In their new community opera, Roxanna Panufnik and Jessica Duchen have turned to the joys of cricket for inspiration, as Jeremy Pound discovers
Within the extensive grounds of the Wormsley estate in Buckinghamshire sits a glorious cricket ground. Set in a natural bowl, it is surrounded by tree-lined hills and adorned with an elegant Tudor-style pavilion. Just add two teams in white, a sunny day, a smattering of spectators lazing on deck chairs around the boundary and a glass of wine or two, and you have the ‘leather on willow’ idyll itself.
This immaculately tended patch of grass is not the only perfect pitch with which Wormsley is associated, however. Since 2011, the estate – acquired by Sir Paul Getty in 1985 and now owned by son Mark – has also been the stamping ground of world-class singers, instrumentalists and conductors, as the home of the annual Garsington Opera festival, with productions staged at the Opera Pavilion set up within its grounds. So… cricket… opera… You can probably see where this is going.
And, yes, you’re right. This summer, Garsington will be staging its first production about cricket, when Dalia, a new community opera by composer Roxanna Panufnik and librettist Jessica Duchen, pads up and swings its bat at the Opera Pavilion, with a cast that includes 15-year-old Adrianna Forbes-Dorant in the title role, alongside the likes of soprano Nadine Benjamin, bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu and an amateur chorus of children and adults numbering over 150. However, as director Karen Gillingham tells me, the project’s genesis was a little bit more complex than the one-plus-one-equals-two logic I’ve suggested above.
‘Three years ago, we did a piece at the Royal Albert Hall called Dare to Dream,’ she says. ‘For it, we made partnerships with children in schools in refugee camps in Syria, Uganda and Bangladesh, who exchanged poems with children in Buckinghamshire about hope and loss. The piece featured those young people on a screen using Skype and, while it was very challenging to make the relationships that we can today on Zoom – technology has moved massively since then – I knew how much everyone gained from the experience in terms of awareness and understanding of each other. I wanted to commission another similarly themed piece for Garsington, and also to work again with Rox and Jess, whose Silver Birch community opera had been such a success in 2017.’
