Wiltshire festival: How a cowshed became a restaurant

If Opera has sold-out in most years since beginning around three decades ago, and hundreds of people enjoyed the latest season which took place last month. 

For the first time, it was at the home of long-standing patrons David and Fiona Robinson - Church Farm, Wingfield. 

Given the location at a private residence, which has a Grade-II listed refurbished building, and 14th Century church, and is located outside of the town of Trowbridge there is nowhere for festivalgoers to eat, relax and enjoy the setting before the baritones, sopranos and tenors sing for their lives. 

So to address this, the Robinsons built a pop-up restaurant complete with sumptuous cushioned chairs and curtains that made the space look like an Arabian tent. All of it is returned to a cowshed following the event. 

Added to this, there was plenty of seating outside, a pond and picnic area and several drinks pop-up locations for serving everything from champagne to mojitos.  

This newspaper was there to see Rigoletto, a tragic play about the arrogance of men that sees a father motivated by a revenge that leads to his daughter's undoing. 

It is considered Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's most popular and revolutionary operas, and if you are put off by the words being in a foreign language there is screens displayed above the stage showing the words sung in English. 

At this production was Russian baritone Alexey Gusev playing the title character of the seductive noblemen the Duke of Mantua's court jester, and London-based Ukrainian singer Inna Husieva playing Rigoletto's daughter Gilda. 

The first act sets the scene, before the second act really gets the action going as we see the ramifications of the Duke seducing Gilda and the famous aria, the La donna è mobile sung by the Duke, played by Uruguayan tenor Andrés Presno. 

The end leaves you saddened as Gilda seems punished by Rigoletto's earlier mocking of another conquest of the Duke's. 

More information on the event is available here ifopera.com.

The If Opera festival – which had its inception in 1994 and was known as Iford Arts – ended this year on Sunday, August 17 with a Baroque double bill and Rigoletto still to come.

Next year, the event will stage a new opera around the life of Caroline Herschel, an 19th Century astronomer who lived in Bath.

The opera festival is a charity and relies on donations with people asked to donate to keep the event going.