opera and Le Studio de l'Opéra de Lyon.

Support: Opera Prize National Mozart Singing Competition, Georg Solti Accademia, Verbier Festival Academy Scholar.

He was a member of Opéra Les Azuriales Young Artist Programme.

ADELE O’NEILL Studied: GSMD. Credits: Mirala Fiddler, ensemble Onegin, Spades (Grange Park Opera); Moses und Aron, Lohengrin (WNO); Traviata (LFO); Elizabeth Maria Stuarda, Norma, Adina, Micaela, Adele (Burry Port Opera); semifinalist 2008 Montserrat Caballé International competition; finalist 2009 Stuart Burrows competition; 2009 Llangollen International Gold Medal.

SAMUEL PANTCHEFF Studied Royal Academy Opera.

Suppor t: Blyth-Buesst Opera Prize. Credits: King Eight Songs for a Mad King (Russian premiere), Papageno (Pavilion Opera), Guglielmo (PopUp Opera), Aeneas, (RAO), L’horloge comtoise/Le chat L’enfant (Barbican, BBCSO), Goehr’s Triptych (Mariinsky), Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures (St Petersburg).

IRIA PERESTRELO Born Portugal, studied GSMD. Credits: Fiddler, Onegin, Puritani (Grange Park), Susanna, Adele Fledermaus (Warsaw), Gingerbread Woman Village Romeo & Juliet, chorus L’Arlesiana (Wexford), Moth Dream (Barbican) Zerlina, Despina (Zêzere Arts), Suor Genovieffa, Zerlina (Humanitas Opera), Gazela Os Zoocratas (Teatro Rivoli & TNSC Portugal).

IAN PRIESTLEY Originally from Nottingham.

Credits: D’Oyly Carte and Carl Rosa opera companies, Buxton International Festival, WNO, Dutch Nationale Reisopera, Scottish Opera, Opera North and ROH. He is active on the concert and recital platform.

JAMES QUILLIGAN Deputy Don Carlo Born near Cambridge studied GSMD. Credits: Figaro (Off the page productions), Jacques Raverat Strange Ghost (Cambridge), Leporello (HGO), Count & Antonio Figaro (GSMD), chorus Aida (OHP); recitals Wigmore Hall, St Martin in the Fields, Old Royal Naval Chapel, Greenwich.

JESSICA ROBINSON Voice from Heaven Don Carlo Studied RWCMD. Support: Aneurin Davies, Mansel Thomas & Elias Soprano award, Prince of Wales Scholar, Worshipful Musicians’ Company, Tillet Trust, Arts Council of Wales. Credits: Billows Herring, Fox Vixen (RWCMD), Nora Riders to the Sea (Bute Park Opera), Worker/Semi Chorus Gair ar Gnawd (WNO/ S4C).

RYAN ROSS Knife grinder Oliver!

Monk Don Carlo The Dutch/American baritone studied Wales International Academy of Voice, Southwest Minnesota State University, California State University-Long Beach. 2014 recipient National Wales America Foundation Scholarship. Credits: Petrovich Onegin, Avram Fiddler (GPO), Marcello Boheme (Barga Bel Canto Festival), Scottish Soldier Silent Night (Wexford).

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JONATHAN STIRLAND Noah Claypole Oliver!

Credits: Ensemble/cover Go-To Mikado; Giorgio, Ensemble/cover Duke of Plaza-Toro Gondoliers; Ensemble/cover Bosun HMS Pinafore; Ensemble/cover Bunthorne Patience (National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company UK Tour); Bass Soloist Henry IV (RSC), Chorus Andrea Chenier (Opera North), Aida, Norma (OHP), Boheme (RAH).

SAM STONES Dance Captain Oliver!

Trained: Dupont Dance Stage School, Arts Educational. Credits: Mack & Mabel (Chichester, UK & Ireland tour) Linville/Postmaster Damn Yankees (Landor Theatre) Frank Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (UK/Ireland Tour), Dance Captain What’s on Stage Awards & Ensemble Olivier Awards 2011-2013, Friday Night is Music Night (BBC R2).

HARRY THATCHER Bello Fanciulla Deputy Don Carlo Studies RCM with Russell Smythe, supported by Basil Coleman Opera Award. Masterclasses: Roderick Williams, Peter Harvey & Elizabeth Watts. Credits: Death Savitri (BYO), cover Frank Fledermaus (RCM). Represented RCM at Young Kathleen Ferrier Awards; finalist in Somerset Song Competition 2015.

MATTHEW THISTLETON Castro Fanciulla Monk Don Carlo Born Manchester, studied RNCM. Support: Riga Heesom Award, Laurison School Trust.

Credits: chorus Grimes, Spades.

Second Philistine Samson, chorus and cover Colline Boheme (GPO), Geppetto Pinocchio (Italian Cultural Institute), Theseus Dream (RNCM), Colline (Opera on Location).

ADAM TUNNICLIFFE Joe Fanciulla Sailor / Shepherd Tristan Studied Christ Church, Oxford & GSMD. Credits: Oberon (Cadogan), Tom Rakewell (Saffron Opera), Werther (Grimeborn); Herring, Lensky, Young Guard King Priam, John Shears Paul Bunyan, Edmondo L’assedio (ETO); David Meistersinger (SOG), Rinuccio (OHP).

KATHRYN WALKER Milkmaid Oliver!

Trained RAM. Credits: cover Dorabella (Opera North, WNO); Maestra Delle Novizie Trittico, Humpty Dumpty Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (OHP); Wowkle Fanciulla, Bridesmaid Figaro (Opera North), Pit Mezzo Wagner Dream (WNO); Dido, Tormentilla Poisoned Kiss, Orlofsky Fledermaus, Juno Semele and Third Lady Zauberflöte.

ANDREW WALTERS Born: Southend-on-Sea. Trained: TCM. Andrew has sung with many opera companies over 25 years in repertoire from Rameau to Shostakovich. Credits: Chorus (ENO) and regular appearances with London Voices (New York, Beijing, Lucerne), as well as on many film soundtracks.

SEAN WEBSTER Born Edinburgh, studied Napier College and TCM. Support: TCM Trust Scholar, finalist Isabelle Bond Gold Medal Competition.

Credits: Argante Rinaldo, Major General Stanley Pirates of Penzance. He works regularly with the choruses of Opera North and Scottish Opera.

CARRIE-ANN WILLIAMS Tebaldo Don Carlo Charlotte Oliver!

Studies RAM. Support: St Clare Barfield Rose Bowl, Mario Lanza Prize, John Ireland Prize, Ashleyan Prize, Stuart Cameron Smith American Song Prize. Credits: Fox Vixen, Anna Maurrant Street Scene, Dido and Suor Angelica (Birmingham Conservatoire); 2nd Woman Dido (Operamus) & cover Savitri (BYO).

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