A full staging of Wagner’s Ring cycle in a converted barn in rural Gloucestershire once seemed eccentric. You may say it still is. Now in its 33rd season, Longborough festival opera, which began modestly in 1991, has become a centre of musical seriousness. Its popular founders, Lizzie and Martin Graham, who happen to be Wagner fans but open-mindedly – or sensibly – allow other composers to feature, have passed the artistic leadership to their opera director daughter, Polly Graham. With a 500-seat theatre, a dedication to environmental sustainability and an expanding programme of education and participation, the festival is a mainstay of the summer opera season. Its success is a result of artistic ambition and achievement, helped by having the Wagner specialist Anthony Negus as music director.
Last week, the festival embarked on its second complete Ring cycle (the first was in 2013), built up over five years and nearly thwarted by the pandemic. Negus’s gift, as well as training singers to perform Wagner, is to judge the pacing of this music, moving it forward but never driving it too hard. Directed by Amy Lane, the stagings make clever use of limited technical facilities and thrift, with imaginative but simple stage designs by Rhiannon Newman Brown and lighting by Charlie Morgan Jones. A video backdrop by Tim Baxter conjures painterly moonscapes, forests, rocky landscapes and the fiery furnace of Nibelheim.
