Wasfi Kani put opera behind bars and at the heart of rural Surrey. Bruce Millar has an audience with the cultural entrepreneur...
The first opera house built in Britain this century sits in countryside midway between Guildford and Leatherhead on the edge of the Surrey Hills. The Theatre in the Woods is modelled on the world’s greatest opera house, La Scala in Milan – but unlike La Scala it adjoins beautiful formal gardens and a 14th-century manor house, where you can dine during the interval.
www.grangeparkopera.co.uk
Set in the grounds of West Horsley Place, this is the purpose-built home of Grange Park Opera and a monument to the career of the extraordinary woman who created the company, Wasfi Kani.
Born in Cable Street in the heart of London’s East End in 1956, one of five children of a family who fled India at the time of Partition, she is almost certainly the only opera impresario who grew up in a home with an outside lavatory.
She is also the only one who regularly produces operas in prisons, through the pioneering Pimlico Opera, the first company she created almost 40 years ago. To date, Pimlico has put on 30 productions involving more than 1,000 inmates and watched by 60,000 members of the public – most recently Made in Dagenham, performed this March at HMP Bronzefield near Staines, the largest women’s prison in Europe.
For Kani, opera is “a form of almost religious aspiration reaching upwards to the stars – and into the depths of the human soul”. It has the power to change lives – and that applies equally to offenders as to more privileged audiences.
“Prisoners are all just people,” she says, typically matter-of-fact. “We are all the same. No one is better than anybody else. Some people do bad things; some people get a better education.
“Prisoners need help to become useful members of society,” she adds, injecting a note of humour that negates any hint of po-faced do-goodery. “I’m trying to make them all into taxpayers.”
Opera has certainly transformed her own life. A talented violinist who performed with the National Youth Orchestra and studied music at Oxford University, Kani apparently left music behind when, after graduating, she launched a lucrative career in the City setting up computer systems for investment outfits – “back when computers were the size of a room”.
www.grangeparkopera.co.uk
But after 10 years or so she began to hanker after music again
She had bought the house in north London in which she still lives and asked herself: ‘Well, what do I do now? Do I just get richer and richer?’
So she studied conducting and began staging concerts, and it was a performance of the overture to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro that sparked her interest in opera. She also gradually realised that while she was a more than competent conductor – no mean feat in itself – “there were 100 other people just as good”. Her unique talent, she recognised, lay in a more organisational and entrepreneurial direction.
Kani founded Pimlico Opera in 1987 to put on productions in unusual places – banks, hospitals, prisons – and nearly 40 years later the company is still working with prisons as well as providing 6,000 primary school children with weekly singing lessons.
Its success led to her appointment as chief executive of Garsington Opera near Oxford, a country-house company she quadrupled in size over five years.
Then, in 1997, she founded Grange Park Opera on a family-owned estate in Hampshire, only to have to move less than 10 years later when the family rescinded the lease.
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Fortunately help was at hand
Bamber Gascoigne, the long-serving University Challenge quizmaster who died three years ago, had recently inherited West Horsley Place from his great aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe, and established it as an arts foundation. He generously offered to accommodate Grange Park on a 100-year lease.
Kani had just two years to raise £10m and build a new opera house on a Grade I listed historical site within the Green Belt – surely an impossible task.
A formidable operator who clearly sees opportunity where others see only difficulty, Kani scraped together the money and negotiated the planning minefield to meet the timetable. Neither Grange Park nor Pimlico Opera, she stresses, receive any public funding. Instead she has raised more than £22m in donations from individuals and trusts.
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As ever, she is disarmingly direct on the matter of soliciting donations from wealthy supporters:
“It’s only money, after all,” she says. “English people are so uptight in talking about money. I wonder why. But as I always say, there won’t be any culture left in the world unless people are prepared to pay for it.”
Yes, she concedes, opera is expensive to put on – it costs half a million pounds a year just to run the organisation. But she insists that it is not prohibitively expensive for audiences.
There are currently 19 musicals on in the West End with tickets at similar prices to Grange Park (where anyone under 36 can buy a ticket for £36) – to say nothing of the sporting events that pull in tens of thousands every week.
Nor is opera elitist: you don’t have to follow every nuance, insists Kani, to be drawn in by the human emotions – love, grief, jealousy, fear – brought vividly to life on the stage in front of you.
Elitist or not, however, Grange Park Opera does attract elite performers – including some of the greatest operatic singers of our time, such as the baritone Sir Simon Keenlyside, who stars in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra this summer.
“He loves performing with us because he lives in Ealing and rides down on his motorbike,” says Kani.
Casting, she has learned in her decades of running opera companies, is the most important single ingredient to the success of a production.
“There are just so few people who can sing some of these roles.”
Which is why she is currently working as far ahead as 2030, booking some of the world’s most in-demand singers for what is the most ambitious project any opera company can tackle – a complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring, which Grange Park will perform over five years from 2026.
But with all that is involved in running her two companies, does Kani still manage to play music herself?
“I still love playing,” she says. “It’s still there – the muscle memory from practising for up to six hours a day when I was young.”
But the knowledge that she has created a company that will carry on after she has gone, delivering this unique art form of opera to another generation, is her real satisfaction.
“We’re making the world a slightly better place. I feel very privileged that I have been allowed to do it with a bunch of likeminded people.”
Grange Park Opera’s 2025 season runs from June 5 to July 13 with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa and the world premiere of Nishat Khan’s Taj Mahal. Tickets: grangeparkopera.co.uk
