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.
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 a
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.
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.
