![]() The fact that the audience is so comparatively close to the stage means that refinements of gesture and facial expression come into play to an extent almost unknown in the bigger houses that usually perform Wagner. On the other hand there are positive gains in terms of scale. The balance for the audience, though, was consistently excellent – a rarity in Wagner and as for any problems of pit-to-stage coordination, I detected none. One of Negus’s assistants told me that the pit goes back so far that the woodwind sections, far under the stage, are sometimes practically inaudible to the singers. But hardly anything of the colour and variety, even richness, of his orchestration is lost in the superb playing of the festival’s orchestra under Anthony Negus. Just occasionally in Götterdämmerung and in the third act of Siegfried one misses the sheer weight of sonority that Wagner, in his late style, seems to be wanting. Refinements of gesture and facial expression come into play to an extent almost unknown in the bigger houses Gotthold Lessing’s reduced orchestral version of The Ring, made in the 1940s for small provincial German theatres, fits Longborough like a glove, mainly because it allows (though it doesn’t specify) a reduction of Wagner’s large string section – frankly unnecessary in a theatre this size. Longborough’s 500-seat converted-barn theatre with its modest pit (70 players maximum) is not quite what you would think of designing for a 15-hour cycle with a cast of 50 and an orchestra of 110. The cycle had been not just convincing but, beyond question, a huge triumph, demolishing at a stroke all kinds of prejudice about Wagnerian scale, the Wagnerian orchestra, even the Wagnerian voice. But the noisy acclaim of the far from provincial or rustic audience at the end of Götterdämmerung on Saturday must all the same have been music to their ears.
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