Dorset Opera Festival

Dorset Opera Festival is an annual country house opera festival combining amateur and professional performers, which takes place at Bryanston near Blandford Forum in Dorset, England.

[1] Founded as Dorset Opera by Patrick Shelley at Sherborne School in 1974, it moved to Bryanston in 2005, when Roderick Kennedy became its artistic director, and it became Dorset Opera Festival in 2011.

[2] Recent productions below:[3] 2011: Puccini's Tosca and Verdi's Otello[4] 2012: Verdi's Il trovatore, Puccini's Suor Angelica, and Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrament by Lord Berners.

[5] 2013: La traviata, directed by Jonathan Miller, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman and a reduced version of La bohème staged by Dutch National Touring Opera.

[2] 2014: Verdi's Aida and Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio 2015: Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore 2016: Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Verdi's Macbeth 2017: Gounod's Faust and Rossini's Le comte Ory 2018: Puccini's La bohème and Massenet's Le Cid (the British stage première) 2019: Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Verdi's Nabucco 2021: Mozart's Don Giovanni, Mozart's Così fan tutte and Handel's Acis & Galatea in the Mozart orchestration 2022: Puccini's Manon Lescaut and Mozart's The Magic Flute 2023: Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Massenet's Le Roi de Lahore (finalist in the International Opera Awards 2023) 2024: Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Paul Carr's Under The Greenwood Tree (librettist Euan Tait, after Thomas Hardy)