About
Only 23 miles from London, by the Surrey Hills, Grange Park Opera is one of the major summer opera seasons in Europe.
Founded in 1998 by Wasfi Kani CBE, Grange Park Opera has staged more than 80 operas, including the acclaimed productions of Rusalka, Tristan und Isolde, Peter Grimes, and Fiddler on the Roof with Bryn Terfel at the BBC Proms.
Its sister charity Pimlico Opera works in prisons and primary schools.
Grange Park Opera held their last season in Hampshire in 2016.
In 2017, Grange Park Opera relocated to West Horsley Place, Surrey.
West Horsley Place is a 350-acre estate with a glorious, sprawling 14th century house surrounded by formal gardens with secret corners, aged trees, box hedges and a majestic crinkle crankle wall.
The house was inherited in 2015 by author and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne from his aunt Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe. He gifted the estate to the West Horsley Place Trust.
In eleven months Wasfi Kani and her team built a five-storey opera house modelled on La Scala, Milan, seating 700.
Read Tales from the Theatrical Woods
The Times Arts Awards acknowledged the achievement as the “fastest construction of an opera house in history”.
The opera house, glimpsed amongst the trees, appears as a cross-gartered brick drum and within is an intimate red five-tiered auditorium. The rose colonnade provides a passeggiata for a leisurely stroll. The audience can foregather and linger ahead of a performance.
