CityLife

Buxton Festival

Conductor Wyn Davies

THE Buxton Festival seems each year to outdo its already impressive past record.

This year there are two-and-a-half completely homegrown new productions of classic operas (two fully staged and one ‘in concert’), plus three imported ones by companies of high standing.

In Messager’s Véronique there is the complete counterbalance to operatic high drama – a French confection from the turn of the 20th century, light and delicious as a perfect soufflet.

The music is by André Messager, a conductor of distinction in his time (and also composer of The Two Pigeons, recently performed in Salford by Birmingham Royal Ballet, as it happens).

Projection screens are the in thing this year, it would seem: designer Leslie Travers has used them so skilfully that his set – really quite a bare three-sided box – earned its own round of applause as act three opened on the first night.

The costumes helped create that tableau, too, and the opera, set in a flower shop, a country inn and a ballroom, comes across as a vision of light and beauty.

Director Giles Havergal tells the story in straightforward, perfectly paced style, and Tim Claydon, the choreographer, has made a major contribution in an all-singing, all-dancing piece of fun. The new English version by Kit Hesketh-Harvey is witty and adroit.

The performers make it what it is, of course: festival debutante Victoria Joyce as the heroine – she’s ex-RNCM and a brilliant operetta soprano lead – Helen Williams, Yvonne Howard, Donald Maxwell, Owen Webb and Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks, all professional to the fingertips – and Mark Stone as the matinee idol (as we would call him) hero.

The festival has engaged artists of the first rank for this cast, and it is to be congratulated for it.

The other major credit is to Wyn Davies, the conductor, whose genius it is to pace and articulate this music in utterly authentic and charming style.

*Further performances are tonight (Wednesday) and July 19, 22 and 26.

Screens were fully used, too, in Martin Lloyd-Evans’ production of Mitridate, Re Di Ponto, an Italian opera seria written by Mozart before his voice had even fully broken.

The Classical Opera Company from London have again come up with a gripping interpretation of early Mozart drama.

This time the story, from ancient history, is brought to life in the present day, with a computerised Middle East war-room as the set – hence the screens. But they are used to project English surtitles, too, and to enhance the visual effects with close-up live camera images.

Those don’t always work perfectly, but it hardly seems to matter, so well conceived and projected are the principles’ presentations of their roles.

Mark Le Brocq is outstanding in the warlord title role, and the two original male high-voice roles of his sons are given to Stephen Wallace and Kishani Jayasinghe.

So it’s a man for the baddie and a woman in trousers for the goodie, which works because of the power and intensity of their singing in each case – his voice changing from head to chest tone in an effectively disconcerting way, and hers exhibiting silky tone allied with acrobatic articulation (there is surely star in the making here).

Allison Bell is pure in voice as Aspasia – the girl whom three men want – though she could perhaps have made the characterisation a little more alluring to account for it.

Mary Nelson sings sweetly as Ismene, and Sigriour Osk Kristjansdottir, in her beard and stubble, is secure and clear as Arbate.

Ian Page conducts the authentic orchestra in lively style, and the whole is a model of how to bring opera of an ultra-formal style to effective life (repeated on July 20 and 24).

The same cannot really be said, though for the Opera Theatre Company’s version of Handel’s Orlando.

They have done excellent things with Handel before, and this one’s concept of a sanatorium set and a doctor and nurse among the characters was a promising one.

But – with the honourable exceptions of Mhairi Lawson and Henry Waddington, as the nurse (Dorinda) and doctor (Zoroastro) – I found the presentation too much concentrated on singing the notes and not enough on living the roles.

It’s repeated on July 23 and 27.