Better than Bayreuth? Niall Hoskin enjoys an account of Longborough Festival Opera’s improbable success

To quote the entry for the village of Longborough on the Cotswolds Tourism Partnership’s website, ‘the community owned village shop and café is worth visiting and the village has pubs and an opera house’. Behind the last phrase lie thirty years of sometimes fractious endeavour which have brought Longborough Festival Opera (LFO) to national and international prominence, and while press-worthy stories of hens, excavators and planning committees abounded in the early days of the Longborough saga, coverage is now firmly in the hands of music reviewers.