A brief history of Grange Park Opera and Pimlico Opera

Founded in 1998 by Wasfi Kani CBE, Grange Park Opera (GPO) has staged more than 75 operas, including acclaimed productions of Rusalka, Queen of Spades, Don Carlos, Peter Grimes, and Fiddler on the Roof with Bryn Terfel at the BBC Proms.

When Grange Park Opera’s lease in Hampshire was terminated, the company moved, in 2017, to West Horsley Place, Surrey.  

In spring 2015, some GPO trustees visited Bamber and Christina asking if an opera house might be built in the woods behind their orchard – it seemed an ideal spot. Christina’s face lit up and she turned to Bamber pronouncing ‘A rare and beautiful bird has just landed in our garden and would like to stay. Of course we must welcome it!’. They made their decision on the spot. 

In June 2016, Guildford Borough Council granted planning consent and the five-storey opera house, modelled on La Scala, Milan, built by Martin Smith, was ready for us in just 11 months and opened on Thursday 8 June 2017. The Times Arts Awards acknowledged the achievement as the “fastest construction of an opera house in history”.

The following year the ornate brick exterior was completed and the Lavatorium Rotundum. Guests at the 2019 season could enjoy a new rose colonnade – a passeggiata for the audience to foregather and linger ahead of a performance – made of larch columns from a Sussex estate. 

The 2020 season was lost to COVID but the company was the first to create an online Found Season, praised to the skies in all the national press.

The 2021 season included Bryn Terfel as Falstaff, but the theatre could only be half-filled.

There has been an impressive number of world premières including The Life & Death of Alexander Litvinenko, Pushkin, Feast in the Time of Plague, Gods of the Game (with Sky Arts).

Grange Park Opera’s sister company, Pimlico Opera, works in prisons and primary schools. 

IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS Every week of the school year, Primary Robins gives 6,060 primary school children a half-hour singing class equating to more than 100,000 hours of teaching. 

Primary Robins are disadvantaged children within disadvantaged communities. Their schools have low Key Stage 2 results, higher-than-average numbers of children receiving free school meals and NO MUSIC.

Fifty years ago, every primary school had children sitting around a piano learning songs. In 2013, Primary Robins was introduced to four Hampshire schools, giving 430 Robins a weekly half-hour singing class.

Today there are 6,060 Robins spread across the country: Newcastle, Durham, Manchester, Essex, Kent, Lewisham, Hampshire, Surrey. In a school year, this equates to 100,000 hours of teaching.

A year of singing classes is £40 / child. The project costs £250k / year. 

Primary Robins participate at no cost to either the schools or the parents. All three benefit: children, parents and the school.

Pimlico Opera receives neither government nor public subsidy. 

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The project is startling in its simplicity and in its effectiveness: classes gather every week and learn songs. Each term the Robins have a new specially-prepared songbook of around 10 songs, one of which is in another language. All songs are traditional rather than pop tunes, and often turn out to be familiar to our Robins’ parents and grandparents. The songbook includes musical notation. It is not intended to teach the children to read music, but some see the pattern of how they sing and what the dots do.

IN PRISONS for 35 years.  The work started in 1989 when the company performed two operas in Wormwood Scrubs: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Walton’s The Bear. The first joint production with prisoners was Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, involving a large cast of inmates serving life sentences. 

There have been 26 co-productions, taking more than 60,000 public into prison, more than 2,000 prisoners have participated and over 10,000 prisoners have seen a performance.

In November 1992, the collaboration with Wandsworth Prison, was the subject of a BBC2 documentary Guys, Dolls & D wing which was nominated for a BAFTA.

Five weeks of intensive rehearsal – all day, every weekday – can be challenging: most prisoners have never been to the theatre, some cannot read, for some English is a second language. The end result is a truly excellent piece of musical theatre performed before a paying public and prisoners’ families, by a cast largely made up of prisoners – who are at the very heart of all aspects of the project. 

There is powerful evidence for the benefit that this work has to society, the public purse and the wider economy. 

Improvements in prisoner rehabilitation and the lowering of re-offending can only be a good thing. 

Of the 85k people in prison today, around 4k are women. There are very few women’s prisons, so an offender is a long way from her family; her children are often taken into care. 27% of the prison population were in care. 

Of the under 25s, 50% were in care. 

45% of adults are re-convicted within a year of release but 97% express a desire to stop offending.

"It is said that no-one truly knows a nation until you have been inside its jails"

Nelson Mandela