Die Walkure: Longborough Festival Opera (From The Oxford Times)

Die Walkure: Longborough Festival Opera

2:03pm Wednesday 28th July 2010 in

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One cannot do other than applaud the ambition and celebrate the achievement of Martin Graham, and the artistic team he has recruited, in staging the notoriously challenging works of Richard Wagner in an opera house fashioned from a barn beside his home.

Gloucestershire’s Bayreuth in miniature began as long ago as 1998, but only in 2007 with Das Rheingold — production standards having been ratcheted up a few gears — did Longborough Festival Opera embark on its project of building towards performances of all four operas in The Ring cycle to mark the Wagner bicentenary in 2013.

Widely judged the most accessible of the quartet — in terms of the comparative simplicity of the plot — Die Walküre, the second, was given to an ecstatic audience on Saturday in the first of three sell-out performances. The standard of musicianship, under the dedicated Wagnerian Anthony Negus, was high enough to confound the ‘impossible-ists’, as Mr Graham styled them, who said the thing could never be satisfactorily done.

A 63-strong orchestra in the newly extended pit played its heart out, from the opening of the scene-setting prelude — where a 60-bar tremolo on the strings sets the scene for so much turbulence to come — to the closing moments in a musical presentation of a mountain in flames.

The fire surrounds the disgraced heroine, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde (Alwyn Mellor), who has been put to sleep there, awaiting the attentions of the first man to wake her, by her father Wotan (Jason Howard). This is her punishment for disobeying him, by trying to save Siegmund (Andrew Rees) and his sister and wife Sieglinde (Lee Bisset), from his pre-ordained slaying by the vengeful Hunding (Mark Richardson). Wotan’s own inclination was to side with his natural son, Siegmund, but in this he has been overruled by his wife Fricka (Alison Kettlewell) — his “trouble and strife”, as this fearful figure is amusingly described by him in the surtitles.

While it becomes a little tiring peering into the darkness of director Alan Privett’s always gloomy staging, there are sometimes rich visual rewards. These include the sight of Brünnhilde’s eight Goth-garbed companions (pictured) — each with a voice of belting power — during this opera’s best-known episode, the Ride of the Valkyries.