Das Rheingold review – Longborough begins new Ring with assurance and clarity

Wagner has been the raison d’être of Longborough festival ever since Martin and Lizzie Graham began planning a summer opera season in the grounds of their Cotswolds home, two decades ago. What can now be seen as the first phase of their festival’s development climaxed with a remarkable series of complete Ring cycles in 2013. Since then the Grahams have passed on artistic leadership of the festival to their daughter Polly, an opera director herself. The centrepiece of her plans is a new Ring, conducted once again by Anthony Negus, who has been central to Wagner projects at Longborough from the start, and directed by Amy Lane. It was launched with the production of Das Rheingold that opens this year’s Longborough season.

In an opera house that only seats 500, with stage facilities to match, this was never going to be a Ring cycle on an epic scale. No one goes to Longborough expecting elaborate scenic effects. To judge from this first instalment, Lane’s approach and that of her designers will be modestly straightforward, without any obvious big ideas but with video projections that veer between the naturalistic and the abstract to supply an extra layer of visual interest, and costumes that could be characterised as Victorian gothic.

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It begins unpromisingly, with a rather clumsy and unimaginative opening scene of cavorting Rhinemaidens and a predatory Alberich. But everything becomes steadily more involving thereafter, and the shining virtues of Longborough Wagner become more obvious: exemplary diction – how often in any theatre is so much of Wagner’s text as clear as this? – and a performance under Negus that fits every element into the dramatic scheme with total assurance.

Among the cast, Mark Le Brocq’s foppish, sardonic Loge and Mark Stone’s vocally authoritative Alberich stand out, managing to create stage personalities to match the strength of their musical ones, while Darren Jeffrey’s Wotan still seems to be a work-in-progress: in an intimate space that seems to cry out for a lieder-style performance, he was just too strident. But a suitably insistent Fricka from Madeleine Shaw, a gorgeously sung Erda from Mae Heydom and a surly Fafner from Simon Wilding all promise much more to come, and Negus will surely make the most of that.

Further performances 7, 9 and 11 June. Longborough Festival Opera continues until 3 August.