This Leonora looked like a brassy waitress and sounded laboured uneven

This Leonora looked like a brassy waitress and sounded laboured, uneven. Most of the singers were quite clearly second rate, but you could imagine Tito You, the elegant baritone who sang the part of Luna, in a more glossy cast. Near the climax, Azucena’s nostalgia for her homeland (“Ai nostri monti”) is sung in a little child’s voice And none of Verdi’s sublime melodies come off. But she surrenders everything to a wild, disorderly characterisation of the gypsy as a vengeful fury.Directorial bravura is not so successful with Romantic emotion. There is sex and masturbation, nudity, torture, and a man is set on fire.
None of this is relevant to the opera, but it generates lots of opportunities for virtuosic stage direction The opera turns into a kind of university of bright ideas.

The Anvil scene (though without anvils) foregrounds the vibrant acting of Leandra Overmann as Azucena. This artist has a truly odd voice – piercing the eardrums in the top register and breaking audibly across into a barking chest tone. You do not feel that Calixto Bieito, the director of Hanover State Opera’s Il trovatore, has any real vision for the piece. When Jonathan Miller transferred Rigoletto to Little Italy for the English National Opera, it made sense because Italian-American gangsters had a strict hierarchic code of honour, just like Verdi’s characters. But Bieito’s scenes of low life are really just embellishments. The cast are hoodlums and bully boys, tarts, slags and layabouts.

They tear around, beat each other up, climb over the scenery (a two-level framework like a building site) and fall about drunk. By this time I was gasping for some properly improper folk revelry, and the Scottish-Irish blending of Daimh fulfilled that need. They had the crowd dancing the clod-hop, playing with brilliance. Headliner Alasdair Roberts, whose wonderfully morose Scottishness uncurled to a twin-guitar accompaniment, drums rolling sensitively through a sitting-down set, ended the weekend with a melancholy flow..

The Brighton-based Lucky Jim quartet initiated a Scottish sequence, although their organ-infused rock has a distinctly Stateside cast.I prefer this folktronica business when it hits hard, as with the omnipresent laptopper Four Tet’s climactic self-destruction on the first night, loading in his twinkling Indonesian gamelan chimes, then jacking up brutal gut-punch beats that defied any attempts at pagan dancing.As the second day winds down, the lanky Green Man leads his parade around the grounds, and the evening boasts a marked improvement in musical quality. She builds up layers of cello, melodica, recorder, thumb piano and bowed guitar, but her results are overly precious, an unimaginative demonstration of limited technique. Pedro deploys laptop clatter to greater effect, but his input is more free jazz than folk twang.Joanna Newsom has a mannered voice, nervily plucking her harp, while Ella Guru win the competition to be the quietest combo of the weekend. She specialises in multi-instrumental dabbling, making sampled loops out of simple phrases.