CityLife

Classical highlights: July 9 to 15, 2010

Buxton Festival continues for two weeks more, with concerts, recitals and opera performances every day.

Richard Rodney Bennett’s children’s opera, All The King’s Men, gets its first performance this afternoon, with participants from local schools.

It is repeated on Monday and Tuesday, too, and conducted by Hallé assistant conductor Ewa Strusinska with the Dark Peak Youth Orchestra.

It is about the siege of Gloucester in 1643 during the Civil War – believed by some to be the origin of the rhyme, Humpty Dumpty (though the theory was first floated by Prof David Daube, a scholar whom anyone who met him would realise had a particularly clever sense of humour).

And in the Opera House tonight there’s Mozart’s Zaïde, brought by the Classical Opera Company (it is on again on Tuesday, July 20).

Funny that, you will be saying, since Mozart never finished it – he left 15 numbers, but no final act and no dialogue.

But one of those numbers is the beautiful soprano aria, Ruhe Sanft, Mein Holdes Leben, and there’s much good in the rest of it, too, so Classical Opera’s boss, Ian Page, has come up with a performing version, which uses other music written by Mozart around the same time, and (with collaborators Michael Symmons Roberts and Ben Power, and director Melly Still) a complete text in English to sing it to.

“We will never know how Mozart would have finished the work,” he says, “but it was clearly conceived as a piece of theatre, and I hope that audiences will enjoy the chance to hear this magnificent but little-known music in a fully-staged dramatic context.”

Manchester-trained Amy Freston takes the role of Perseda, and the title role is sung by the South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, with tenor Andrew Goodwin as Gomatz.

Tomorrow afternoon there’s George Benjamin’s Into The Little Hill, paired with Berios’s Recital 1 – by The Opera Group with the London Sinfonietta, at Buxton Opera House, and a performance of Verdi’s Luisa Miller in the evening (also on Wednesday).

Sunday night’s opera is The Barber Of Baghdad (also on Thursday), and Monday’s is Handel’s Alcina, given by Opera Theatre Ireland (also on July 16 and 21).

On Tuesday there’s the first of three concert performances of the festival’s third home-grown opera this year – Mozart’s Idomeneo, in the version by Richard Strauss. Paul Nilon, Victoria Simmonds, Rebecca Ryan, Mary Plazas, Jonathan Lemalu and Philip Gault have the leading roles in this rare realisation.

Festival artistic director Andrew Greenwood, who conducts, says: “It was created in the 1930s, when opera seria wasn’t really performed at all.

“Strauss cut the original and re-composed the harpsichord recitatives, but the arias, duets and ensembles are Mozart.

“There’s the odd bit that’s pure Strauss – he even quotes his own Die Ägyptische Helena in it – and he wrote a huge quartet with chorus in the final scene which sounds like something out of Der Rosenkavalier – I guess some purists might run screaming out of the theatre at that!

“My idea was to put it on as a piece that is well worth hearing but that would not be worth the expense of a fully-staged production.

“It’s one huge genius working with the music of another.”

*****

Richard Strauss’s music opens the programme in Chetham’s School of Music’s final concert of the academic year tonight at the Bridgewater Hall. The Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stephen Threlfall, plays the Suite from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and ends with Rachmaninov’s second symphony.

There’s also Liebermann’s flute concerto (soloist Joshua Batty), which was originally written for Sir James Galway, and Chetham’s Chorus sings the Dies Irae from Pizzetti’s Requiem, written in 1921 (conductor Martin Bussey).