Monday 20 April 2009














A few days' rest in a Spanish house on the coast between Alicante and Valencia, belonging to one of our singers, has enabled us to make a little more progress with the Haydn translation, a job which really should have been finished well before now.  Translation is a fascinating but very, very slow business, involving a multitude of advanced crossword solving skills!  Act 1 is complete and is being sent out to the singers, but Acts 2 and 3 are only partially done. So many more hours lie ahead in the company of the score, libretto, rhyming dictionary, thesaurus and other essential tools.  Unfortunately there were no beach-huts on our local patch of utterly lovely Spanish beach, but plenty of fish to eat for inspiration....  The second photograph shows Gilly, post-paella, and niece Rosa, who will be helping back-stage at the production of Pescatrici and whom I am trying to persuade into a walk-on part.

Saturday 4 April 2009


We've just had a design meeting: Mike Wareham, Anthony Hall, Gilly French and myself.  Mike has built an initial set model based on my first ideas and we were thrashing out a number of issues to do with the size of stage (we have a stage built for us at Bampton and Westonbirt, so shape and scale are flexible) and  sightlines (in open-air venues audience tend to fan out and can't always see the whole stage if they choose to sit on the periphery).  As we are correctly setting this at the quayside at Taranto in Southern Italy, albeit updated to the 1950s, we were bouncing around a number of ideas relating to the style of Italian beach-huts, and fish-stalls.  Mike has an intriguing project in hand to create flapping seagulls.... 

Wednesday 1 April 2009


Our publicity flyer for Le pescatrici is now printed and we hope will attract suitable attention when it's distributed shortly.  Possibly the fish 'n chips image is a little British for an opera set in Taranto on the south coast of Italy, but we have carefully posed them on an Italian newspaper. Anthony Hall, our truly wonderful friend in Bampton who, along with equally marvellous Mike Wareham, builds scenery and drives vans, is an excellent photographer and was certainly intrigued by the challenge.  Local chippy in nearby Carterton provided a more photogenic model than upmarket Waitrose in Witney - as Anthony said, "probably something to do with the greasy sheen".  The Italian newspaper unfolded an appropriate surprise when Anthony later came across an article about what Italian visitors to London might expect to eat - complete with a photograph of fish and chips!