The woodland outside Longborough’s theatre, deep in the Cotswolds, sneaks inside and on to the stage for its season-opening production of Orlando. With a story that sometimes seems little more than an excuse for a series of showpiece arias, it’s not an obvious choice for the festival’s first Handel opera in a decade, but Sinéad O’Neill’s production has confidence in the work and is persuasive enough to lead us through.
The flimsy plot comes from Ariosto’s poem Orlando Furioso. High-ranking warrior Orlando loves princess Angelica, but she’s not interested; she loves Medoro. Low-ranking shepherdess Dorinda loves Medoro – but he loves Angelica, see above. The usual baroque-opera love triangles and noble self-sacrifice are absent, and what we have instead is the stuff of school lunch-queue gossip. Someone hears words that weren’t meant for them and jumps to conclusions; someone else has unwisely given away a special bracelet. Then Orlando cracks: he has an extended, musically arresting mad scene and then goes on a murderous rampage that’s cleared up by the presiding magician, Zoroastro, thus allowing for a happy ending.
Andrew Foster-Williams’s resonant sorcerer Zoroastro – bearded, and in a high, powdered wig – is almost our compere here: after all, lots of 18th-century operas require a moment of divine intervention, but not many need a magician to take the lead throughout. His three silent, crinolined attendants seem almost witch-like at first, and there’s an enduringly uneasy side to this enchanted forest, with Anisha Fields’s set of trees, bed and rusty spiral staircase lit in sunset tones by Ben Ormerod. But it’s all more A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Macbeth. Serene and unblinking, the attendants wind a willing Angelica into a huge cat’s cradle, and animate Dorinda’s many wildlife friends – because in O’Neill’s vision there’s more than a touch of the Disney princess about Dorinda, who dances with hares and sings to a puppet nightingale.
At the centre of it all is an extraordinary performance as Orlando from Beth Taylor, her voice impossible to pin down: one moment it’s trumpet-like, then vanishingly soft; it’s ferocious, tender, weighty, light as air, and impossibly agile. What this isn’t is a display of poised, joined-up mezzo-soprano tone – but that’s not what the role cries out for, and besides, for that we have Katie Bray’s gorgeously sung Medoro. Anna Devin’s soprano gleams in Angelica’s vocal pyrotechnics, and Dorinda gets a sparkling performance from the rising soprano Kelli-Ann Masterson. Handel’s score has its share of unconventional moments and they sound beguiling thanks to the players of the Academy of Ancient Music, in their first Longborough show, and the conductor Christopher Moulds. But it’s the singing that makes it all worthwhile.
• At Longborough Festival Opera until 7 June.
