Longborough Festival Opera

Welcome to Longborough Festival Opera.

The 2011 Festival opens with a new production of Cosi fan tutte led by Italian conductor Gianluca Marciano and director Jenny Miller. Cosi fan tutte is a wry comedy about love and trust, as two young men test their fiancées loyalty . Elizabeth Donovan and Martene Grimson return as Fiordiligi and Despina and Rodney Clarke and Louise Callinan make their Longborough debuts as Guglielmo and Dorabella.

The third opera in this summer’s Festival will be a new production of Verdi’s Falstaff, conducted by Jonathan Lyness and directed and designed by Richard Studer. Verdi’s final masterpiece, full of lyrical melodies, this opera is romantic and comical the same time as we watch the pompous Falstaff tricked by the wealthy wives of Windsor. Simon Thorpe sings the title role and Linda Richardson (Butterfly in 2010) makes a welcome return as Alice Ford, with Gaynor Keeble joining them as Mistress Quickly. Longborough has a strong commitment to the involvement of young people in productions and Falstaff offers local schoolchildren opportunities to take part.

At Longborough, we have a fully-fledged opera house seating 480, complete with an orchestra pit accommodating up to 65 players. It is built in the grounds of our house on the edge of the Cotswold village of Longborough with beautiful views across the Evenlode Valley, and has been included in the latest Pevsner guide to buildings in England. In 2007 the building had a major face lift: a new façade and a new insulated raised roof were added, together with a new staircase and grand upper foyer.