No one looking at the ever-increasing activities of Grange Park Opera would believe that the opera is under threat. The country house season moved to the gardens of the late Bamber Gascoigne's country house at West Horsley Place in Surrey, when he inherited the estate from his aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe; he made the site available to the company when it was homeless in 2016. An opera house was built in the forest in record time, which had increasingly ambitious summer seasons. The aim now is to build more facilities and rehearsal spaces and set up year-round activities under the driving force of director Wasfi Kani, who originally founded the company in 1998 and shows every sign of taking the business into the future.
For the 2024 season, Kani will build on the links she has built with some of Britain's greatest operatic talents: Bryn Terfel will appear in a double bill of one-act operas by Rachmaninov and Puccini, while Simon Keenlyside leads the cast as Prospero in Anthony Bolton's new Tempest-inspired opera Island of Dreams.
Another standout this season is irascible director David Alden, who is launching a new production of Janáček's searing opera about madness and desire, Katya Kabanova, with a fine cast led by Natalya Romaniw and Susan Bullock.
"I did Katya Kabanova all over the world for 20 years," the 74-year-old explains. "But this time I'm doing something new. Janáček was not particularly religious, he was agnostic, pantheistic, whatever you want to call it. But he had such a keen sense of the way societies come into being and the terrible mendacity of how they work together and fight with each other."
Alden describes his new production as "a bit of a mix of ancient and modern, which I think is right, late 19th century to early 20th century, because it feels sonically right for the piece."
For years, Alden was the enfant terrible of the opera, the iconoclast at ENO, where he first made an impression in 1984 with Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa, set in gloomy Stalinist Russia, with chainsaw murder, torture and blood spatter. The critics were outraged. Alden's productions helped define the company's style - in stark contrast to the rather sedate productions at Covent Garden - and attracted a sometimes skeptical but always involved audience.
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He explains: "It was a good era because in London there was a real contrast between the ENO with its great productions and the Royal Opera, which was not good in that respect - now it's basically doing the same thing."
Alden maintains close ties with ENO and will revive Janáček's Jenůfa in March as long as the company does not go on strike. In line with his desire to direct all revivals of his own productions, he brought back his award-winning Brit Peter Grimes, amid the company reeling from the suspension of Arts Council funding and a proposed move to the north of England .
"I was a little worried when I came back, after those stupid, disgusting mistakes that had been made by so many different people," says Alden, who lives in London most of the year. "But the chorus is still incredibly exciting, there is a dedicated music staff and fantastic stage management, even if it is much more limited. To me it is a testament to human resilience, almost to an idiotic degree."
There has been a sea change in opera, as in all other areas of the performing arts, as the effects of #MeToo permeate the industry and change the power structures of directing and performing. Alden has felt this personally. "So many things have changed in the way you interact with people. In my work, I'm stuck in a room alone with a few people. It's the way you approach people, what you say, how you touch them, it's really different now - almost overnight. And obviously it's harder for old people like me to adapt so quickly, especially in this industry, which is a personal, physical affair and intimate on some levels."
In what sounds like the basis for an Iris Murdoch novel, Alden has a twin brother, Christopher, who also directs opera, albeit in a less subversive way. They were born in New York in 1949, the son of playwright Jerome Alden and Barbara Gaye, a dancer who starred opposite Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun on Broadway when she was eight months pregnant. "Before the birth we were on stage seven or eight times a week," laughs Alden.
Unsurprisingly, it was a culturally conscious household and the brothers are old enough to remember the last year of the old Met in New York before it moved to Lincoln Center, where they saw L'elisir d'amore and Tannhäuser . They knew instinctively that they could do better. "The operas were fantastic, the singers were great, but the productions were completely uninteresting."
Both Alden boys studied at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and cut their directing teeth at the adventurous Opera Omaha in Nebraska. Alden says he maintains a friendly rivalry with Christopher.
Alden is indeed a fighter. "I like rules and structures and things I can hit. I am very persistent and focused. I am always ridiculously well prepared, I always know the opera better than anyone, including usually the conductor."
Nevertheless, Alden now seems quieter and very thoughtful. As we sit in a pub in north London, somewhat bizarrely next to a large funeral party, he tells me: 'I've moved on emotionally. I've always wanted to show opera in the present, and question the givens about the pieces when they were written, and present them in an aggressive way. But not to pretend, and not to erase history, which is one of the worrying things right now."
Which brings us to the question of whether the current culture wars have changed anything for the better. "So much of what is happening now is so naive, so childish. I mean Turandot [Puccini's last, incomplete opera set in China] has a lot of problems, but turns those characters Ping, Pang and Pong into Jim, John and Bob or whoever is stupid. I think the whole emphasis on inclusivity is extremely good, but don't rewrite the past."
Still, he states: "There are a lot of things happening now that are very interesting. What Peter Gelb does at the Met [in New York], playing new plays, commissioning new operas, I mean, even five years ago that was impossible to imagine. You can be cynical about it and say that their [older] the audience disappears. But there are also many positives to a more diverse audience and giving artists opportunities they have never had before."
Economic conditions will also have an increasing impact on the opera. "It's going to change things," he says. "Why wouldn't that be possible? To be honest, I've always felt that opera was too big and, yes, exaggerated, so linked to social class...' But I point out that Alden has always been the beneficiary of that extraordinary ability of opera to draw upon enormous resources absorb. "I'm very lucky to have done this during such a fertile era. But of course I'm in heaven as soon as I leave the opera house and do it somewhere else, in different locations. That's one of the reasons I love what Wasfi does at Grange Park. Okay, it's an opera house, but it's just so small and so different."
Katya Kabanova opens at the Grange Park Opera on Sunday 16 JunePriority booking for Telegraph subscribers
Telegraph subscribers can take advantage of priority bookings ahead of the general public for Grange Park Opera's summer season. The priority reservation window is open until Monday, February 5. For more information visit: telegraph.co.uk/extra-offers
This year's season looks like this:
Bryn Double: Blood and Bounty (June 6, 15, 20, 23, 26, 29, July 7)The great Bryn Terfel stars in two operas in one act: one tragic and one comic. In Rachmaninov's Aleko he plays Pushkin's tormented hero, while in Gianni Schicchi (Puccini) he is the titular comic trickster who must deal with the consequences of a disastrous will-reading.
Daughters of the Regiment (8, 13, 19, 30 June, 4 and 6 July)This beautiful piece of French whimsy by Donizetti features the queen of the high notes, Julia Sitkovetsky.
Katya Kabanova (June 16, 22, 27, July 3 and 12)Janáík's most personal opera stars Natalya Romaniw as the woman driven to despair and Susan Bullock as the matriarch from hell. David Alden directs.
Island of Dreams (July 11 and 13)An exciting world premiere inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest, this play by Anthony Bolton (The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko), starring Simon Keenlyside as Propsero.
Wynne zooms it up (July 14)Opera singer, GoCompare star and Celebrity MasterChef champion Wynne Evans prepares six sublime dishes, with some stunning musical interludes.
