Performer: Jung Soo Yun

David Pountney completes his “Verdi trilogy” for the company but although his staging has fluidity, it lacks an explosive ending... and the vocal performances disappoint. 

Any occasion to see Donizetti's first big success is to be welcomed. The Longborough Festival's new production of Anna Bolena gives us a Tudor court in terror of a brutish, Henry VIII as he seeks to supplant Anne Boleyn with Jane Seymour.

A spirited account of Verdi's early opera in its first professional UK staging, nowhere near as “ugly” as Verdi would have had us believe.