 | ||
Grange Park Opera is a professional opera company whose base is West Horsley Place in Surrey, England. Operating since 1998, the company founded by Wasfi Kani, OBE and Michael Moody has staged an annual opera festival at an award-winning theatre seating 550 people at The Grange, in Hampshire, until its last season at this venue in 2016. In 2017, the company moved to a purpose-built ‘Theatre in the Woods’ at West Horsley Place – the 350-acre estate inherited by author and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne in 2014. A 99-year lease from the Mary Roxburghe Trust, into which Bamber Gascoigne placed his inheritance, has been agreed.
Contents
With four tiers of seating in a horseshoe shape (modelled on La Scala, Milan), the Theatre in the Woods is designed to target an optimum acoustic reverberation of 1.4 seconds.
Singers who have performed with the company include Bryn Terfel, Simon Keenlyside, Joseph Calleja, Claire Rutter, Rachel Nicholls, Bryan Register, Susan Gritton, Wynne Evans, Sally Matthews, Alfie Boe, Robert Poulton, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Sara Fulgoni, Clive Bayley and Alistair Miles. In recent years, the festival has also included well known musicals with productions of Fiddler on the Roof in 2015 and Oliver! in 2016. Fiddler on the Roof was subsequently staged in the Royal Albert Hall as part of the 2015 BBC Proms.
Grange Park Opera is a not-for-profit organisation. Its sister charity Pimlico Opera, founded in 1987, has presented co-productions with prisons for 26 years and has taken more than 50,000 members of the public into prison. Each week, its Primary Robins project gives a singing class to 2,000 KS2 children in schools in deprived areas.
History
In 1998, the founders of Grange Park Opera leased The Grange, Northington from Lord and Lady Ashburton, who became the patrons. The four festivals from 1998 to 2001 took place in the Orangery, into which the opera company had fitted a raked seating structure, stage and orchestra pit. This theatre seated 360, using seats discarded from the refurbished Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
The auditorium was then rebuilt and expanded in time to re-open for the 2002 season. The capacity increased to 550, again re-using Royal Opera House seating. Its horseshoe shape, with boxes, follows the design of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, which was built by William Wilkins, the architect who first applied the Greek Revival style to The Grange. In the main house, the opera company created a dining salon and basement-level dressing rooms.
From the production of one opera in 1998, the festival expanded to three in 2000, over a five-week season, and to four operas in 2013 over seven weeks. From 2003 until 2012, an extension to the season ran at Nevill Holt near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, in a 300-seat theatre concealed within a 17th-century stable courtyard, for which each year Grange Park Opera provided one opera production.
In February 2016 co-founder Michael Moody left Grange Park Opera to join The Grange Festival, the company that will continue opera at The Grange, Northington.
Grange Park Opera moved to West Horsley Place after the 2016 season, ready to occupy a new, purpose built theatre that provides a permanent home for the company. Phase 1 of this project commenced in June 2016 and will host its first performance – a production of Tosca featuring Joseph Calleja – on June 8, 2017. Phase 2 continues after the 2017 festival and includes exterior brickwork.
Performance History
In addition to many operas which are part of the current repertoire, the company has included some more unusual fare: