If Opera Festival | 07 - 17 August 2025
Beautiful music in extraordinary places
Rigoletto
Giuseppe Verdi
Orpheus in the Underworld
Jacques Offenbach
Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
Claudio Monteverdi
& Historia Jonae
Giacomo Carissimi
We can reveal that our 2025 repertoire will include Verdi’s Rigoletto as the centrepiece of the season alongside Simon Butteriss’ interpretation of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld in our secluded and peaceful new venue for 2025, Church Farm.
Alongside this, we are delighted to announce that a Baroque double bill of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Carissimi’s Historia Jonae, the tale of Jonah and The Whale, will also feature in the season as well as our annual Picnic Prom.
Details of these, and other events throughout the year, to be announced soon…
Rigoletto
Giuseppe Verdi
07 | 09 | 14 | 16 August 2025
Verdi's great masterpiece is a chilling, dark-hearted tragedy whose central father/daughter pairing brings us to the depths of despair as a result of obsessive love, betrayal and murder.
Prepare for a unique and intense operatic experience. The score, one of Verdi’s best-loved and most melodious, is by turns insouciant (La donna è mobile), or tragically profound, but always of great dramatic richness, variety, and beauty, climaxing with the great Act III quartet.
Jacques Offenbach
Orpheus in the Underworld
08 | 12 | 15 August 2025
Offenbach, dubbed by Rossini as the Mozart of the Champs Elysées, pokes hilarious fun at po-faced classical opera in general and Gluck in particular, as Orpheus is dragged to Hell to rescue an unwilling wife, accompanied by the Gods, in search of Bacchanalian joy.
The opera is chock full of glorious music and is perhaps best known for the rousing 'Galop Infernal’, later adopted by the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère to accompany the 'can-can'. Simon Butteriss adapts and directs what promises to be an outrageously joyous version of Offenbach’s comic masterpiece.
Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
Claudio Monteverdi
Historia Jonae
Giacomo Carissimi
17 August 2025
Our Baroque double bill features the early Baroque master, Giacomo Carissimi and his oratorio, Historia Jonae, the story of Jonah and the whale.
This is followed by a semi-staging of Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, written for the Venetian carnival season of 1624. Adapted from an episode in Tasso’s epic about the First Crusade, the Christian knight Tancredi challenges a Saracen to fight to the death, only to discover his vanquished opponent is the woman he loves.
Set in the medieval church of St Mary’s, Wingfield, this intimate evening is presented on early instruments alongside our repertory ensemble and promises to be a season highlight.
Priority booking will open for
patrons, sponsors and members on
Monday 17 March 2025
General booking will open on
Thursday 03 April 2025
Welcome to Church Farm, Wingfield…
If Opera was created as a company that would perform in a variety of venues offering spectacular experiences in diverse and exciting spaces. In 2025, we are delighted to announce that we will be moving to a new, beautiful site while the gardens at Belcombe Court rest.
Come with us to a remarkable new space, secluded and peaceful, in the vale of the Westbury White Horse. With easy access via the A366, you’ll find Church Farm, the home of long-standing If Opera Patrons, David and Fiona Robinson, and our setting for the 2025 season.
There, the ancient farmhouse house and tiny, fourteenth century gem of the little parish church of St Mary, are bonded in a timeless cluster of warm limestone buildings. Surrounded by a churchyard, garden, duckpond and sometime farmyard, there’s easy access, extensive lawns for picnicking and our Saddlespan Auditorium will be installed on fields overlooking the Westbury White Horse.
Church Farm, Wingfield, BA14 9LE is an eight minute drive from the centre of Bradford on Avon and parking will be available on-site.
There will be shuttle service available from Bradford on Avon for those travelling by public transport, full details will be shared nearer the time.