Opera, warm baths and survival

Wasfi Kani, founder of Grange Park Opera, is a realist when it comes to the costs of opera. ‘But if we only have art that's economically viable,’ she tells Caroline Wheater, 'much of it just won't exist’

Don Carlo (a 2016 production). Image: © Grange Park Opera

Each June and July some 15,000 people head to the Surrey Hills to watch Grange Park Opera stage works such as La Bohème and Eugene Onegin. The setting is West Horsley Place, an ancient house with formal gardens. Beyond, in a woodland glade, lies a five-tier, 700-seat opera house called the Theatre in the Woods, inspired by La Scala in Milan, where cast, chorus and a 60-strong orchestra perform.

Grange Park Opera is the vision of trailblazer Wasfi Kani (OBE and CBE) who founded the company, a charity, in 1997. Born in London’s East End, in Cable Street, her parents had fled India at the time of Partition. For Kani’s earliest years the family lived in one room. She is, she says, ‘almost certainly the only opera impresario [to have] spent her childhood in a house with an outside lavatory’. 

A talented violinist who played for the National Youth Orchestra and studied music at St Hilda’s College in Oxford, Kani saw her first opera as a teenager, I Pagliacci, featuring the aria Vesti La Giubba. ‘I was taken with that aria, but it’s all I knew until my late 20s, when my love of opera really began,’ she says.

Wasfi Kani. Image: © Richard Lewisohn

After university Kani worked in the city, in the world of programming and financial computing systems, but by the early 1990s had made the leap to a career in music, running Garsington Opera in Oxfordshire for six years, more than quadrupling its turnover. 

Three decades on, she rejects the perception that opera is elitist, believing it to be an art form anyone can enjoy. ‘The more you listen the more you get out of it; it teaches you what being a human is about – every situation can be found in an opera.’ 

Grange Park Opera’s original home was in Hampshire, but when that arrangement ended in 2015 a new base was needed. A friend of Kani’s spotted on Twitter that Bamber Gascoigne had inherited a Surrey estate and planned to reinvent it as a cultural hub. ‘We’ll never get our hands on that,’ she thought. But she did. 

Gascoigne knew of Kani’s energetic track record in opera. Before the deal was struck, Kani asked another friend, actress Joanna Lumley, to check out West Horsley Place. Memorably, Lumley reported back that it was ‘a demi-Eden’. And so it is. ‘If you come by train to Horsley station, walk through fields and woodland to the house, it is incredibly romantic,’ says Kani.

The Theatre in the Woods. Image: © Grange Park Opera

Romance aside, Kani had to raise £10m in a year to build the Theatre in the Woods, which opened in 2017. Operas – more than 80 so far that have played to numbers over 300,000 and star figures such as Sir Bryn Terfel – are chosen by Kani and executed by a team that includes executive director Bernard Davies. ‘I avoid the earlier, lighter repertoire such as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in favour of 19th-century composers Verdi, Puccini, Wagner and Massenet. The feelings around these operas, for me, are like getting into a warm bath.’ 

She picks three per season – one with a recognisable title, one that’s less known and one that challenges, such as The Excursions of Mr Brouček by Janáček, performed last summer. Another boundary breaker took football as its focus. Produced by Factory Films with Grange Park Opera for Sky Arts, Gods of the Game saw the opera house swathed with football paraphernalia and starred comedian Lee Mack in the commentary box, with a chorus of ‘football fans’. As an aside, that chorus represents coveted places, with some 200 young singers auditioning each year. 

This summer Grange Park Opera will be staging Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde, Puccini’s Tosca and Massenet’s Werther. The bill for the orchestras alone will be half a million pounds.

‘I get no funding; I’m constantly having to ask for money,’ Kani says. ‘In the current chaos it’s a challenge for any arts organisation to survive, but especially one with the massive running costs that come with employing people. But if we only have art that’s economically viable much of it just won’t exist.’ With top seats coming at considerable prices (not unlike some football tickets), one wonders how opera can attract younger audiences. With an eye on this, Kani has instigated initiatives such as ‘36 £36 tickets’ for each night of the summer season for those under 36. There is also ‘Musical Chairs’, where youngsters aged 14-25 can apply for free tickets on selected dates, funded by donations.

A past performance of Hairspray at HMP Bronzefield 

Kani is alert, too, to the need to reach wider audiences, looking at how opera can be made accessible to those who may never encounter it. 

In 1987 she founded Pimlico Opera to work with prisons and schools. To date, around 30 operas have been performed by prisoners, with performances seen by upwards of 60,000 people. The next production, in March 2024, will be at women’s prison HMP Bronzefield in Middlesex. 

Such projects come with costs of around £220,000 and are funded entirely by supporters and charitable trusts. ‘The most touching element for the performers comes on the first night, when they often experience the audience clapping wildly. For many prisoners it’s the first time in their life they’ve done something such as this, something that gives them confidence.’ 

At another level, the Primary Robins project offers primary school children within disadvantaged areas weekly singing lessons starting at around age seven – more than 6,000 youngsters have taken part. There’s always more work to be done, but initiatives such as these have to be the future for opera – an art form that can be traced to the start of the 17th century and, despite current cuts and challenges, continues to stir hearts 400 years on.

Find out more 

grangeparkopera.co.uk

westhorsleyplace.org

The Arts Society East Surrey Area has worked with the West Horsley Place Trust on a special project, with heritage volunteers caring for and recording the 10,000 books in the library in the Grade I listed house.