Music A century ago, Lancashire cotton mill owners flocked to Buxton for its restorative powers. With its high altitude, handsome buildings and spacious gardens, the town has always been a place to relax.
 |
| Mary Plazas as Lucrezia and David Soar as Alfonso in Lucrezia |
Its other characteristic is resourcefulness. The £1.1m budget is tiny by international standards, yet Buxton mounts five productions – two of its own, a third in concert format drawing on the casts of the two staged operas, plus two smaller shows by touring companies.
The festival has trained its public to expect the unexpected. Operas by Benda, Holst, Lortzing, Paisiello and Peter Maxwell Davies have featured in recent years, and the 2009 festival (until July 28) pays anniversary tributes to Handel with Orlando and Mendelssohn with concert performances of an opera I had not heard of – Camacho’s Wedding.
The opening performance on Friday was Lucrezia Borgia, not staged in the UK since Joan Sutherland sang it at Covent Garden 30 years ago. Donizetti’s melodramatic tragedy comes across in Buxton as a swift-moving drama, alternately tense, torrid and tender, with a series of powerful duets, trios and quartets that presage Verdi’s Rigoletto – written almost two decades later.
Stephen Medcalf’s production, strongly conducted by Andrew Greenwood and imaginatively designed by Francis O’Connor, turns Lucrezia into a 1920s mafioso intrigue: the focus is on intimate confrontations rather than grand-operatic display. Although announced as indisposed, Mary Plazas gave a titanic performance in the title role, negotiating Donizetti’s coloratura sweeps with heroic abandon. David Soar was the convincingly impulsive Alfonso, John Bellemer a sonorous Gennaro, Miroslava Yordanova a spunky Orsini.
Saturday brought André Messager’s Véronique (1898), arguably the most charming – and shamefully neglected – operetta in the French canon. Messager was one of the most experienced conductor-composers of his day: it shows in his mastery of plot and flowing melody. I first saw Véronique in the 1980s in Lausanne, with the unforgettable Colette Alliot-Lugaz in the title role, and fell under its spell. It is hard to explain its neglect in the English-speaking world. Maybe the “naughty nineties” French humour doesn’t mix with Anglo-Saxon morality. Maybe there have been too many Offenbach romps that fell flat in translation.
But Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s new version conveys the risqué wit of the original without vulgarising it. And Giles Havergal’s staging, conducted by Wyn Davies and enhanced by Leslie Travers’s simple but ravishing designs, is a winner from start to finish – elegant, affectionate, impeccably stylish. Mark Stone’s debonair Florestan heads an experienced cast including Donald Maxwell, Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks, Yvonne Howard and Helen Williams. Despite a less than winning performance from Victoria Joyce in the title role, Buxton’s period instincts are bang up-to-date. ★★★★☆
