THE Buxton Festival is almost over, but now is a good chance
to look back on the outstanding events of the only home-producing opera
festival we get in the north west of England. Under artistic direction by
conductor Stephen Barlow (who happens to be married to Ab Fab star Joanna
Lumley), it’s achieving remarkable things.
There were three in-house opera productions this year:
Beethoven’s Leonore, Bellini’s I Capuleti E I Montecchi, and Handel’s Tamerlano
(the last a co-production with The English Concert).
I talked to Stephen about Leonore, Beethoven’s first version
of what we know as Fidelio, a few weeks ago, and he was thrilled to be
presenting a work he says is on fire with inspiration. It’s longer than the
later score, so there’s music in it we never normally hear, and much of that is
very beautiful – but is it better? I think the answer is a mix of yes and no …
but it was well worth the trouble of mounting what is a pretty big opera in any
terms, and director Stephen Medcalf and the whole team should be thanked for
it.
The Bellini was more straightforward in that it’s a singers’
show – find really good voices and forget dramatic realism (it’s Romeo And
Juliet, but an economy version with a greatly simplified plot and a duet for
the star-cross’d lovers before they die). But – as well as fabulous singers –
it had an imaginative production by Harry Fehr and a sure hand in conductor
Justin Doyle.
Best of all, however, was the Handel. It’s a remarkably
modern opera story, about an inhumanely merciless and capricious warlord and
the defeated Turkish leader and his daughter whom he plays off against another
vassal prince. Treachery and murder hover constantly in the air, and if you
have a convincing couple of young hero and heroine, and a strong cast all
round, it works powerfully despite two high men’s voices (to our ears).
With Paul Nilon as the defeated sultan, Marie Lys as Asteria,
his daughter, and Owen Willetts as her lover, this was classy casting and the
stand-out of the festival.
The whole production, by Francis Matthews, was distinguished
by a restrained use of baroque performance techniques in movement as well as
musical realisation, which for me made it all the more interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment