Review of Malcolm Arnold's The Dancing Master at Buxton International Festival

David Webb, Eleanor Dennis and Graeme Broadbent

 in The Dancing Master at Buxton International Festival. 

Credit Genevieve Girling

There was no doubt that Buxton Festival’s audience was glad to see it back in the glorious Peak District opera house, going by the applause for Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master on Friday night. Even a half-full house sounded like a capacity crowd at the conclusion of its interval-less performance.

Live opera! Yes, and necessity has become the mother of invention for the festival this year. How to find shows that can be performed by smallish casts on a smallish stage with smallish orchestra pit, keeping the performers and musicians suitably distanced from each other – and the audience, too?

Buxton had several alternative plans for its festival until quite late in the preparation process this year: it had to, like everybody else in the arts recently. The final one has led it down the musicals road (and will do again next year), joining up with the Opera House itself and CEO Paul Kerryson in its own production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. But for proper opera, in its tradition of shining light into little-seen corners of the tradition that deserve discovery, its first offering for 2021 is quite a find.

We’re in Malcolm Arnold’s centenary year, and here’s one he wrote very early on. It was rejected by the BBC (and then Granada TV) and never professionally performed until this year, when conductor John Andrews and his Red Squirrel Opera recorded it (and that’s already won an award). This production, directed and designed by Susan Moore (lighting by Ben Pickersgill), puts the CD cast, with one exception, on the stage, and John Andrews conducts it.

Seeing it now, you wonder why on earth the BBC’s panjandrums ever thought it “too bawdy”. The story is simple and based on stock characters from Restoration comedy: marriageable young heiress (Miranda) kept under close watch by her puritanical aunt while her father fandangoed in Spain has been betrothed to her foppish and Frenchified cousin; she wants out and enlists the help of her maid, Prue, but along comes a young admirer called Gerard, who manages to climb in through her bedroom window. She pretends to her father that Gerard is her dancing teacher (though neither of them can dance a step), and fun and games ensue, with a real romance between the two and a happy ending when daddy (Don Diego) lets true love win and Monsieur (the fop) throws in his lot with the maid.

How do you stage that with all the limitations of summer 2021? Answer: do it on the radio! Susan Moore has picked up on the BBC lapse of judgment in 1951 and reimagined the piece as a radio broadcast like The Archers or ITMA, with the cast positioned around a central microphone and bits of the action illustrated by “sound effects” of the day.

That gives her staging the extra dimension of being able to show the “actors” arriving in civvies, picking up their scripts (I think they had the actual scores, but they didn’t need to read them) and getting into character before they finally go off-air and revert to who they were … except that you suspect the romance between “Miranda” and “Gerard” might be going a little further in real life after the show is over.

The score is full of both gentle satire and lovely tunes. It’s from the era of the English Dances and the Oboe Concerto, and with Gerard as romantic tenor hero and Miranda as soprano heroine you get some very tuneful arias – his Over the mountains and over the waves and her “Book of love” ballad, for instance, while the slow waltz ensembles are both melodically beautiful and ingenious in contrapuntal interweavings. The satire comes out in the castanet-filled “Spanish” accompaniments for Don Diego (every cliché in the book in use there), the French fop’s Gaze not on swans (rightly sung “badly” by Mark Wilde), and even in Gerard’s “Miranda …” song – almost a Catalogue Aria in its own right.

 Arnold poured his gifts for melody and atmospheric orchestration into this piece, and with the theme of dancing ever in the air the rhythms are pretty snappy, too. There has to be a moral to the story, of course – quaintly expressed as a warning to parents not to try to restrain their children too much – and of course a final ensemble of general rejoicing, which Arnold rises to magnificently.