For the second year running, an opera house has opened in the English countryside. After Wasfi Kani’s “theatre in the woods” popped up at Bamber Gascoigne’s spruced-up crumbling pile, West Horsley Place — home of his late great-aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe — Kani’s former partner in country-house-opera activity, David Ross, has fitted out the 17th-century stables of his beautiful Leicestershire property, Nevill Holt, with a permanent theatre.
This replaces the temporary scaffolding and tarpaulin temporary auditorium he had made do with until 2016. Ross, one of Kani’s biggest Grange Park Opera donors in his Carphone Warehouse days, decided to go it alone six years ago with a team led by NI Opera’s music director, Nicholas Chalmers — now the artistic director of Nevill