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After 45 years, Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet returns to Buxton in a gripping, psychological staging by Jack Furness. 

Setting the life of Vera Brittain to the music of Ivor Novello, Buxton Festival's new musical is a welcome if overambitious showcase for them both.

Mozart's early opera seria may not be his greatest achievement – but lightness of touch from all involved highlight its charms in Jack Furness' new production. 

Top notch singing, judicious pruning and production which prioritises human drama over camp spectacle make for an illuminating take on Handel's most frequently staged opera.

Northern Ballet's Ugly Duckling offers a fantastic and inclusive introduction to the ballet for the whole family and at just 45 minutes long, does not try anyone's patience.

A top notch ensemble brings Coult’s first opera luminously to life at the Buxton International Festival, finding renewed relevance in the post-pandemic era.

Buxton International Festival presents Rossini's exhilarating La donna del lago with fine singing, but it is undermined by Jacopo Spirei's staging. 

Every July, Buxton’s charming opera house hosts an international festival of opera, literature and the arts. This year the festival opened with a strong familiar favourite, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

Stephen Medcalf directs a coherent staging of Mozart’s opera seria in which Idomeneo’s inner demons are to be battled. 

A spirited account of Verdi's early opera in its first professional UK staging, nowhere near as “ugly” as Verdi would have had us believe. 

The fashion for reviving Mozart's teenage operas brings a vocally dazzling production of Lucio Silla to Buxton, nevertheless hampered by the work's own lack of believable drama and some fairly flat staging. 

A period-perfect Albert Herring from Francis Matthews for Buxton International Festival takes time to settle into its stride, but provides plenty of laughs along the way. 

A searing, edge-of-your-seat spinetingler from Elijah Moshinsky makes the strongest possible case for Verdi's first Macbeth, ideally suited to the proportions of Buxton's beautiful Opera House.

This Yeomen of the Guard was one of the best sung G&S performances I have heard. The traditional but inventive production will appeal to novices and enthusiasts alike.

Handel's psychotic Tartar leader and bedhopping nobles are well served in an excellent collaboration between the Buxton Festival and the English Concert with some outstanding singing from Marie Lys and Owen Willetts.

Stephanie Marshall's Romeo and Sarah-Jane Brandon's Giulietta make this production of Bellini's version of Romeo and Juliet utterly compelling.

Stephen Barlow makes the case for Beethoven's earlier version of Fidelio, but doesn't quite manage to convince.

Gustave Charpentier's Louise, revived and in excellent form at the Buxton Festival.

Amateur gangsters, but a nicely sung, if rather staid Lucia di Lammermoor at Buxton, worth seeing for its excellent mad scene.

Verdi's rarely-performed early masterpiece gets a succinct, powerful outing in top class style at Buxton. 

An updated Orfeo and Eurydice at Buxton sees Orpheus as an ageing rocker, too distracted by adoring groupies to notice Eurydice. However, one piece of casting was an unsolvable conundrum. 

The charm-ometer was cranked firmly to ‘high’ yesterday evening for the opening opera of this year’s Buxton Festival with a performance of The Jacobin, an opera close to Dvořák’s heart. 

Princess Ida holds her court amongst the rarer Gilbert and Sullivan operas; their eighth collaboration, it opened at the Savoy Theatre on 5 January 1884, running for 246 performances.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe made history twice over on its opening night of 25 November 1882: in the first instance it was the first G&S production to play at the recently completed Savoy Theatre; and in the second, it was the first to open (almost) simultaneously at the Standard Theatre, New York City, beginning barely an hour after the conclusion of the London performance on the same d

The Pirates of Penzance is without a doubt one of the most popular and most successful of the G&S canon, containing some of Gilbert’s most amusing lyrics and characterisations, alongside examples of Sullivan’s best music.

There can be little doubt that two principal draws of the Buxton Festival are the annual opportunity to experience little-known and sometimes totally unheard-of repertoire and composers, and forgotten repertoire by familiar composers; the co-operation of such a festival committee, patrons and backers that supports the production of rare works is a gift to any artistic director – especially one as

One hundred and sixteen years ago, on 7 March 1896, Gilbert and Sullivan presented before the London public their final Savoy Opera: The Grand Duke.

Few 19th-century operettas exceed HMS Pinafore in style, wit and musical accomplishment; the principal candidates in English are The Mikado, and The Yeoman of the Guard, plus a few offerings by Lionel Monckton and Sidney Jones. Any foreign contender would surely be one of the champagne-soaked Viennese delicacies by the Strauss family or Carl Zeller.

Among the fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, it must be acknowledged that there are glimpses of weakness. The Gondoliers maintains one of Gilbert’s typically insane plots, which is best described as ‘topsy-turvy’ until the final scene, when order is restored. Likewise the music is far from Sullivan’s strongest score, but there are moments of inspired vocal writing.

The Gilbert and Sullivan canon perhaps achieves the pinnacle of its greatness with The Mikado. The ninth of their fourteen collaborations, it was premièred at the Savoy Theatre in 1885 and the gentlemen were rewarded with an extraordinary success.

Henry James’ chilling 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw is a curious story and might be considered a gift to any composer as the basis of an extraordinarily sinister opera libretto.

Buxton, a small spa town in Derbyshire, has been home to one of the most imaginative and important festivals in Britain for over thirty years.

When is an opera not an opera? Some would answer this question with “when it’s a musical”, but such a response says more about our own preconceptions of what opera and musical theatre represent than it does about the works themselves.