Grange Park Opera, founded by Wasfi Kani in 1998, brings Bryn Terfel’s Sweeney Todd and Wagner’s Die Walküre to its opera house in the Surrey woods.
Grange Park Opera, the company Wasfi Kani founded in 1998, opens its summer at West Horsley Place in West Horsley, Surrey, on Thursday 3 June 2027. Sir Bryn Terfel leads Sweeney Todd in four productions running to Sunday 11 July.
She ran the company in Hampshire for nearly two decades, staging Rusalka, Tristan und Isolde and Peter Grimes. After its last Hampshire season in 2016, it moved to West Horsley Place, a 350-acre estate whose fourteenth-century house Bamber Gascoigne inherited in 2015 and gave to a trust.
There, in eleven months, Kani and her team built a five-storey opera house modelled on La Scala. It seats 700 in a red auditorium inside a brick drum among the trees.
Sondheim’s grand guignol of Victorian London is one of Terfel’s signature roles, here directed by David Alden. His history with the company includes Fiddler on the Roof, which Grange Park took to the BBC Proms.
Rachel Nicholls and James Rutherford head a cast of British Wagnerians in Die Walküre, the second part of the Ring. David Stout sings the title role in Stephen Medcalf’s production of Eugene Onegin, set in Imperial Russia. Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore completes the repertoire.