Confronting the new: Old School B&B is a hit, Fidelio misses

REVIEW: The Old School B&B, Fidelio at Longborough Festival Opera

It was all change to start of our seventh season at the Longborough Festival Opera. A new (to us) opera, and a new B&B, pushed us out of our comfort zone.

From our discovery of this magical operatic venue, we'd stayed on a neighbouring estate called Windy Ridge. It played an important role in our courtship, we briefly considered holding our wedding reception there, and our regular visits were the first tradition we established in our married life. I spent a poignant, and very special, Thanksgiving weekend at Windy Ridge with my mother just three months before she died. We were the only guests and the owner gave us the run of the place, treating us as ladies of the manor. Five years later, we hired the whole house out to stage a 1920s-themed murder mystery party for my husband's birthday; one of the best events we've ever hosted. We called it "the summer house". Windy Ridge was a special part of our lives.

But things change. The owner decided to retire from the hard work of hospitality, and we had to find a new home for our annual country house opera weekends. The Old School shows strong potential to step into the beloved spot that our departed summer house has left vacant.

This understated yet luxurious B&B is on the A44 just east of Moreton-in-Marsh. The building started life as a Victorian schoolhouse; the original, cathedral-like school room is now divided into two stories, both lounges for guests' use. The upper one, with its exposed beams, church-style window and overstuffed sofas is particularly lavish, and relatively private considering that there are only four bedrooms for guests. Bookshelves are stocked with plenty of tomes you're tempted to dip in to, glossy magazines grace table tops and board games are stacked beside the sofas. The bedrooms have a House and Gardens Magazine feel about them, all oatmeal and cream neutrals enhanced by gentle watercolours, crisp white linens and luxurious fabrics. Our bathroom had a big tub (with shower) and multiple windows letting light flood in. There's a lovely traditional garden out back with places to eat outside or snooze amongst the flowers.

It's the kind of place you could easily settle into for long hours and forget the temptations of sightseeing.

Hostess Wendy Veale takes care with the little touches, from dressing gowns and bottled water in a bedroom fridge to reaching out a fortnight in advance of your stay to offer local knowledge, restaurant reservations, etc.  She was mindful of our anxiety over moving to a new place and was tremendously helpful with refrigeration for our opera picnics, sorting taxis, booking overflow guests and generally giving us the lay of the land.

Come mornings, Wendy pushes well beyond the traditional B&B breakfast, though if you opt for that you will be both delighted by the quality (the eggs all come from an enormous chicken enclosure at the bottom of the garden) and embarrassed by the quantity. Even hearty appetites are likely to be defeated by the mountain of sausage, bacon, black pudding and fried bread that accompany the less sinful eggs and veg. The next morning I downshifted to smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, but could have selected from a broad menu including omelettes, porridge, "eggs royale", eggy bread (aka French Toast) or pretty much anything I could dream up. A groaning sideboard held the usual array of fruit, cereal, yogurts and juices, if you could make a dent in them. (Or cared to go continental.)

So we successfully faced the anxiety of change. We are looking forward to a return visit to our new Cotswolds home next month and hope to become regulars at The Old School in future seasons.

We were less enthusiastic about the new opera.

Fidelio was my least favourite of any production we've seen in seven seasons at Longborough. Given that I've raved with appreciation over almost every past visit, they had set high standards for themselves. The fault was partially with the opera itself, a bit with the performance and a great deal with the director's choice of staging.

While the singers were excellent (particularly Elizabeth Atherton's Leonora/Fidelio and John Paul
Huckle's Rocco) but the orchestra started out surprisingly timid. A shame, since the overture is the only memorable bit of this opera that most people will know. It sounded like a handful of key players were trapped in traffic and didn't make it for the start time. It could simply have been opening night nerves and a young guest conductor, Gad Kadosh, but it wasn't until the second act that the orchestra pit was delivering its usual rich sound.

None of our party of six had seen Beethoven's opera before, and we were all looking forward to it. We all left feeling a bit underwhelmed. While the plot is a good one ... plucky, faithful wife goes under cover as a man to find and spring her missing husband from political prison ... there isn't a lot of action to stage. It is mostly small groups of people singing at each other in a couple of rooms within a prison. A greater surprise from such a famous composer: the music is pleasant rather than memorable. Beyond the overture, there's simply not an aria that you'd walk out humming, much less demand an encore of. In fact, some of it seemed remarkably derivative. One of the most beautiful bits, where a duo becomes a trio and then a quartet, seems like a blatant rip-off of a similar scene in The Marriage of Figaro.

Perhaps we would have appreciated the music more if we hadn't been so distracted by the staging. Without reading the programme or the reviews, my interpretation was a bit off piste. The stage is set with what's obviously a drug production factory. We open with a line of women packing drugs. They leave and Leonora's husband, Florestan, investigates the scene. The bad guy, Pizzaro, catches him. A fight ensues. Pizzaro gets shot and ends up in a wheelchair, Florestan gets thrown into a lower cell. Shift to Act 1, it's two years later and Leonora ... now disguised as Fidelio ... is working in the prison while the male prisoners (but not Florestan) stand around the back hooked to glowing lines that fed into a big, central machine.

My interpretation: Pizzaro was supposed to be managing a prison, but was making a mint by also running it as a meth lab staffed by the free labour of his prisoners. I thought the glowing lines showed the unfair robbery of labour from the prisoners for his nefarious ends. With this interpretation, the plot zipped along as an entertaining episode of Breaking Bad or Hawaii 5-O with a Beethoven soundtrack. Complete with shoot-out ending and a near death before the bad guys get their just deserts and the good ones live happily ever after. It was an enjoyable romp at the time, but all seemed quite lightweight. Leonora's great paeans to fidelity, which are supposed to be the emotional hook of the piece, got lost in a straightforward, fast-paced episode of a crime drama.

Afterwards, we learned that the glowing lines were supposed to be pumping the drugs IN to the prisoners, and it was all a big commentary on the unfairness of incarceration and the prevalence of drugs in the prison system. I think I'm glad I didn't know that in advance.

We also had issues with the lighting. The programme notes say they were going for oppressive gloom. Anyone who's seen a Caravaggio knows that you can do gloom, anxiety and drama while still bathing your main characters in light. The design here washed everything in a dim half-light so murky that one of our party with vision problems could see nothing at all of the second act, and little of the first. (I'm quite sure they jacked up the light for the press photo I've used here.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, our partially-sighted friend appreciated the music more than the rest of us.

I didn't hate Fidelio.

At the time, I was highly entertained. But I wasn't moved. My emotions remained untouched, both by the music and by the plot. I suspect that's not what Beethoven was going for. I'll give Longborough's Fidelio this: it's the first opera here from which I've emerged keen to take in another production, to see if I'd like someone else's interpretation more.

I am now a tiny bit nervous about next month's Magic Flute. Brace yourselves.