Lesley Anne Sammons

In the pit Lesley Anne Sammons’s excellent Barefoot Band matched what was happening on stage with hollowed-out accompaniments that were more 1920s Berlin than 17th-century Venice. Pizzicato-bass jazz riffs, soulful accordion decorations, scrunchy harmonies, lots of percussion and some full-blown grunge effects: it shouldn’t have worked with Cavalli’s elegant baroque melodies, but it did.    Matthew Williams Ellis – The Times

The “given” is that the orchestra is The Barefoot Band led by its founder, the clever Lesley Anne Sammons. Sammons has re-orchestrated Mozart for this show. Now, there are several good reasons given for this: making the opera more funky, more modern move appealing to a contemporary audience; clearing away the cobwebs of a too-familiar classical work and making it feel more as it must have felt for the original audience in 1792.
★★★★

Longborough Festival Opera’s new production of Così Fan Tutte is not so much ’for reduced forces’ as it is radically, rewardingly reinvented. Performed in-the-round in LFO’s circus-red Big Top, conductor Lesley Anne Sammons’ arrangement of Mozart’s score – played with flair by the six-piece Barefoot Band – adds dulcet recorders to sensuous clarinet, injects an accordion’s brassy punch, and complements double bass with electric strum. Classical purism it is not; classy panache it certainly is.          THE STAGE