Longborough Festival Opera will stream its 2021 concert production of Die Walküre from 6pm BST tonight.
Watch here
(Available on demand until Friday 25 February 2022)
This concert production of Die Walküre was filmed live at Longborough Festival Opera on 8 June as part of the festival’s ambitious new Ring cycle. The cycle began in June 2019, with a critically acclaimed production of Das Rheingold. Longborough will stage Siegfried (2022) Götterdämmerung (2023) building to the full cycle of Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2024.
All productions in the new Ring cycle are created especially for Longborough. Amy Lane, Artistic Director of Copenhagen Opera Festival and previous Head Staff Director at The Royal Opera Covent Garden, will direct the entire cycle. Longborough Music Director and eminent Wagnerian Anthony Negus will conduct.
“The Ring cycle is the most epic of tales with a score that is searing, desperate, sublime and so perfectly unfathomable. What an honour it is to set foot upon this glorious pathway and to commence this journey with Longborough” – Amy Lane, Director
A destination for Wagnerians
Wagner is the lifeblood of Longborough founders Martin and Lizzie Graham. In 1996 they began building the Longborough theatre in the image of Wagner’s Bayreuth festival theatre. The first opera in the completed theatre was a performance of Das Rheingold (1998) from a reduced version of the Ring cycle which was adapted for the City of Birmingham Touring Opera by the late Sir Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove. The festival has since been celebrated for its performances of Wagner’s work.
Longborough’s first full-scale performance of Das Rheingold took place in 2007, and the Grahams commissioned Jim Keeling to create a statue of the great composer to mark the occasion. The statue was displayed outside the theatre until Wagner’s birthday, 22nd May, when it was placed proudly atop the theatre roof, where it remains to this day.
In Wagner’s bicentenary year (2013) Longborough was the only UK company to host a fully-staged Ring cycle, described by The Times as “one of the summer’s most remarkable cultural achievements”. The success of the Ring cycle was a landmark for Longborough: it firmly established the festival as an annual destination for Wagnerians around the world.