How best to market an opera?  Wiener Kammeroper advertises Le pescatrici with a strikingly posed image (photograph by Holger Bleck) of two gymnastic women wearing, well, not a great deal: perhaps more Rhinemaidens or Rusalka than the fishwives of Goldoni's farce.  It makes for effective publicity but in actuality the production, set up by credit-crunch video projections during the overture, adopts a less seductively enticing approach. The choice for our own publicity, to be launched soon, should appear less marginal. Expect edible succulence!

We've just taken two days off from rehearsals - we have a forthcoming education production of Schubert's utterly engaging Die Verschworenen at Queen's College, London - to attend the lively preview performance of Le pescatrici at the Vienna Kammeroper.  As unaccountably there is no available recording of this opera, this was our first opportunity to hear the whole piece through.  It certainly reinforced our conviction that this is an opera which both delights the ear and relates an entertaining story with deft wit and charm.  Like us, the Wiener Kammeroper specialize in small-scale rarities - in the past they have also performed L'infedeltà delusa, a work which we toured a couple of years ago.  Thursday's Pescatrici, in Kammeroper's attractive 250-seater theatre in the heart of old (and very cold!) Vienna, was given as an education preview.  With its vivacity and good humour, it was an ideal operatic introduction for schoolchildren - everyone especially loved the moment in Act 3 when shiny new iPhones were presented to the overjoyed 'fisherwomen' by their disguised lovers.  You can read Wienner Kammeroper's own blog of this fresh and appealing production at http://wienerkammeroper.blogspot.com/.

I (that's Jeremy, one of the Artistic Directors) have just been finishing the copy for our season's flyer - as usual a little late, but undoubtedly our designer Cath will get it all designed and ship-shape at lightning speed. But should the text really be as fishy as this?

"The chips are down for the fishing folk of Taranto: their love lives have become – well - a little vinegary, and Lesbina and Nerina would like to hook a bigger catch than their current boyfriends. When the Prince of Sorrento surfaces, seeking the lost heiress to his kingdom, the ambitious girls swim hard to escape the enclosing net of their soured relationships. But all that glitters is not a goldfish, and when the unassuming Eurilda is selected by the Prince, it’s time for the guts to fly and Lesbina and Nerina receive a grilling from their men. Happily no-one gets too battered - but perhaps when all is finally wrapped up the taste of tartare sauce lingers on….."

Well, yes - I think we can get away with this - the libretto for Le pescatrici is a farce by Carlo Goldoni, and Haydn is of course the wittiest of composers . And besides, this is going to be one of those gloriously funny productions which have won us many friends from the public and press in the past - "There isn’t a company in England with as sharp a sense of fun as Bampton" was how Opera Now described us a few years ago.

(The photo shows our 2005 production of The Barber of Seville - not the famous one by Rossini, but its precursor by Paisiello - we set it in a wonderfully ghastly caravan park - a really successful production which appeared at Bampton and also at the Buxton Festival).

We're delighted to be posting our first Bampton Classical Opera blog.  In this we hope to give you an insight into some of the delightfully complex processes leading up to an operatic production, in this case Haydn's wonderful setting of a Goldoni farce, Le pescatrici.  We are presenting performances of this to mark Haydn's 200th anniversary in 2009 - it's our third Haydn production, after L'infedeltà delusa and La vera costanza and adds to our long list of rarities from the eighteenth century on which our strong reputation is built.