BARNSTORMING.(Longborough Festival Opera)(Brief Article)

JEANNIE WILLIAMS LISTENS TO WAGNER IN A BARN AT ENGLAND'S LONGBOROUGH FESTIVAL OPERA

So you've nibbled a salmon sandwich while lolling on the grassy sward at Glyndebourne -- or stayed at delightful inns or castles while visiting Welsh National Opera in Cardiff or Scottish Opera in Edinburgh. Now comes a new U.K. stop on the opera gourmet's itinerary -- Longborough Festival Opera, offering its eleventh season this summer, its fifth in the first private opera house built in England since John Christie opened Glyndebourne in 1934 on his estate in his Sussex hometown.

Unlike Glyndebourne, this house in the Cotswolds began life as a calving barn and later had a run as a chicken coop before entrepreneur Martin Graham hung a chandelier and copped its 480 red-plush seats from London's renovation-bound Royal Opera House. Mozart, Rossini and Wagner are on tap this month and next, and Graham once again will greet visitors for five weekends, no doubt wearing his usual tuxedo with white "trainers," at his post in front of the faux-Palladian, terra-cotta-colored opera house. At the interval, picnickers in the adjoining field have been known to borrow a plate or two from Grahams nearby home. His wife, Elizabeth, deeply involved in the festival, is glad to oblige.

Graham is fifty-eight, Yorkshire-born, a wealthy property developer, and nothing if not ambitious. His productions, with an orchestra of up to forty-five players, have been well-received critically, and he has mounted three years of Wagner Ring marathons (cut versions of one or two of the operas per season), which are set to culminate in a full Ring cycle in 2002. His goal is a second, larger opera house and concert hall on another site within ten years, in part as an alternative to Bayreuth, where he is well aware that tickets are in short supply.

"The market is there," he says, for another regular Ring in Europe. So, apparently, is the money for a house -- "the least of the worries." It will cost at least 30 [pounds sterling] million. Graham confesses that he had initially hoped the festival could become profitable, but "After a few years you get real." He lost 100,000 [pounds sterling] on it last year but says that doesn't bother him at all. The operation will be registered as a charitable organization this summer, which among other things will enable it to seek sponsors for children's programs.

Graham has never been to a Bayreuth performance, and in fact he saw no Wagner works before he was forty. After first visiting the then more intimate Glyndebourne twenty years ago, he became enamored of the idea of an opera house in his garden. "It seemed such a novelty, and as we were builders, it was no trouble to put it together." Hens and tractor were cleared out of the barn, and the first productions there came in 1997: Carmen and Die Zauberflote. "Then we decided we wanted to do a Ring, and we were even more sure because everybody said it couldn't be done," says Graham.

The 2002 festival Ring cycles will take place over eight evenings, with one cycle at the beginning of the season in mid-June, the other at the windup in mid-July. Discounted tickets will be offered to those who purchase all four nights. This Ring will open some of the cuts by Jonathan Dove and ...