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Tannhäuser
Longborough Festival Opera
***** OPERA North, Welsh National Opera and
London’s two principal companies all play their part in bringing Wagner,
intermittently, to the English stage. Indeed Opera North’s much-praised Ring cycle has
just reached completion, and been seen in Leeds, Salford, Nottingham and
other venues. But there is one venue which surely holds the
torch for Wagner productions. It is the ‘English Bayreuth’, the
much-praised at Longborough, near Stow-on-the-Wold. Longborough has always seemed something of a
miracle among opera companies. Some 18 years ago, Martin and Lizzie
Graham launched the first of their Ring cycles, using initially - to gr By 2014, when they had
brought to fruition the (I think) third of their complete cycles, and
were moving on to Tristan and Isolde,
their catchment had extended far and wide. The audience is lured from
great distances to catch the latest offering of this by now renowned
‘English Bayreuth’. A battle with the planners, which the Grahams
won, enabled them to map out plans for the future. Longborough is a
long-term fixture, and still as exciting and attractive as ever.
Everything about Longborough is appealing. It can
be reached via the Fosse Way, turning off either before or just after
Stow-on-the-Wold. Alternatively, from Oxford or Broadway and Evesham
direction. Gradually a quite modest structure - a simple
barn adorned with superfluous crimson-coloured seats obtained from
Covent Garden - has been expanded with buildings and follies that would
do Capability Brown proud. The auditorium has enlarged its upper layers
into a swathe of comfortable boxes, circling the whole interior. The
orchestra pit, initially modest, is now big enough to house an orchestra
of truly Wagnerian dimensions. It’s possible to hear Mozart, Handel, Britten,
Janacek and others at Longborough, often directed and conducted by the
ever-inventive team of Richard Studer and Jonathan Lyness, or the
ingenious Thomas Guthrie, who shares this season’s new Figaro with
Robert Houssart. But the senior team is
undoubtedly Alan Privett and conductor Anthony Negus, who this year
moved on from an acclaimed Tristan
(with Rachel Nicholls and Peter Wedd) to a brand new
Tannhäuser. This was a production in which the singing proved
endlessly rewarding. Whom to praise first? The two leads, obviously. But
before them, two absolutely riveting performances from among the
Minnesingers, the group of masterly vocal performers to whom Tannhäuser,
before his disappearance to dally with Venus, belonged. Donald Thomson as Duke Hermann, the Thuringian
landgrave (the action is based in what used to be East Germany) brought
such a noble dignity and rich bass tone to the role that he revealed And especially by the Second and Third Acts, the
Icelander Hrólfur Sæmundsson’s Wolfram von Eschenbach (the Fischer-Dieskau
role), desperate to divert the errant Tannhäuser from returning to his
old ways and restore his Christian sense of duty, brought such passion
and also elegance to his arias he proved one of the highlights of the
entire evening.
But the same can be said for the remaining
Minnesingers - Charles Johnston’s visibly engaged Renmar van Zweter
stood out vocally, clearly audible amid the textures - and the entire
female and male chorus (trained superbly by Philip White), whether
wafting mystically like restrained Rhine Maidens or delivering with
character the Pilgrims’ chorus and the other vigorous chanting related
to it. Longborough excelled
itself here - now sporting a fully sized ensemble of 24 singers,
producing a fresh and exciting, and involving, sound, and enhancing
hugely the allure and attractiveness of a score that has
occasional longueurs.
Alison Kettlewell sang Venus, an entrapping Circe
figure, in a fetching costume but with an even more fetching voice. Her
launch, in low register, was absolutely searing: a thrilling sound which
made one’s nerves tingle. Her efforts to retain Tannhäuser within her
power (contrast his ‘I can’t remain your slave. I would find peace
through repentance’) produced a moving riposte: ‘How have I deserved
this?’, in which an obligato clarinet produced a meltingly beautiful
effect to support the wheedling goddess. On the subject of
obbligato, the wonderful Act I scene with the young Shepherd (Chiara
Vinci), sumptuously accompanied at side of stage by a plangent cor
anglais, incredibly moving, was one of the highights. But the solo
instrument touches from the endlessly impressive Longborough Festival
Orchestra stood out time and again: solo oboe, not least, early on, and
later an ensemble of cellos; but also harp accompanied by reduced
strings for Wolfram, and some mesmerising touches for French horn,
including a kind of evocative envoi
closing Act I. Erika Mädi Jones made Elisabeth a full-blooded
character: not merely pious (which of course she is), but forceful and
persuasive, not afraid to intervene, so that it is something of a
surprise that she is not successful in bringing Tannhäuser to shed his
wayward lifestyle. Elisabeth’s exquisite prayer to the Virgin, with
clarinet again in accompaniment, all somewhat hymnic, was
Of the cast, this leaves us with John Treleaven,
who shared the role of the vexed lead with (on two nights) Neal Cooper.
Treleaven is a Wagnerian of real distinction, who has made Tristan his
own in many of the great European opera houses, not least Verona,
Hamburg and Berlin. He cuts a weighty figure, ponderous, lumbering, but
intense and involving as he struggles with his past misdemeanours, his
betrayal of his colleagues and his deep-seated yearning to put things
right. Even in Act I he introduces or anticipates the
Pilgrims’ music (‘The burden of my sins is intolerable’). It is as if
his long sojourn with Venus and her sex-craving maidens has been not so
much a commitment on his part as a protracted experiment. When the male
chorus surges forth for the first time, effectively counterpointed, it
is so pleading and impassioned - just as effective as the previous
female ensemble - that one sees what a fix he is in. Direction and Set Design were sensible and
unostentatious; especially effective in marshalling and locating the
larger ensembles. One would perhaps pick out Lights designer Ben Ormerod,
who from the seductive opening Venus scene, swathed in sensual reds and
pinks, captured the flavour at many points in the action. But the hero of this
Tannhäuser,
as with all of Longborough’s musically adroit Wagner productions from
the outset, is conductor Anthony Negus.
Tannhäuser
sports some extremely lengthy preludes, and Negus’s skill at maintaining
pace and definition, at teasing out the most subtle solo work from deep
within the textures, and by careful balances ensuring that no detail is
wasted or lost, stood out here just as they did in all of the
challenging Ring cycles seen at Longborough hitherto, and which reached
perhaps their apex in 2015’s Tristan
and the 2014-completed cycle. T0 18-06-16 Roderic Dunnett 06-16
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all the qualities of a top-class Sarastro. This was a performance to
treasure. 
notably
touching; just as earlier, in Act II, her intense conversation with her
uncle and guardian, Thomson’s serenely noble Landgrave, yielded a
passionate exchange which led up to a large scale chorus of both sexes,
with fast moving strings hastening the urgent narrative along. The
chorus ‘The will of heaven’, taken at an impressively slow pace by
conductor Anthony Negus, was all the more striking for its slow
unravelling.