Garsington Opera 2017 booking opens
Summer is only a few beats away: enjoy open air music of the highest quality as Garsington Opera booking opens
The eight-week season opens on 1 June with Handel’s Semele, designed by Nicky Shaw, directed by the artistic director of Norwegian national Opera, Annilese Miskimmon, and with Jonathan Cohen, making his Garsington conducting debut. In Semele, the god Jupiter is entranced by the beauty of the mortal of the title, but the interlocking of the earthly and the divine has tragic consequences. The seven performances are from 1 June to 4 July.
Opening hard on its heels is Le Nozze di Figaro, with 11 performances from 2 June to 16 July. Garsington’s artistic director Douglas Boyd conducts Mozart’s masterpiece, which will be directed by John Cox with designs by Robert Perdziola. The production is a recreation of one staged in 2005, when Garsington had a different home.
All eyes will be on the baritones singing the Count and his servant, Figaro, and the sopranos singing the Countess and her maid Susannah, as the domestic staff get the better of their duplicitous master and effect a reconciliation between him and his neglected wife.
Michael Boyd and Tom Piper, who directed and designed 2016’s outstanding Onegin, return with a new production of Debussy’s story of a sylvan love triangle, Pelléas et Mélisande. Jan van Steen, who conducted the spirited Strauus Intermezzo in 2015, returns to conduct.
In the revival of Martin Duncan's 2011 production of Rossini’s rumbustious Il Turco in Italia ( eight performances from 26 June to 15 July), Rossini specialist David Parry conducts the romp based on unrequited love and mistaken identity, with a suitably boisterous set by Francis O’Connor.
Roxanna Panufnik has a real gift for compositions that are warm, melodic and memorable, so her new opera with librettist Jessica Duchen is a very promising prospect. Silver Birch uses professional artists and local people in a production that combines music, dance and the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. Performances are from 28 to 30 July.
For priority access to the best seats in the purpose-built, glass-sided auditorium, there is a membership scheme, and there are deals too for under-30s.
Public booking opens online and by telephone from 10am on Tuesday 28 March 2017.
