Longborough Festival Opera / Vélemények

Le timbre riche du baryton-basse Julien Ségol est idéal dans ses trois emplois : aimable en Berger, inquiétant en Esprit, c’est au service de Pluton que le jeune homme use avec le plus d’impact d’une voix fort caractérisée.

The scenes in the Underworld were dominated by Pluto sung by baritone/bass Julien Ségol. He has a fascinating history having left previous careers in diplomacy and as a philosophy lecturer to become an opera singer. Philosophy’s loss is opera’s gain as he has a velvety, rich voice a bit like cognac spiced with gunpowder.

The whole raison d’être of the Longborough Festival was always the performance of its founder Martin Graham’s beloved Wagner. So it’s perfectly natural that the twelfth anniversary of the start of the festival’s original Ring cycle should be marked by the inauguration of a completely new cycle, under, so to speak, new management: the Grahams’ daughter Polly, who took over as artistic director last year, and the Royal Opera’s Amy Lane, directing The Ring itself. Negus’s cast mostly copes admirably with the challenge. The unquestionable star of the show is Mark Le Brocq’s Loge (pictured below), a kind of fin de siècle Mephistopheles, with frock coat and cane, pirouetting round the stage in a way that openly ridicules the stolid, bewildered, humourless bourgeoisie of mount Valhalla, and even runs rings (non-golden) round the crafty tenants of Nibelheim. He also sings - the most lyrical music in the opera - with elegance and eloquence. But there are excellent things elsewhere. Mark Stone’s Alberich, though inertly directed, has moments of real vocal splendour, Adrian Dwyer is a lively if too likeable Mime, and the giants, Fasolt (Pauls Putnins) and Fafner (Simon Wilding), are cleverly differentiated both vocally and professionally (chauffeur and bookmaker perhaps). I like very much Amy Lane’s idea of a hypersensitive, lovelorn Fasolt and a tender Freia (Marie Arnet) who would almost elope with him if it weren’t for her duties in the Valhalla orchard. And did I detect a parallel moment of sympathy between Wotan and Alberich at the moment when Wotan seizes the ring? Honour among thieves, or some deeper vibration?

This is Longborough Festival Opera’s Das Rheingold and the first instalment of the complete Ring-cycle up until 2022. It's also Polly Graham’s second season as Artistic Director of the festival established by her parents in 1991 - a founding year that was to bring an operatic dream of a British Bayreuth to reality. A first Cotswold Rheingold in 1998 heralded a Wagnerian Eden. It’s not been a smooth ride - early on a critic considered ‘Mr Graham will give more pleasure by being less ambitious’ - but history has proved otherwise and the intimate space of Longborough’s 500-seat theatre (salvaged from Covent Garden) is no barrier to artistic enterprise or a composer’s gargantuan vision. If anything, Longborough’s limited dimensions admirably suits Rheingold’s text-laden outlines where its creative energies (unfettered by the absence of technical wizardry) can be distilled through depth of characterisation and powerful musicianship. Designs and costumes aside, what really lifted this Rheingold into something almost revelatory was the standard of acting and singing - albeit not uniformly excellent, but with enough definition to repeatedly draw the ear and eye towards several outstanding performances. Chief amongst these was Mark Le Brocq’s dodgy dealer Loge, whose crimson frockcoat and twirling cane brought a whiff of a Victorian music hall MC. His ease of movement and vocal projection were outstanding, his perfectly caught ambivalence tailor-made for this role. His pirouetting laid bare Darren Jeffrey’s stolid and authoritatively sung Wotan whose lumbering gait worked against his impressive build, otherwise ideal as a ruler of the gods. More convincing was the nimble and dishevelled Mark Stone as Alberich, utterly persuasive in voice and single-minded ambition. His brother, Mime, was sung by a clarion-voiced Adrian Dwyer who brought considerable energy to his ensemble scenes.

Henry James when talking about reviewing books or music or drama was insistent that one must start by accepting “the given”. So when reviewing a Wagner opera at the Longborough Festival Opera, the first given is to remember that you are not at Bayreuth or the Royal Opera House. Longobourgh has its own approach and house style for Wagner and the constraints of a smaller theatre or even a smaller budget than the more august opera houses in no way diminishes the impact, enjoyment, or inspiration of their productions. Yet again, with a new production of Wagner’s Siegfried, this company provides its audience with a remarkable and thoroughly engaging experience of opera as drama. All the elements of music, scenery, movement, and declamation blend into a seamless whole that rivets the attention. Musically, Anthony Negus leads a committed, idiomatic, and intensely moving interpretation. The orchestra played with real aplomb and the brassier bits blazed while the softer moments lilted. The stage was peopled with singers who are also convincing actors and all of whom were extremely well-chosen for their roles.

Siegfried, the third instalment in Wagner's Ring cycle, is perhaps not the most engaging of the tetralogy, with its welter of back-storying and insufferable navel-gazing, but this production from the stupendous Longborough Festival Opera as it leads up to its second presentation of the complete cycle in little over ten years is the most involving I have ever seen. There is nothing to be faulted (apart from the turgid first act, Wagner's fault) in this presentation, with no weak link in the casting, amazing playing from the Longborough Festival Orchestra under the veteran, much-respected Wagner conductor Anthony Negus (such clarity of texture!), and brilliant staging effects.

“The women were simply brilliant – both vocally and dramatically... Lizzie Holmes was the fine and memorably well-sung and energetically well-acted Despina, especially delightful in the comic scenes disguised as the doctor and the judge. Her judge, in fact – an attractive and sexy woman – was so different visually from her Despina “look” that you could almost believe that she could have got away with it.” ★★★★

“Holmes (Despina) is recognised as a versatile and dynamic soprano; she certainly showed that with her two disguises, the doctor, and later, the notary… As the sister’s maid, Holmes joins in the charade and delights.”