Ring without the bling

At Longborough Festival Opera, Richard Wagner is on the roof. Literally: his statue stands on top of the little pink opera house, surveying the Evenlode valley from beneath a stone beret. He’s not alone, mind. A figure of Mozart looks up indignantly. On the other side of the pediment stands Verdi, arms folded, glowering huffily at the floor. But Wagner is on top: a permanent reminder that this is the company that took on the greatest musical-dramatic challenge in the operatic universe, and in 2013 staged a full production of Der Ring des Nibelungen in a converted barn.

And next week, they’re going to start all over again. The 2019 Festival opens with Das Rheingold, with a full cycle scheduled for 2023, the year that the company’s irrepressible founder Martin Graham turns 80. It’s a brand-new production: LFO isn’t the kind of outfit that can afford to maintain warehouses full of mothballed sets. To create a new Ring from scratch less than a decade after the previous production — when the challenge of mounting a single Ring has been known to break national opera companies — is pretty unprecedented. And since LFO has little left to prove (Michael Tanner called its 2017 production of Tristan und Isolde ‘one of the most exalting experiences I have had in the opera house’), you might be tempted to ask why. To which there’s no more eloquent an answer than attending a performance for yourself. The spirit of the place wells up from Graham’s boyish devotion to Wagner, coupled to his wife Lizzie’s organisational genius. A sense of shared, incredulous delight to be doing this at all pours out of everyone you talk to: tuba players, conductors or the ladies serving the interval tea.

Second time round it’s also a question of how. Surprisingly, direction of the whole massive project has been handed to Amy Lane, a newcomer to Longborough.