Reviews of Buxton International Festival operas 2022

La Donna del Lago at Buxton International Festival:  Máire Flavin as Elena (red dress) 

Credit Genevieve Girling

La Donna del Lago

Tottola and Rossini, after Walter Scott

Buxton International Festival

Buxton Opera House

8, 12, 15,17, 22 July 2022, 2 hours 50 minutes

 

After the outright cancellation of 2020 and constrained conditions of 2021, Buxton International Festival is back and firing on all cylinders this year. And its operatic flagship is a masterwork by Rossini.

Written in 1819, it was inspired by Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake, and is an early example in European opera of full-blown Romantic ideas coming to the fore – war and peace, love and rivalry, wild and remote locations, supposed ancient traditions and figures from the past. There’s even a reference (not taken from Scott) to characters in the writings of the mythical Scottish bard, “Ossian”, a literary fake that hoodwinked most people at the time.

And musically we find Rossini on the cusp of using new-fangled Romantic language in his otherwise cute-and-classical writing: off-stage horn calls, tremolando strings, the sound of the harp to convey local colour (no matter that there’s nothing specially Scottish about it). At the same time he was going all out for popular appeal, and one of the climactic numbers is a competitive duet for love-rival tenors in which the dramatic tension is reflected vocally by bursts of repeated high Cs (and more) from both of them.

The story is fairly simple: Elena (the Lady in question) is the daughter of a chieftain whose loyalty used to lie with the King but who’s now mixed up with rebel Highlanders. He’s betrothed her to their leader, but she really loves another. The King, disguised, comes across her and falls for her, too (hence the two-tenors rivalry). Battle goes badly for the rebels, but Elena seeks to save her father and her true love, and in the end … Well, I won’t give it all away.

Director Jacopo Spirei and designer Madeleine Boyd have staged the opera in a way that conveys general impressions – ragged clothes for the Highland warriors, shiny techno-style costumes for the King and his forces; a interior/exterior set to provide the lakeside locale for the first act and a geometric, power-lit coldness for the King’s palace in the second … showing there’s a clash of cultures as well as of loyalties, a nice gloss on the storyline. The use of a tiny model boat to represent what the script says is Elena’s offer to her visitor of a trip across the lake got a bit of a titter from the audience – but what else can you do on a stage like Buxton’s?

What you need for this opera to work is two tenors with first-class Italian-style top registers: tick – Buxton has Nico Darmanin and John Irvin. You also need a really good bass-baritone and a virtuosic wide-ranging mezzo (for the trouser role of Elena’s warrior true love: tick – Buxton has David Ireland and Catherine Carby. And above all you need an utterly wonderful soprano as Elena: Buxton has Máire Flavin, and her rondó finale at the end brings the whole thing to a triumphant close, as it did on the first night in 1819 and needs to every time.

So the casting is top-class. So is the chorus, all 22 of them plus some minor role singers, too. Buxton has nobly managed so often in the past with a small-scale body, but at last it’s great to hear a full-throated crowd of them in the bright Opera House acoustic.

And the musical direction, by festival artistic director Adrian Kelly, is full of energy and impact. The Northern Chamber Orchestra plays with precision and panache, and the whole thing rattles by with both brilliance of coloratura technique and glorious tone production from all the principals.

(Giulio Cilona conducts on 12, 15 and 17 July).

Antonio e Cleopatra

Ricciardo and Hasse

Buxton International Festival

Buxton Pavilion Theatre

13, 16, 20, 22 July 2022, 1 hour 25 minutes

 

This is Buxton International Festival’s second fully home-grown opera production for 2022. Antonio e Cleopatra is a “serenata” – a baroque mini-opera employing a tiny orchestra and a smaller cast … the title tells it all, as there are just two of them.

It was written in 1725 by Johann Hasse, a German who, like Handel, had his first successes in Italy, and created for production in Naples – then part of the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs.

As the state museum in Vienna will proudly tell you, the Habsburg imperial crown, inherited from Charlemagne, has symbols that show supposed continuity from the Caesars, and this piece makes the point by having Cleo and Mark Antony finally console their unhappy lot (after the battle of Actium) by looking to a future world ruled by Kaiser Charles VI and his missus, Kaiserin Elisabeth. Very loyalist, if a tad historically unlikely.

So how to present a two-acter in which the lovers (both written for high voices) spend the whole time telling each other how they feel, and nothing actually happens? This is baroque opera, and the convention is that each aria (always in da capo repeat-the-beginning-after-a-middle-section form) represents one emotion only – despair, anger, renewed love, determination, regret, resignation, heroic fatalism, etc. The succession gives the singers opportunities to show what they can do in each mood, and that’s the drama.

Director Evangeline Cullingworth (with the help of designer Grace Venning) seems to find parallels in the agonies of a penniless (or even homeless) young couple of the present day. We’re in a near-bare bedroom, and they have nothing but the clothes they stand up in and one big suitcase of a few remaining treasured things. These turn out to include bits of Roman armour, a pair of angel wings, some wigs, theatrical costumes, imitation pistols and hair brushes. Perhaps they have been acting in some dead-end theatre, as finally they dress up in full Carry On Cleo mode for the suicide pact that ends the piece?

The props, of course, give them something to do as they emote their way through Hasse’s arias (plus a couple of duets, one to close each act), with all those repeats. The vocal music is extremely taxing, though, and the quality of the two singers – Thalie Knights, as Antonio, and Ellie Neate, as Cleopatra – is what the audience has come to hear. They are top-class young artists, well able to embellish their repeats tastefully, and in Ellie Neate’s case making the most of her frequent bursts of high-powered top notes (originally written for Farinelli). The first-act closing duet, “Un solo sospiro”, verges on the Handelian in its variety of emotive resource and showed the two both at their best.

Musical direction from the harpsichord is by Satoko Doi-Luck, with a tireless in-period string quintet beside her.

 

Viva la Diva

Donizetti after Sografi, English version by Kit Hesketh-Harvey

Salzburg State Theatre in association with Buxton International Festival

Buxton Opera House

10, 14, 19, 21 and 23 July 2022, 2 hours 55 minutes

 

It’s good to see that Buxton International Festival can laugh at itself. Here we have an adaptation of material originally written to be a comic opera about opera, by Donizetti, turned into a tale of the auditions, rehearsals and final chaotic performance of a piece by the “High Peak Festival” – guess what that might be.

There’s the aspiring hopeful from the Royal Northern College of Music, the heavyweight star soprano with equally nasty minder from eastern Europe, the mezzo who flounces out to be replaced by the grande dame of the local musical scene, the tiny Italian tenor with a sore throat, the dodgy impresario who can’t quite find the cash to pay everyone on time, and the hapless director trying to hold it all together.

So far, so good, as ideas. In practice, Viva la Diva turns out to run 40 minutes longer than they estimated when the festival programme was printed, and it’s not quite as funny as it thinks it is. Maybe that’s to do with the inevitable in-jokes of opera singers sending themselves and their colleagues up, maybe it’s because Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s English words to fit around Donizetti’s tunes, full of internal rhymes and cleverness, still aren’t as tight as a script for a comic opera should be (he also gets extended mileage out of imagined absurd surtitle translations of an Italian libretto – OK first time but not worth doing over and over). Maybe the extra length is to do with preparations for the second act, which is technically quite ambitious, but if you’re going to do an exercise in The Opera That Goes Wrong (as this does), you have to be sure we know which bits are gags and which are not.

There was a feeling of improv creeping in, as if the presence of a male in drag (George Humphreys, stealing the show as supposed contralto Lady Agatha Wigan) turns everything to panto in British theatreland.

Many of the rest of the cast are capable of strutting their stuff as genuine bel canto singers, and I suppose they needed to have the opportunity to prove it, but the progress of the plot is slowed by rather too much Donizetti in the process. So full marks to everyone for singing really well at times and acting funny at others, to conductor Iwan Davies and repetiteur Katie Wong for both being and portraying their roles, to the Northern Chamber Orchestra for both their excellent playing and for pretending to go on strike, and to director Stephen Medcalf and the technical team for everything that went wrong properly.