Poison in Political Opera

David Pountney's productions of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra and Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa at Grange Park Opera are lessons in love and violence

Moving reunion of father and daughter: Elin Pritchard’s dreamy Amelia, Simon Keenlyside’s musical instinct as Simon Boccanegra Picture © Marc Brenner

Wasfi Kani, founder of Grange Park Opera, does nothing by halves. Not content with building a new opera house in the grounds of a 350-acre estate in Surrey, she has demonstrated boundless ambition in her choice of repertoire. Starting next summer her part-time company will stage Wagner’s Ring over four years, to be directed and designed by Charles Edwards (following his spectacularly successful Tristan und Isolde last summer). Kani probably won’t be able to mount complete Ring cycles in her festival’s five-week format but, with her Midas touch, you never know.

Although Grange Park Opera won’t be the first country house venue to stage the Ring - that accolade goes to Longborough Festival Opera - her Surrey festival has already announced the engagement of the Orchestra of English National Opera for its productions of the Ring operas. Not so long ago Kani was being tipped as a potential chief executive for ENO - at that time the UK’s second most important state-subsidised company - but she has stayed put in Surrey, apparently prizing her independence above all else. Amazingly, she still finds time to raise the money and awareness for admirable outreach projects with which she has long been associated, such as Pimlico Opera’s stagings of musicals in prisons.

And yet the symbiotic relationship between her festival and the UK’s beleaguered national companies could hardly be more explicit: this summer’s programme offers two productions by David Pountney, arguably the representative-on-earth of UK subsidised opera. It was as director of productions at ENO in the 1980s and early 90s that he made his name, so there was some irony in the fact that his new production of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa for Grange Park Opera had the ENO orchestra in the pit and was conducted by Mark Shanahan, a former ENO stalwart and one of the safest pairs of hands in the business.