Cast of L’Olympiade at Vache Baroque Festival | Photo: Michael Wheatley

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The Vache Baroque festival, masterminded by young singer Betty Makharinsky and conductor Jonathan Darbourne, has big plans, I hear, but for the moment it’s more or less as you were, with the addition of a tent roof over the rather hard seats pointed towards a stage built on the façade of the Jacobean mansion. Opera in gardens is a tricky business, of course. But the Bampton model – with a fallback option in the local church – makes a decent blueprint. Trouble can start when you try to get posh. Out go rugs and deckchairs, and a certain formality of staging comes in. Or so it seems. To be honest, I’m not clear why Vache charges £90 and Bampton £40 top whack. The singers and band are good at both places; the repertoire isn’t so different, and the stagings and presentation at Bampton are reliably better.

And Pergolesi’s L’Olimpiade, despite the nice Paris Olympic link, wasn’t a great choice for the cast and space. The plot of this old Metastasio chestnut (they did the Vivaldi version at the Linbury earlier this year) isn’t terribly complicated, but it’s a chatty opera and there are a lot of characters to get your head round.

The moral of the story is: try not to cheat at the Olympics. A good deal of trouble is caused when the unathletic Licida calls in a favour from his sporty pal Megacle, persuading him to take part under Licida’s name – because the gold medal comes along as a job lot with the mega-hot Aristea, the king’s daughter. One problem: Aristea is Megacle’s inamorata, though Licida doesn’t seem to know this.

Cast of L’Olympiade at Vache Baroque Festival | Photo: Michael Wheatley

That’s not all. Licida has also conveniently ‘forgotten’ his own beloved Argene, who wanders around forlornly. This moderately intricate situation takes a while to work out, and at the end it turns out that Licida and Aristea are actually long-lost twins, which happily avoids what might have been a sweaty situation.

Here, it was a bit hard to remember who was who. The recit was cut, and substituted with spoken text of uncertain tone, uncertainly delivered for the most part. And Laura Attridge’s direction and blocking (she also wrote the script) was way too static, not giving the singers much help at all with their spoken parts acting. Singing was a different matter, confidently delivered by the excellent young cast: Nazan Fikret – whose terrific debut as a 13-year-old Flora in The Turn of the Screw I saw many years ago – is a fine, strong, emotional singer, and Aoife Miskelly and Natasha Page in particular were impressive. Jonathan Darbourne conducted a good-sized band (including two horns and two trumpets) with great feeling for the variety of Paisiello’s music, an Italian version of that interregnum between baroque and full-blown classical style, a bit like our post-Handel composers Arne and Boyce.

There are the seeds of something good here, and a lot of work has gone in, but it all needs a bit of definition and more of an identity. Good to be on the tube and Chiltern railway line too – they’re reasonably unlikely to be both out of action at the same time…

Vachebaroque.com