Kent Opera

Kent Opera was a British opera company in the period 1969-1989. Based in Ashford, England the Company presented its productions in several centres mainly in the southern part of England. These included The Orchard Theatre, Dartford, the Assembly Halls, Tunbridge Wells, Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, Kings Theatre, Southsea, Theatre Royal Norwich, the Derngate, Northampton. Operas were performed in English usually with new translations of the libretto, mainly by professor Michael Irwin but also by both Norman Platt and Anne Riddler. The orchestra was at first the Midland Sinfonia, though after two years the company employed its own orchestra.

Kent Opera was England's first regional opera company, founded in 1969 by Norman Platt, in response to a perceived need for first-class opera in England outside the main centres, in productions that were composer-centred. Kent Opera gave its inaugural performances in 1969 with The Coronation of Poppea, sung in English at Canterbury and Tunbridge Wells with Adrian de Peyer, a high tenor, as Nero and Laura Sarti as Poppea. The edition chosen by the conductor, Roger Norrington, was that by Raymond Leppard, but in 1974, when the company was invited to Lisbon, Norrington, with the members of the Kent Opera continuo, produced a realisation closer to Monteverdi's manuscripts. Anne Pashley and Sandra Browne were now the lovers, Laura Sarti sang Ottavia and John Tomlinson Seneca. Later in the year the production toured Kent and performed at the City of London Festival: ‘It comes closer to the heart of this blazing masterpiece than any other I have heard’, wrote the Sunday Telegraph. The following year, in a new translation by Norman Platt, the opera was performed at the Proms, with Sarah Walker as Poppea. In 1986 Kent Opera toured a new production of Poppea with Patricia Rosario as Nero and Eirian James as Poppea and Iván Fischer made his own new realisation of the score.

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