It’s a knockout

Die Walküre
Longborough

Not having been to Longborough and its opera festival before, I was bowled over by it in all respects. The much-referred-to extended garage is an extremely comfortable theatre, with more than 400 seats, and with plenty of space in the foyer to make intervals a far more agreeable affair than they are in London’s two major opera houses. The setting is, of course, enchanting, the trimmings slightly playful, no hint of pretentiousness such as one finds in several other country-house operatic establishments, and no lengthy hectoring before the performance gets under way. However, none of that would count for anything if the performances weren’t well worth the trouble of getting there.

I went only to Die Walküre, and it was a knockout. Martin Graham has made no secret of his overriding ambition: to mount Wagner’s Ring cycle — the ambition that also animated John Christie when he founded Glyndebourne, but which was soon abandoned. Longborough has already had one shot at the Ring, which I saw when it came to Cambridge in 2004, but that was in Jonathan Dove’s chamber orchestration, and with as much of the work cut as presented, so that for a Wagner-lover it was a matter of waiting tensely for the next cut. What is in progress now is a completely different affair, and one that can stand comparison, in terms of musical interpretation and commitment, to any Ring one might see in the world.

The orchestra is more than 60-strong, the singers are an impressive team, some of them very experienced, and above all Anthony Negus, the conductor, gave as ardent, penetrating and concentrated an account of the astonishing score as any I have heard in decades. He was a colleague of Reginald Goodall, the last supreme Wagner conductor, and he learnt many vital lessons from him, while not adopting Goodall’s often very broad tempi, which often worked for him but not for anyone else.