It’s midsummer in the UK, which means the country-house opera festival season is in full swing. Canadians will be familiar with glittering international events like Glyndebourne and Grange Park, but there are plenty of smaller festivals to be found in equally attractive settings which attract devoted British audiences each year, even if they have a lower profile abroad.
One such offering is Longborough Festival Opera, near the impossibly pretty Cotswolds market town of Stow-on-the Wold, with its hobbitty church and dulce-de-leche coloured stone buildings. Longborough started in 1991, when founders Martin and Lizzie Graham began hosting opera soirées in their expansive garden, with guests sitting on hay bales. Eventually, a bijou opera house was built – a converted metal barn tarted up with pink and white columns in homage to Bayreuth (the festival has become known for its Wagner, including complete Ring cycles in 2013 and 2024).
Martin died at Easter this year; his legacy is carried forward by daughter Polly, Longborough’s artistic director since 2018. This year’s season features three productions: Il barbière di Siviglia, Pelléas et Mélisande, and Dido and Aeneas. I attended the first two, which both starred Canadian singers.
Louise Bakker’s new production of Barber is the perfect romp for a warm June day, sweet and frothy as an ice cream float. The setting is late 1980s Spain, complete with teased bangs, tacky tourist hotels and neon everything. Max Johns’s simple but versatile set consists of a ground floor or street level and upper balcony, making efficient use of space on Longborough’s petite stage.
The layout is ideal for the physical comedy and slapstick hijinks that make this production so charming. The cast gambol up and down the single staircase, dangle from ladders, hide conspicuously behind fake plants, and even perform a kind of overwrought, Pat Benataresque music video choreography. The blue eyeshadow, mullets, and logo tees add to the general silliness, with more than a sprinkling of Gen-X nostalgia from costume designer Anisha Fields.
Henry Neill brings a level of cheesy bombast to his extravagantly coiffed Figaro that even “the Hoff” would admire. The voice is juicy and flexible, although a wider dynamic range would have brought some depth to his performance – everything was stubbornly slotted in the mezzo-forte to fortissimo range.
As Almaviva, Joseph Doody showed off exceptional vocal quality and control – a true tenore di grazia, high and penny-bright, never insipid, with pearly fioritura, ringing high notes and elegant phrasing. Young Scottish mezzo Lauren Young was an irresistible mall-queen Rosina, all sass and telenovela dramatics, backed by a plush, warm, powerful instrument. She handled Rossini’s coloratura adroitly and with taste, never pushing for the more extreme extensions or exaggerated ornamentation.
Canadian Trevor Eliot Bowes was clearly having a marvellous time as the unctuous, scheming Basilio. His “La calunnia” was a tour de force of comedic timing, building to a stupendous climax. As Bartolo, Benjamin Bevan also showed terrific comic skills, although he tended to woof and bellow his way through the music. Soprano Shafali Jalota’s Berta – reimagined as a nosy hotel maid – was a scene stealer.
The pickup orchestra, conducted by Elaine Kelly, sounded as effervescent and energetic as the cast, although there were a few disjointed moments where they were outracing the singers, caught up in the inexorable, washing machine churn of the composer’s ostinati.
Photo Credit: Jorge Lizalde
Nia Coleman (Yniold) with Brett Polegato in the Longborough Festival’s Pelléas et Mélisande
Two weekends later, I was back on Longborough’s lovely grounds for the opening night of Pelléas et Mélisande, in a striking new staging by Jennie Ogilvie. If Barber was bathed in Costa del Sol light and colour, this was the exact opposite.
The stage was dimly lit by single, swinging bulbs, fluorescent tubes or spotlights here and there, creating sharp, sunset shadows and spooky areas of almost palpable gloom– a nod to the original 1893 staging of the Maeterlinck play on which the opera is based. The colour scheme was all inky blacks and deep chocolate browns, with accents of ashy white and aubergine in the luxe, vaguely 1930s costumes – another Anisha Fields triumph. The astonishing set consisted of a mobile wall made up of different-sized rectangular or square shadowboxes, like a giant Advent calendar, which the characters used as rooms, platforms and stairwells.
Having sung the role Pelléas to great acclaim for years, Canadian baritone Brett Polegato made his debut as Golaud. Polegato continues to evolve as one of opera’s great singing actors: his Golaud was tortured, obsessed, selfish and suspicious, tender and cruel in turns. His final, howling scene was horrifying and heartbreaking at the same time, all the more impressive for the sustained beauty and quality of the singing. Polegato delivered a masterclass in maintaining control while creating the illusion of losing control – and all that while nursing a torn ACL!
The charismatic Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman was a compelling, naively pure and open-hearted Pelléas. My personal preference is for a baritone in this role; Sulayman’s voice is delicious: smooth, elegant and attractively coloured, but the heavier orchestral textures overpowered him in places.
Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper had no such issues as Mélisande. This is a voice that immediately makes you sit up in your seat: bell-clear and spinny, with an unusual, almost veiled quality that floated above Debussy’s lush orchestration like a cloud.
The musicians luxuriated in Debussy’s evocative orchestral interludes. Conductor Anthony Negus underlined the brooding score’s deeper recesses and the elusive, watery character of the music, although I would have liked to hear more French shimmer and sheen from the higher strings and woodwinds. After so much unremitting murk, emerging into the late afternoon, English summer light was a disorienting experience.
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Natasha Gauthier has been covering classical music in Canada and the US for more than 20 years. She writes for Artsfile, Ottawa Magazine, was the classical critic at the Ottawa Citizen, and regularly contributes to Opera Canada.
