Beth Taylor's Orlando Lights Up Longborough's First Handel in a Decade
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Longborough Festival Opera opened its season with Handel's Orlando, its first Handel opera in a decade, staged by director Sinéad O'Neill with sets by Anisha Fields and lighting by Ben Ormerod that bring the surrounding Cotswolds woodland onto the stage.
- Beth Taylor delivered the title role with a voice the review describes as 'trumpet-like,' 'vanishingly soft,' 'ferocious, tender, weighty, light as air, and impossibly agile' — explicitly not poised, joined-up mezzo tone, but matched to the character's crack from lovesickness into a murderous mad scene.
- Andrew Foster-Williams played Zoroastro as a resonant, bewigged sorcerer who functions almost as compere, with three silent crinolined attendants and an enchanted-forset design that the review likens to A Midsummer Night's Dream rather than Macbeth.
- Anna Devin gleamed as Angelica in her vocal pyrotechnics, Katie Bray provided a gorgeously sung Medoro, and rising soprano Kelli-Ann Masterson gave a sparkling Dorinda drawn with a touch of 'Disney princess' — she dances with hares and sings to a puppet nightingale.
- The Academy of Ancient Music, making its first Longborough appearance under conductor Christopher Moulds, made Handel's unconventional scoring sound beguiling, though the review concludes it is the singing that carries the show.
- The plot, drawn from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, strips out baroque love triangles in favour of gossip-grade misunderstandings — a overheard conversation and a misgiven bracelet — before Orlando's extended mad scene and rampage are tidied up by Zoroastro for a happy ending.
Why it matters: Longborough's first Handel in a decade lands on the strength of a breakout title-role performance from Beth Taylor, whose unorthodox, wildly varied vocal colours redefine what the role 'cries out for' — a meaningful marker for the festival's reputation for casting against type, and a debut of the Academy of Ancient Music at the venue.
