This year provided as fine a start to the summer season of privately funded ‘country-house’ opera as any I can remember.
Glyndebourne’s artistically adventurous and theatrically thrilling revival of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers launched the season. Then Garsington’s powerful new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was followed by a viscerally splendid new staging of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Grange in Hampshire.
It was after completing his own prose draft for an operatic treatment of that the 32-year-old Verdi
