Forget the Royal Opera House. For a magic Flute, give me Longborough

It takes an opera you've seen before to really drive home just how special Longborough is.  I've written about all four of our excursions to this up-and-coming opera festival since our first outing, to Die Walküre, in 2010.  I've loved the whole feel of the place, the Cotswold setting, the black tie picnics in the fields, the luxurious B&B to round out the weekend.  And the opera performances, of course.  Up to this point, however, everything we'd seen on stage was new to me.

This summer's first production was The Magic Flute, a Mozart classic with fantastic music, a strange plot and one aria that must be amongst the 10 greatest pieces of music ever written.  We'd seen the full bells and whistles version at the Royal Opera house last year.  I loved it.  But Longborough bettered it.

Granted, there was no big budget production, lavish costumes or internationally-known singers.  Longborough's stage is no bigger or more advanced than that of a high school musical, and their budgets allow only economical sets.  Budgets force a cleverness of design that, in this case, created a compelling and mysterious set that moved the plot along elegantly.  There's innovation in production, too.  The spoken parts of the opera were done in English.  It drew some gasps of shock from the audience, but why not?  It gave the plot a continuity and pace I hadn't felt in the more traditional production.

Sliding screens gave us a black, ominous vortex that served as the Queen of the Night's realm.  Those slid back to reveal clean lines of a simple building; the structure and order of Sarastro's temple.  Tricks of perspective and diaphanous screens made the stage look much deeper than it was.  Most impressively, a large, silky expanse of cloth was variously a serpent, a screen, an ocean and the murky clouds of dreaming, thanks to the dextrous manipulations of the cast.  Papageno's birds are tied to helium balloons and you can watch the sprites make thunder by rattling a sheet of metal.  The only high tech effect was lights shining from books to illuminate the faces of the temple priests holding them.  Otherwise, it felt like a production Mozart would have recognised.  And that felt good.


I thought all the voices were strong, and that Penelope Randall-Davis’ Queen of the Night delivered the famous "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" ("The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart") better than I'd heard it at the Royal Opera House.  That, of course, may be to do with sitting practically on top of the performers.  When you can hear each nuance, see every movement and pick up even small facial movements, everything comes to greater life.  That effect was glaringly noticeable in Nicholas Merryweather's Papageno (pictured above), brought to his full comic potential by the singer's gangling frame and expressive face.


Outside, the weather was dire.  We'd assembled a merry band that wasn't going to give in, however.  Screened from the worst by our tent, we did a full four-course dinner, complete with silver candelabra, champagne and chicken liver parfait brûlée flamed on the tailgate.  It might have been cold and wet, but it was elegant.


As usual, we returned to Windy Ridge.  Immediately after the opera, we returned on a golf cart, trying to avoid crashing into trees as we drove through a pitch-black arboretum.   I haven't laughed that hard in years.  At the end of the path was my favourite B&B in the UK, which continues to delight.  I've started referring to it as our holiday cottage.  Why bother with the maintenance issues and responsibilities of a second home when we can settle in to this lovely estate a few times a year?