Paperback. 9 1/4 x 6" - 235 x 150mm; 414 pages, illustrated throughout.
Good condition, a 'new'.
This is the story of the legendary Batignano opera festival and how it came about, tracing the life of its founder from stage-struck wartime child to his career as a fashionable designer in swinging sixties London and then his dropping out' to find a new life in Italy in a derelict building, the heap of stones, that would launch so much young talent in the opera world.
"Did you do Batignano?" is the phrase most used by the many people who worked in the seventeenth-century which for thirty-one years was the home of the opera festival in southern Tuscany. This acted as a trampoline for a wide range of mainly British talent from singers like Lesley Garrett to composer Jonathan Dove; conductors, Jane Glover, Christian Curnyn and Ivor Bolton; directors such as Graham Vick, Richard Jones and Rupert Goold. Productions ranged from many first performances in modern times of forgotten baroque operas, to the first performances in Italy of Tippett's King Priam and Bernstein's Candide. Among new works commissioned festival were several by Stephen Oliver and Italo Calvino 's dazzling text for Mozart's unfinished Zaide. In 2004, the festival's founder, Adam Pollock, whose story this is, was made a CBE for services to music and Anglo-Italian relations.
