The audacity of Longborough Festival Opera
From a converted chicken shed in the Cotswolds, Longborough Festival Opera has grown into one of Britain’s most interesting opera festivals. Juliette Barber meets Executive Director Emily Gottlieb and Artistic Director Polly Graham to discuss ambition, independence and the passion and vision that drives it all
There’s something quintessentially British about Longborough Festival Opera (LFO). Tucked into the beautiful surroundings of the Cotswolds, overlooking the Evenlode valley, it had the most unusual of beginnings: an opera festival that started life in a chicken shed and grew, unexpectedly but magnificently, into something extraordinary.
Its audiences have included Wagnerian pilgrims travelling from across the world, local families discovering opera for the first time, and everyone in between.
The story begins with Martin and Lizzie Graham, who in 1991 started hosting summer opera in the garden of their Cotswolds home, Banks Fee, with audiences sitting on bales of hay. Inspired by Freddie Stockdale’s Pavilion Opera, which brought costumed performances to intimate venues, Martin wanted to recreate that spirit but with the sound of a full orchestra. He approached Travelling Opera, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, and for seven years a temporary theatre inside the little stable block at Banks Fee became the setting for something remarkable. In 1997, the Grahams built a 500-seat opera house in the grounds of the family home, and Longborough as it is known today began to take shape.
“The founder story matters enormously,” says Executive Director Emily Gottlieb. “Martin wasn’t born into a family with a particular connection to theatre or opera. He found it himself, and that gave him this great desire to share it. That spirit is embedded in everything we do.”
That desire to share has driven Longborough’s growth from hay bales to a festival with a formidable international reputation. Its Wagner productions are perhaps its best-known achievement: the 2013 Ring Cycle, presented on a minimal budget, put the festival firmly on the map for Wagnerians in the UK and abroad, a reputation consolidated by a new Ring in 2019 and another complete cycle in 2024.
Polly Graham, Artistic Director since 2018 and daughter of the festival’s founders, is clear that Wagner is only part of the story. “Although we became known for Wagner, it isn’t the only thing that we do,” she says. “Our artistic mission is to ensure that everything we produce is delivered to the highest possible standard, and there’s no internal hierarchy.”
The freedom of independence
Without the safety net of public funding, Longborough relies on ticket sales, on more than a thousand members whose giving ranges from a friends’ membership at £85 to major philanthropic support, and on an increasing focus on trusts and foundations. It is a model that brings both freedom and constraints, and Graham and Gottlieb are candid about both.
“It makes you nimble,” says Graham. “You can pitch an idea to an individual supporter or a trust and get something off the ground without the level of bureaucracy that working with Arts Council England as an NPO would involve.” But the trade-off is real, she acknowledges. Organisations in receipt of public funding can offer significantly lower ticket prices, and Longborough cannot match that. An 18-to-35 scheme offering reduced prices, generously backed by a group of donors, goes some way towards addressing the gap.
Gottlieb is equally clear about where the priorities lie. “Philanthropy is increasingly a major area of support for us,” she says. “We’re concentrating on the upper levels of giving and making sure that’s a really strong foundation for the future.” The Emerging Artists Programme, she adds, is one area that consistently attracts support from trusts and foundations, and one of the most effective ways of bringing donors close to the work of the festival.
A season of firsts
The 2026 season presents four productions ranging from Handel to Wagner via Verdi and Humperdinck: a new staging of Orlando, Verdi’s Macbeth in its first ever Longborough production, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, sung in English in Sir David Pountney’s translation, and a revival of the acclaimed Tristan und Isolde. All three new productions are directed by women: Sinéad O’Neill, Karolina Sofulak and Lucy Bailey.
“I like working with intelligent women,” says Graham with characteristic directness, “and I found these wonderful people and decided that they were each in their own different ways completely right for the shows we have programmed.”
Orlando marks a double first for the festival: a debut partnership with period-instrument ensemble the Academy of Ancient Music, conducted by Christopher Moulds, and the casting of mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor in a title role more traditionally associated with a countertenor. Taylor is a former LFO Emerging Artist, having been part of the programme in 2018, and her return feels entirely in keeping with the festival’s long-held commitment to nurturing British talent.
“It wasn’t so much that we definitely didn’t want a countertenor,” Graham explains. “Director Sinéad O’Neill and I were talking about the piece, and gender is very much in play: Medoro is traditionally sung by a mezzo, and Sinéad is thinking about the work in dialogue with Sally Potter [whose 1992 film brought Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to the screen], Derek Jarman and Virginia Woolf. There’s a whole spectrum of identity in play in the way she’s directing it.”
Look closely and a single thread winds through the season: the forest. It appears in Orlando, in the Renaissance woodland; in Macbeth, where Birnam Wood becomes a presence almost as ominous as the characters themselves; in Tristan und Isolde, where a hunting party disappears into the trees and the lovers seize their moment; and in Hansel and Gretel, where the wood becomes a dreamlike space in which the children lose themselves and, perhaps, find something else. It is the kind of connection that feels discovered rather than designed.
Cascade of excellence
Hansel and Gretel, conducted by Grammy Award-winner Karen Kamensek and directed by Lucy Bailey, features two of Longborough’s 2026 Emerging Artists, Joanna Harries and soprano Rosalind Dobson, in the title roles. It is a production that crystallises the festival’s approach to nurturing young talent.
This year the Emerging Artists Programme has been restructured so that opportunities are woven across all four productions rather than concentrated in one. “It’s not exclusively singers,” Graham explains. “We have a developing conductor doing one performance of Hansel and Gretel. The idea is that opportunities are allocated as appropriate to each artist’s development, within a company where there is eminent experience around them – a cascade of excellence, if you like.” The intimate scale of the Longborough theatre, she notes, is a particular asset. “A young singer with huge potential can completely knock Gretel out of the park in our theatre in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a 2,500-seat house.”
The stories that emerge from the programme speak for themselves. Beth Taylor’s return as Orlando is one. Another is a former member of the community chorus who sang in the Chorus of the Vassals in Götterdämmerung, went on to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and is now returning as an Emerging Artist. “That’s a really wonderful story,” says Graham, and it is hard to disagree.
On their own terms
Gottlieb became Executive Director in April 2024. A Clore Leadership Fellow, she came to Longborough after 15 years at the Royal Ballet and Opera, first as a stage manager and later in a leading organisational development role under CEO Alex Beard, followed by nine years as Chief Executive of the National Opera Studio. The move to Longborough, she says, was a deliberate choice to bring those skills to bear in a different kind of environment.
“Working at the Royal Opera House gives you an insight into the industry, the scale of it, the technical and artistic complexity, that’s hard to get any other way,” she says. “But after nurturing young artists at the National Opera Studio, I wanted to come back to a live opera performance environment. Longborough is small but mighty. It punches above its weight. And I hope that together Polly and I can take it to the next level of reputational excellence and create a genuinely international profile for an organisation that is already attracting visitors from across the world.”
Graham is a director of considerable standing in her own right. Before taking on the artistic directorship in 2018, she had already worked at Welsh National Opera, Irish National Opera, Teatro La Scala and the Wiener Staatsoper, among others. Leading a festival her parents built is not something she takes lightly or, it seems, entirely straightforwardly. “They’re not going to expect anything other than a restless troublemaker,” she says with a smile that suggests she embraces her moniker, and she is quick to acknowledge what working alongside Gottlieb has meant. “I feel very lucky to work with Emily and learn so much from her.”
Gottlieb returns the warmth with precision. “The most important thing is that you’ve made it in your own right.”
Sustainability and the stage
Longborough’s commitment to sustainability is shaped as much by practical necessity as by principle. The theatre cannot fly scenery, has limited wing space and minimal storage – constraints that elsewhere might prove problematic, but here are reframed as creative possibilities.
“Those limitations focus the minds of directors and designers in an extraordinary way,” says Graham. This season, Tristan und Isolde and Macbeth are performed in rep, which demands, she explains, “extremely nimble, minimalist, focused design decisions.” Last year, three productions shared a single designer, Max Johns, and a single floor, each looking entirely different while drawing on the same resources. “Sustainability and creativity generally go well together,” she says.
The festival works within the Theatre Green Book framework and has achieved a 61.4 per cent recycling rate, with initiatives including the launch of a Hedgehog shuttle bus service, which brings audiences from the station to Longborough.
Looking further ahead, co-productions are something the festival is actively exploring. “We’ve never really explored that as a company before,” says Gottlieb, “but producing work that can travel and be shared is both artistically and environmentally right for where we want to go.”
Passing the baton
After more than two decades as music director, Anthony Negus is stepping down, moving into a newly created role as Conductor Laureate, a title that honours the extraordinary contribution he has made to Longborough’s Wagnerian identity. His successor is Christopher Ward, currently General Music Director at Theater Aachen and Sinfonieorchester Aachen, who joins from the 2027 season.
“We undertook the process of recruiting Christopher very closely with Anthony,” says Graham. “It was wonderful to have his input, because he cares so much about the organisation and its future, and we’re all in complete agreement and delight about Christopher.”
Gottlieb captures the significance of Negus’s legacy with characteristic warmth. “Anthony came here with plastic bags full of mini Ring scores in the back of a pickup truck and kind of never left,” she says. “He is as integral to the Longborough story as Longborough is to his own Wagnerian reputation. That’s why we’ve moved him into the Conductor Laureate role: to honour that legacy.” Ward, she adds, brings something distinct. “He has an extraordinary breadth of operatic experience from deep immersion in the German system, but the UK is his ancestral home, and he is very keen to give back. He trained at Guildhall and in Oxford, which for us feels like a particularly lovely connection.”
Thirty years and counting
The theatre’s 30th anniversary season in 2027 opens with Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted by Negus. “It’s going to be epic,” says Gottlieb, and the programme delivers on that promise: Ward conducts in his first season as music director a new production of Otto Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor in an English translation, alongside a revival of 2024’s La bohème, with further celebratory events planned.
From sitting on hay bales in a garden to a purpose-built opera house that attracts Wagner enthusiasts from all over the world, Martin and Lizzie Graham built something that was never supposed to be modest in ambition, however modest it might have seemed in scale. As Longborough’s 30th anniversary approaches, the festival they founded is preparing to celebrate in the only way it knows how: by doing something audacious.
Longborough Festival Opera’s 2026 season takes place from 30 May to 8 August. For further information, visit lfo.org.uk
