<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    MESMERISING

However the undoubted stars of this magnificent show -- Alan Privett's best-plotted moves and shrewdly pointed moods apart -- are Anthony Negus and his orchestral players (most of them), and the good knight himself.

Hard to lavish totally unstinting praise on the band (though it's largely due) when there were far too many crucial glitches in the horns (you only had to hear their fluffed garden calls to the late-picnicking audience from Martin Graham's Lady of Shalott pink turret to anticipate some loopy moments -- contrast countless note-perfect sequences in trumpet-trombone); or when the skilled arranger, Jonathan Dove -- of necessity, given heavily reduced woodwind -- offers you not so much a Ride of the Valkyries as the tinkle of a whirligig.

But there were many scenes in this rock-strewn staging when the violins were the very opposite of ropy. Scene after scene, climax after climax, was thrillingly managed in this pit (which is fast ballooning, like Topsy). Two instruments stood out a mile: the cellos, with the cello soli -- just wonderful every time they uttered, nursed and encouraged by Negus to explode into gloriously warm, full-blooded colours; snatches of viola; and everywhere, the clarinet tone (flute paired with clarinet, too), which was an unremitting pleasure to listen to.

Much else was first rate, including some cavernous tuba playing and many very good quivers of percussion at particularly telling and important moments. But it was the overall, the Longborough experience as a whole, that worked: this Ring -- including Negus's overwhelming, by turns fast-sweeping and spacious, McIntyre-free Götterdämmerung -- simply swept the audience along.

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