Artistic Director Michael Chance tells us about The Grange Festival
Who says you have to be in London to get the finest quality performances? This summer at The Grange in Alresford, Hampshire you can find an exceptional programme of opera, dance and concerts in the most beautiful of surroundings. We were excited to know more about this enticing festival so asked Artistic Director Michael Chance to tell us all about it.
Michael, thank you so much for taking time to talk to us about the Festival. It’s all new to me, so could you start by telling us about The Grange itself; the venue and how it’s used as a performance space?
It became a performance space over 25 years ago, when the then newest of the English Country House Opera Festivals was encouraged by the owner of The Grange Estate near Alresford in Hampshire, John Baring, to use his tumbling down uninhabited mansion for operatic performances, calling itself Grange Park Opera. The house is historic, grand, and dilapidated. Some years after performing in the Orangerie, sufficient funds were raised privately to build an opera house, more than doubling that existing space.
The design is based on the Georgian theatre in Bury St Edmunds, with its curved auditorium balcony, designed, as it turns out, by William Wilkins who had already totally refashioned the Grange into a Greek revival mansion and who then went on to design the National Gallery. Grange Park Opera left this venue in 2017 and we formed from scratch to put transformative performance back into the theatre. We’ve since updated it, adding seats as well, so that we are this year putting on 25 performances in June and July to over 600 audience members. The theatre is big enough to stage most operas, with an orchestra pit large enough for 70 players and a stage at least as large in volume as the auditorium. The proximity of audience to performers is one of the joys of this performing space – no singer need shout and we can see the most subtle of facial gestures.
Has it changed much over time?
When The Grange Festival began, it was actually just me for the first months, before much of the senior team from Grange Park Opera were able to join. So I suppose I started it both as Artistic Director and Chief Executive. I relinquished the latter role last year in favour of a younger, more energetic and more managerially savvy replacement. Over its first decade (we launched in 2015 and had our first festival in 2017) it has grown and widened its offering. I thought the name, The Grange Festival, apart from being a necessarily prosaic naming of what we do and where we are, allowed us to spread our artistic wings to encompass other performance art forms. So apart from our core offering of opera, we have staged dance, drama, musical theatre, and concerts of jazz, classical and more.
What is your thought process when selecting such diverse productions to draw together?
The aim is to draw people from as wide a background as possible, to offer as rich and varied a programme as we can, but never to settle for less than standards as high as you will find anywhere. So our vision is nothing if not ambitious. Let’s be clear – opera has a niche reputation, particularly in this country. It’s generally thought of as posh and inaccessible to all but diehards and the deep of pocket. It is our, and indeed all opera companies’ determination to change this perception fundamentally. This year our ticket pricing is far more varied than we have achieved before, so, frankly, the cost of the ticket cannot be given as a reason not to come. We want to show that experiencing live performance in a wonderful theatre in a beautiful place not only changes your life but also is probably more available than going to a Premier League match, Wimbledon, Twickenham, O2 Arena, West End Theatres, … I could go on, but I hope you get the point.
You have Ballet Black performing this year, which is very exciting! Can you talk about that?
Ballet Black are dear friends of the festival, performing for us twice before. They bravely came in 2020 when there were few venues open anywhere. They danced outside in our grand neo-classical portico to socially distanced audiences and were loved for daring to do so. Then they came with a riveting mixed programme a few years later. Their range, their elegance, their cohesive spirit, their musical sensibility all communicate powerfully on our stage.
What are some of the other highlights for this summer?
One of the most popular draws is rock and opera coming together in the form of Queen at the Opera. You could say that Queen were one of the most operatic of Rock bands, particular when you put Freddie Mercury’s love affair with the great Spanish lyric soprano Montserrat Caballé into the mix. He loved going to the opera. In fact I remember him dolled up to the nines with two equally beautiful friends in the stalls at Covent Garden for a Verdi opera. They looked so at home there somehow. We also celebrate Leonard Bernstein on Broadway with the orchestra of Welsh National Opera and starry opera singers. The list goes on. The Jazz orchestra of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam are performing classics from the American Songbook in a programme called Summertime Swing. And to complete the operatic trilogy of the summer comes Cappella Mediterranea with French Dance company Structure Realité and the chamber choir of Namur for a full staging, the first in the UK, of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s great opéra-ballet Les Indes Galantes. Leonardo Garcia-Alarçon conducts and Bintou Dembélé choreographs. This will be quite an artistic milestone for the UK summer festival scene.
One of the events is a gala evening in aid of The Meath Epilepsy Charity. What will this involve and how did it come about?
It will truly be a gala evening with ten of this country’s most prominent operatic stars performing well known scenes, accompanied by Julius Drake and Matthew Fletcher and compèred by comic genius Chris Addison. Brindlay Sherratt has put all this together to raise money for a charity with which he is closely connected. These performers will probably never be all together on stage again so one can safely use the word unique to describe it. I cannot wait, as many of them are good friends and in several cases ex-pupils.
Can you also tell us about your creative learning programmes within the local community?
Over the past decade or so we have developed close links with schools and colleges all over Hampshire and beyond. One of the areas which has proved to be profoundly helpful for primary schools is being able to bring creativity into their learning across all subjects with music, dance, design and wordplay. We work as closely with teachers as we do with pupils. The results are extraordinary. We also stage a new piece of musical theatre in the summer holidays at The Grange with about 80 or so 11-16 year-olds coming every day for a week to write the music and the words, make the set and the costumes and perform a – well let’s call it an opera, which they have created themselves, guided – but no more – by a small team of facilitators. We work closely with Hampshire Music Hub, in a range of projects, including with their brilliant county youth orchestra and choir.
These are all very much partnerships – who are we to march in and say we can do things better? But we can with care and a truly collaborative spirit offer our singers, players, designers, directors and writers to provide different dimensions and ways of opening young eyes and ears and minds which can help them think and speak more clearly, collaborate more openly and be excited to experience no bounds to their imagination.
Thanks very much to Michael for giving us an insight into what promises to be a wonderful event.
The Grange Festival 2025 runs until Sunday 6 July at The Grange, Alresford, Hampshire.
