Performer: James McOran-Campbell

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. 

This innovative and clever new opera by Julian Philips and Edward Kemp at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio Theatre is a delight, with appeal for adults as well as children.

It’s a curious thing that when operatic characters are drinking at a party, they invariably sing about how nice it is to be drinking at a party – never sports results, or the weather, or how all them bleedin’ ’ungarians are coming over to Austria and taking all our jobs...

Eugene Onegin, a lyric opera by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, is based on Pushkin’s novel of the same name, converted into an operatic libretto by Konstantin Shilovsky. It tells the tale of a selfish hero, Onegin, who rejects the outburst of love from the young Tatyana and instead flirts with her older sister, Olga, who is engaged to his best friend, Lensky. This leads to a duel, in which Lensky is killed.

The eponymous heroine of Dvořák’s Rusalka is a water-sprite from the woods and lakes of Middle European fairy-tale, very much the territory familiar to ballet lovers in Giselle and Swan Lake.