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We have become accustomed over the summer (and even before that) to social events being disrupted by Just Stop Oil demonstrations. Polly Graham’s production of The Fairy Queen for Longborough amusingly forestalls such an interruption by staging its own environmental protest. The actor who plays the Drunken Poet in Act One’s masque opens proceedings as a politician …

Longborough Festival 2023 – Purcell’s The Fairy Queen – Lars Fischer, Rachel Speirs, Luke Horner & Peter Edge; directed by Polly Graham; conducted by Harry Sever & Naomi Burrell Read More »

So well-known is the myth of Orpheus (not least because it was treated as the subject of several of the earliest operas) and so urgently direct is its retelling by Alessandro Striggio in the libretto of Monteverdi’s masterpiece, that it doesn’t necessarily need much embellishment in its staging. Olivia Fuchs’s production is all the more …

Longborough Festival 2023 – Monteverdi’s Orfeo – Peter Gijsbertsen, Aoife Miskelly, Frances Gregory & Julien Ségol; directed by Olivia Fuchs; conducted by Robert Howarth Read More »

The point is often made that the only props needed to stage Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle are a spear, a sword, a Tarnhelm and the Ring. To that list Amy Lane has added a leather-bound journal, which was also present in last year’s Siegfried, in the hands of the sybil-like Woodbird. We are probably meant to infer that …

Anthony Negus conducts Longborough Festival’s staging of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, directed by Amy Lane Read More »

Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (1625) was the occasion for several firsts in operatic history – the first surviving opera written by a woman; after its premiere during the carnival season in Florence, it possibly became the first Italian opera to be performed outside of the peninsula of Italian states (in Poland in 1628); …

Longborough Festival 2022 – Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero & Freya Waley-Cohen’s Spell Book Read More »

There were two things in Amy Lane’s new production of Part Three of The Ring that delivered much with almost casual simplicity. The staging is part of Longborough’s unfolding cycle – Rheingold appeared in 2019; there was nothing in the Covid blight of 2020; an orchestrally scaled down, socially-distanced semi-staging of Walküre last year; Götterdämmerung …

Longborough Festival Opera – Wagner’s Siegfried conducted by Anthony Negus Read More »