by In the ecology of rural opera – privately funded, seen by dedicated but relatively small audiences – much remains hidden or unseen. The selective dressing up and high ticket prices hurt headliners, mostly negatively. Their short seasons, which started in May, are coming to an end. (Glendebourne, older, bigger, better funded, operates slightly differently, though there is some overlap.) In this month of political transformation, with so many questions to ask about the future of our collapsing cultural landscape, we should look closely at these small enterprises. . What goes beyond the image of frivolous pleasure gardens? Should we care?
In short, yes. I have referred to their work extensively in recent weeks – at Longborough and Garsington – but there is much more. Their work is vital. The habitat that has nurtured our national companies for a long time – English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera – has been destroyed: by Arts Council funding cuts, by political indifference, by ignoring music education. Whatever support the new government gives, these complex organisms will need time to recover from a long disaster. More money will be needed than any well-disposed chancellor has ever had.
Behind the scenes, out of season, with small budgets and skeleton staff, these small festivals are helping to save the UK’s classical music scene. Not individually – orchestras, ensembles, the Proms (starting next week), Aldeburgh, just to name the obvious, who do great work – but systematically, consistently. As they changed from casual to highly professional fixtures, they showed their muscle. Musicians are hired, singers are nurtured at all levels, stagecraft is taught. The list goes on, and applies to local communities of all ages.
Last week a new children’s laureate for literature (Frank Cottrell Boyce) was appointed. Why not one for music?
Last week I was at Grange Park Opera in Surrey for one of the highlights of the festival. (In biblical rain: no cork popping, just shaking and squelching, even though the handsome theater, newly painted red and gold by volunteers, is purpose-built and dry.) If GPO can occupy one of the best singers on world, Bryn Terfel, to exercise here, often, there must be a reason. Founder and CEO Wasfi Kani’s amazing ability to convince people to give enough to get paid the right fee isn’t about Terfel. He hardly has to do it. He must perceive something of real value in the enterprise.
Two particular strands of activity stand out. The company’s pioneering group, Pimlico Opera, has worked with prisoners since 1989 to stage musicals behind bars. Next, in March 2025: Made in Dagenham, at HMP Bronzefield, Surrey, the largest women’s prison in Europe. Equally important is Primary Robins, a scheme that reaches 6,500 (and rising) key stage 2 school children: 56 schools in deprived areas with no music provision, in 10 counties, north and south. This equates to 100,000 hours of music instruction per year. The children sing for half an hour a week. Singing together? It sounds easy. The administration and red tape involved is unimaginable. So too, reading the evidence, the positive effects on the children.
Last week a new children’s laureate for literature (Frank Cottrell Boyce) was appointed. Why not one for music? I would name, for starters, Nicholas Daniel, deserter and campaigner for higher music education. Keir Starmer knows that his own access to music came from another privilege: free music education in schools.
Terfel starred in a well-matched double bill, crisply directed by Stephen Medcalf and directed by Gianluca Marciano, with the BBC Concert Orchestra enthusiastic and competent in the hole. Rachmaninoff’s early opera Alecó (1893), based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies, is a lopsided but impassioned melodrama of old age rejected by heedless youth. Gianni Schicchi (1918), in contrast, is Puccini’s late comedy about the eponymous trickster, one of the doomed sinners in Dante’s Inferno.
In each, the British bass-baritone sang the title role, rising above an excellent supporting cast and, in Alecó, a stage full of chorus and young dancers (Lynne Hockney movement) dressed as skaters in a very chic house (designer Jamie Vartan). As the outcast, rejected by his bored and susceptible younger wife (played sparingly by Ailish Tynan), Aleko produces jealousy with tragic results. Rachmaninov was still a teenager when he wrote it. The dances at the beginning, vividly scored, make little theatrical sense, but they provide a melodic introduction to the main act, which ignites after a slow, slow glissando for the harp. Terfel maximized the expressive potential of the work, making it more than it first appears.
The perfect certainties of it Gianni Schicchi, not a wasted note, radical and ingenious orchestration, gave him the opportunity for sharp humor. As the Schicchi cock-o’-the-walk, covered in red biker leathers, strutted and skip, lithe, sly and funny. Some of the higher notes are pushing the limits of his range, but every word and gesture adds to the deceptive brilliance. The ensemble cast included Luis Gomes (Rinuccio), Sara Fulgoni (Zita), Robert Winslade Anderson (Betto di Signa) and Jeff Lloyd Roberts (Gherardo), as well as Tynan (Nella) and Terfel. New Zealand soprano Pasquale Orchard delivered her big aria, O mio babbino caro, with enough innocent poise to make Schicchi (the dear babbino/pope in question) look good.
Some non-operating events to note: as part of the Southbank Centre’s Sound Within Sound festival (inspired by Kate Molleson’s book of the same name, about 20th-century composers sidelined), the British pianist Siwan Rhys Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) played three Sonatas, born in St. Petersburg and for some time a compositional student of the respected Shostakovich: singular, stupendous, percussive works, which were outstanding. An engaging program at the Bozzini Quartet in the same series was Ruth Crawford Seeger’s dazzling String Quartet (1931).
At the Barbican, as part of its five-day Pride Classical festival – an interesting program if light on female composers – I heard a superb Quartet Choir performing music from the centuries in My Loved One. Samuel Barnett and Petroc Trelawny read moving extracts from love letters between Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. The person next to me didn’t know Britten was gay. It wasn’t at a classical concert either. In a wet park wearing silly clothes, or in a festival that celebrates queerness, perhaps also wearing silly clothes, the edges meet the middle. Maybe there is something to learn from that.
