Country house opera

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Britain’s youngest summer opera festival is seriously impressive

Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of the species’ natural habitat. You leave the motorway at Oxford services and double back through the fields to the hamlet of Waterperry. Drive past the ‘Cats Crossing’ sign and the life-sized effigy of Rowan Atkinson (honestly) and you’re there. There’s a big house (slightly run to seed), a farm shop, a garden centre and a nursery containing the national saxifrage collection, which is not something you see every day. The opera festival squeezes in between them. Let’s do the show right here! Well, why not? The Barber was literally staged

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The joy of going to a real concert: OHP’s Heart of Delight reviewed

I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a real audience, and the real sound of Waitrose cava bottles popping open in the late afternoon. In some ways, this open-air gala from Opera Holland Park made it feel as if the summer season were back on. There were floral-print dresses and canary-coloured chinos; I swear I even saw a tartan picnic rug. And here in a corner were the critics, released back into society for the first time since March. When the correspondent of the Mail on Sunday ostentatiously upgraded himself to a better seat mid-show, it was like