Roman Summer Holidays

Monteverdi and Puccini in the Eternal City at The Grange Festival

Blind ambition: Kitty Whately (Poppea), Sam Furness (Nerone) Picture © Craig Fuller

In the seven summers since Wasfi Kani decamped with her Grange Park Opera to Surrey, the new Grange Festival in Hampshire has repositioned itself under the artistic direction of Michael Chance as a near-ideal address for baroque opera. The former star of the UK’s Early Music renaissance - whose career in opera challenged that of the first great operatic counter-tenor, James Bowman - knows that a programme devoted entirely to works from the 17th and early 18th centuries would be a tricky sell. Nevertheless, six out of Chance’s seven full seasons have headlined works by Monteverdi, Purcell and Handel, and under his guidance the Festival continues to flourish - despite lingering confusion in the public’s mind over the existence of two country house opera companies with near-identical names.

Chance’s inaugural Baroque offering in 2017, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, did not hit many sweet spots but it boasted, in Anna Bonitatibus’s Penelope, one of the greatest incarnations of this moving role in the modern era. Bonitatibus returned in 2018 to give an ideal assumption of Handel’s Agrippina, but let down by a production in questionable taste. 

Now, in this summer’s production of L’incoronazione di Poppea, she is back with her second Monteverdi part - Ottavia, wife of the mad Emperor Nero, whose ascent to Claudius’s throne was her mojo in Handel’s opera six years ago. Walter Sutcliffe, her Agrippina director, now offers a smart contemporary update (sets and costumes by John Bausor) which admirably follows the action of Busanello’s libretto, even if it only touches the surface of the complex psychologies and dark motivations of the principal characters.