Thanks to Caroline Kennedy (pictured here during the interval) we attended the dress rehearsal of an excellent Cunning Little Vixen at Grange Park Opera on a delightfully sunny evening. Caroline is something of a Bampton protegée, as she sang the Countess and Celidora (L'oca del Cairo) as an outstandingly talented teenager in two of our early education projects at Queen's College, Harley Street, London. A few years on, she is on and off the stage in Vixen in a breathtaking variety of extraordinary costumes and characters, and thoroughly enjoying the experience of singing with a major company. Soon she'll be sunning herself in Pescatrici as one of our bellezze al bagno - Italian bathing beauties.

The Bampton Scenic Workshops are now in full swing with Le pescatrici set - it's sometimes a matter of dodging the showers as, like the opera itself, the workshop is mostly open-air.  It's amazing what can be built in an Oxfordshire cottage garden: last year passers-by became somewhat perturbed as a full size guillotine (for Paer's Leonora) began to appear over the Cotswold stone wall, although perhaps even more dramatic had been Mount Vesuvius (for Martin y Soler's L capricciosa corretta)  a couple of years earlier.  The prop list is ever growing as well, and it's is going to be quite a challenge to get the correct period look.  Meanwhile elsewhere in Bampton, costumes are being stitched and altered: Bampton Classical Opera has acquired something of a wardrobe over the years, and we have recently surprised ourselves with what we have discovered in its inner recesses.  For all this work, we thank Mike Wareham, Anthony Hall and Pauline Smith, who continue to create marvels for us.

Like any opera company, Bampton Classical Opera is very dependent on those who support it financially (our vital "Friends") and by offering volunteer help, and we always do our best to show our warm appreciation. We took the opportunity of today's Haydn's 200th anniversary by presenting a most enjoyable soiree yesterday evening in one of the lovely large houses in Bampton where the delightful new owners have taken over the tradition of warm hospitality set up by the previous equally delightful owners.  With one of our most popular and regular singers, Amanda Pitt, we presented an informal drawing-room concert of Haydn canzonettas, arias and piano sonatas, including the most entertaining (shades of Mozart in the long C minor piano introduction) dramatic cantata in honour of Nelson, and first sung at Esterhazy by Lady Hamilton, Lines from the Battle of the Nile - to echo Cornelia Knight's response to that first performance: "The effect was grand"!  

A musical event of a somewhat different nature in Bampton on bank holiday Monday, 25 May.... Bampton is one of the most ancient homes of morris dancing in England, and throughout the day the three local teams dance in the streets and gardens of the town.  Starting at about 8.30am, it's quite a feat of stamina for the dancers who continue until the early evening, when they are joined by invited guest teams from elsewhere.  It's always a delightful occasion - a chance to nose around neighbours' gardens, meeting many friends expected and unexpected, and of course to eat and drink!  We find it a useful occasion to nurture advance interest for our July opera, and a chance for informal discussion along the way with the many local people involved in our own project.  An excellent day was had, with only the lightest of rain showers and bright sun most of the time. Let's hope the sun is getting in practice for mid-July....

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.

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.... 

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!