We work hard to build relationships with local schools, where arts provision is often limited due to staffing and funding difficulties.
Our aim is to help fill the cultural void by sharing our love of opera and the arts with young people across the towns, villages, and cities in our region. Each element of our work is carefully designed to spark a love of music, raise aspirations, encourage young people to get involved and develop a life-long love of the arts.
Longborough Festival Opera is a charity (no. 1087303). We need to raise over £80,000 every year to deliver our ambitious education and outreach programme. We rely on donations from generous individuals and Trusts and Foundations to support our work in our community.
Please consider a one-off or regular monthly donation to help us to support young people in Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Oxfordshire.
£20 per month could help build a school choir; £50 per month could fund Youth Chorus training; £100 per month could help fund Playground Opera in a school. To discuss further ways of how you can help, contact Saskia Ross: saskia@lfo.org.uk
Our vision is that every child should have the opportunity to sing together. We want to enable schools to build a school choir that meets weekly and works on a wide variety of repertoire and style, promoting singing as a feel good, collaborative and inspirational activity.
Our chorus masters visited four local schools each week throughout the school year. They worked on improving the singing of all children and general musicianship.
Activities covered included:
Nine children from our Singing Schools volunteered to participate as Screaming Nibelungs in Wagner’s Das Rheingold on the Longborough stage in 2024.
We will extend our Singing Schools network to five local primary schools for 2024/25.
Schools visited: 4
Children participating: 550
Days in schools: 88
"This is the most wonderful opportunity for our school-the children absolutely loved it and the staff as well- it was pure joy and has made us all feel fantastic!"
Playground Opera makes opera more accessible and provides an exciting first experience of opera for hundreds of children. We prioritise schools in areas of rural or economic deprivation, where children have little access to high quality culture.
Playground Opera abridges classic operas, involving the pupils in rewriting the story, meeting the characters, and singing and dancing along to the music, resulting in an absorbing and highly engaging performance.
We spent a whole day at each school, giving 1,740 pupils the chance to dig deeper and analyse the story, working in small groups with our team to make the story more relevant and in most cases, more extraordinary.
We worked with 12 schools – three of these were over 36% pupil premium. 1,740 children were directly involved, 403 of these in workshops and the performance.
All schools were sent packs that had been created by teachers to maximise impact and cohesion with the curriculum in Maths, Music, English, History and Languages.
“We’ve asked the school to set up a drama club at lunchtime because we loved your opera so much”
Our 2024 playground opera turned L’elisir d’amore into The Implausible Potions of Dr Dulcamara. We visited a variety of schools in rural Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, as well as giving our first public performance in Cidermill theatre, attended by 95 local families.
The opportunity to engage in high-quality artistic experiences can give students a huge boost in confidence. Our approach creates a fun and liberating environment in which children can express themselves.
Hundreds of children were shown how to project their singing voices and to express themselves through movement. Throughout the process, all children listened, collaborated and followed instructions. We sent feedback forms to each school and directly interviewed teaching staff and students to evaluate the impact of the day.
“We thought it was amazing, enriching and a fantastic hands-on experience that we can’t give the children ourselves”
Our opera workshops for Secondary Schools compared Jonathan Larson’s Rent with Puccini’s La bohème
“Thank you for the fab workshop. Students really enjoyed it and your team were so lovely to work with. Look forward to the next one"
The Youth Chorus has continued to grow in size and reputation as the place to learn performance skills and opera repertoire in preparation for main stage productions. It is still open to anyone under the age of 21 who is prepared to commit to the intensive rehearsals with our teams.
We offer bursaries where needed. This year, six of our members successfully applied. We now have over 55 members from ages 7-21.
This was a busy year with the chorus involved in one mainstage production, two community concerts and the annual community Christmas carols in Longborough village in December.
“For crowd scenes, a cast of local children and emerging artists cram the stage, making a lovely tableau...the whole thing is wonderful spectacle”
Stratford Herald
