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| Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia - finale of Act One - Longborough Festival Opera, 2025 (Photo: Clive Barda) |
Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia: Joseph Doody, Lauren Young, Benjamin Bevan, Henry Neill, director: Louise Bakker, conductor Elaine Kelly; Longborough Festival Opera
Reviewed 13 July 2025
It might be described as 'the British Bayreuth' but Longborough's stylishly engaging 1970s take on Rossini's comic masterpiece radiated both musical style and sheer enjoyment
This year's Longborough Festival Opera season does not feature any of the works by Wagner for which it has become known, though in Avner Dorman's Wahnfried: The Birth of the Wagner Cult and Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, Wagner and his ideas were never far away. In completed contrast, the third opera being presented was far lighter, Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia.
We were lucky enough to catch the final performance, on Sunday 13 July 2025. Directed by Louise Bakker, designed by Max Johns and Anisha Fields, and conducted by Elaine Kelly, the production featured Henry Neill as Figaro, Joseph Doody as Count Almaviva, Lauren Young as Rosina, Benjamin Bevan as Dr Bartolo, Shafali Jalota as Berta, Trevor Eliot Bowes as Don Basilio, and Kieran Rayner as Fiorello. The staff for the production also featured a couple of other notable names; the tenor Alessandro Fisher was assistant director and language coach, whilst David Eaton (music director of Charles Court Opera) was assistant conductor, chorus master and responsible for the continuo.
Max Johns' imaginative set provided all the wherewithal for the opera's farcical elements and did service both for the indoor and outdoor scenes. During the overture, we opened on a Spanish square in a tourist destination in the 1970s, judging from the costumes. Itinerant vendors were setting up their wares, and Henry Neill's Figaro was established as being something of a wide boy and completely itinerant, without any fixed workplace. Feeling the need to fill the whole overture, Bakker rather allowed this joke to play for too long, but it provided valuable background for the comedy to come.
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| Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia - Storm scene: Lauren Young & chorus - Longborough Festival Opera, 2025 (Photo: Clive Barda) |
The slightly over-done mannerism and over-active action partook of the visual language of sitcom and there was a feeling that Bakker and Johns had reset the opera in Benidorm. Whilst Bakker certainly endeavoured to fill the stage with colour and movement, with a fondness for over emphasis, there was little of the extreme stylisation that directors sometimes resort to when faced with Rossini's large-scale structures. The recitative rattled along nicely, with the cast managing to find a vocal and visual language that gelled. The opera was sung in Italian, nice and clear from my fourth row seats, with Nick Fowler's surtitles giving us a rather casual, demotic take on Sterbini's original.
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