The Longborough podcast

Looking ahead to Longborough's 2023 production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, music director Robert Howarth and lutenist Lynda Sayce discuss interpreting manuscripts from Monteverdi's era.

Wagner fits within a German ecological tradition stretching from Von Humboldt through Haeckel and Himmler to the Greens. Can any of this be heard in the music itself? This talk will show you how.

This episode is a lecture by Professor Michael Spitzer, author of acclaimed book The Musical Human, with musical illustrations by Longborough's Ring cycle répétiteur Kelvin Lim, recorded at an event for Longborough members.

In July 2022, Longborough Festival Opera features an exciting double bill performed by our Emerging Artists: Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero, paired with Freya Waley-Cohen's contemporary song cycle Spell Book.

In this episode, Longborough's artistic director Polly Graham speaks to the production's director Jenny Ogilvie about her plans, with musical extracts from pianist Clíodna Shanahan and countertenor Keith Pun.

Korngold's Die tote Stadt forms an exciting part of Longborough's summer 2022 festival. In this episode, Korngold experts Jessica Duchen and Michael Haas teach us more about this remarkable composer. With musical extracts from pianist Charles Matthews. 

Longborough Festival Opera's Music Director Anthony Negus joins the pianist and musicologist Professor Kenneth Hamilton, as they discuss the surprising personal and musical relationships between Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Hosted by writer and librettist Sophie Rashbrook.

In this episode, Longborough Festival Opera's Artistic Director Polly Graham joins the acclaimed librettist and opera director Sir David Pountney, who was in the midst of staging his own Ring cycle in Chicago when the pandemic first struck.

The subject of their discussion is comedy in the Ring cycle: where and how we can find humour inside this huge work of art, and how this deepens our understanding of the story. 

In this episode, conductor Justin Brown and director Olivia Fuchs chat to music journalist Richard Bratby about this incredible work: Janácek's musical language; his parallels to Wagner; and why grown adults would want to see an opera about talking animals. Longborough Festival Opera's Emerging Artist production of The Cunning Little Vixen will now take place in 2021. 

In this episode, writer and librettist Sophie Rashbrook chats to historian Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and soprano Lee Bisset, who was set to have been Brünnhilde in Wagner's Die Walküre at Longborough in the postponed 2020 season. In their discussion they explore the roles and mythical origins of Wagner’s women. 

In this episode, music journalist Richard Bratby chats to Longborough's Music Director Anthony Negus and bass-baritone Paul Carey Jones, who was scheduled to sing Wotan in Wagner's Die Walküre at Longborough in the postponed 2020 season. In their discussion they trace Wotan's journey through Wagner's Ring cycle.

Welcome to the Longborough podcast. Artistic Director Polly Graham introduces Longborough Festival Opera, a 500-seat homegrown theatre in the Cotswolds. Our podcast series was born out of the Covid lockdown. We'll be welcoming lots of our friends from the world of opera and the arts, including singers, players, directors, conductors and more, for what will be some thought-provoking discussions. We hope you'll join us too.