When is a country-house opera not a country-house opera? When it no longer has a country house attached. This is what is about to happen to Garsington Opera, which is moving, lock, stock, barrel and picnic basket, from the exquisitely planned and intimate gardens of the Bloomsbury-redolent Garsington Manor near Oxford to the wide-open rolling hills of the Wormsley Estate in nearby Buckinghamshire.
The move is a change and a challenge that the company’s general director, Anthony Whitworth-Jones, seems thoroughly to relish. ‘It’s enormously exciting,’ he says. ‘Once we knew we were going to have to move from Garsington the hunt was on for a suitable place, and we had to decide whether we should be looking for somewhere with a similar appeal or something completely different.
‘In fact, Wormsley was one of the very first places we saw, and my colleagues and I discounted it the first-time round. Although we’d all given ourselves stern talkings-to about not attempting to recreate the particular atmosphere of Garsington, I think that we subconsciously still had it in mind as a template to try and match. We looked at 45 properties altogether, eventually narrowed it down to three, and — after a bit of negotiating about the actual site for the auditorium — decided that Wormsley, almost because it’s such a contrast, was the right spot beyond a shadow of a doubt.’
There is of course a large house on the Wormsley estate, lived in by Mark Getty, but the auditorium will not be nestled up against it as it was at Garsington. From a look at the plans, what will appear (and disappear again, annually) is an elegantly simple structure, inspired by the design of Japanese garden pavilions and kabuki theatres, from which audiences will be able to enjoy sweeping views of the surrounding landscape and its 18th-century deerpark.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in