Three Buxton operas: Cinderella, Sondheim and something ‘too bawdy’ for the BBC
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The operatic part of the programme may look more piecemeal than usual, but the Buxton International Festival still feels more festive than any other arts jamboree so far this summer. Back in business after a lost year, the festival has seen audiences throng to a variety of productions, interesting concerts and a lively book programme. Things haven’t felt like this since 2019.
They remain different, of course, and what might in another year have been a sideshow is here an unostentatious highlight: Pauline Viardot’s Cendrillon (in English, Cinderella), a miniature ‘salon opera’ scored with piano accompaniment, is a fitting tribute to a remarkable artist in her 200th birthday month. Although overlooked today, Viardot was revered across 19th-century Europe; a great mezzo-soprano from a family of singers, she knew about writing for voices, and the melancholy pathos of her music is well served here by the pianist Iwan Davies and an outstanding young cast.
Nikki Martin brings an appealing, soft-grained soprano to the title role, finding her match in the velvety mezzo of Camilla Seale’s Prince Charming. Olivia Carrell and Flora Macdonald are strong as the sisters, Maguelonne and Armelinde, and Pasquale Orchard glitters as the Fairy Godmother. All are at ease with the dialogue – a tribute to Laura Attridge’s direction of a production that achieves its effect through the simplest of means.
Malcolm Arnold’s 1952 opera The Dancing Master was justly neglected, but has been receiving attention of late thanks to its premiere recording under the baton of John Andrews. Seventy years ago, the BBC sensibly rejected the opera, even if the official reason – “Too bawdy for family audiences” – made it sound more exciting than it is. Susan Moore’s production returns the compliment by setting the opera in a 1950s Home Service studio, with barely half a dozen chairs in a semi-circle – a clever concept that helps with physical distancing but doesn’t prove the work’s stageworthiness.
Based on a Restoration comedy by William Wycherley, it tells of Miranda’s determination to escape marriage to her cousin, a Francophile known only as “Monsieur”. Her preferred beau, Gerard, poses as a dancing master when he is confronted by her aunt, Mistress Caution, and a father known as Don Diego on account of years spent in Spain. Arnold’s extroverted music is mostly thin, the score descriptive rather than dramatic, and his word-setting mechanical – though there’s a clever quintet and an effective lament for Miranda.
Eleonor Dennis sings mellifluously as Miranda, and Mark Wilde is unstinting as Monsieur; but with his smallish tenor, David Webb makes less of an impression as Gerard. Fiona Kimm and Graeme Broadbent sound slightly threadbare, not inappropriately, as the aunt and father, but the mezzo Catherine Carby gives a satisfyingly complete performance as Prue, the ladies’ maid.
If Sweeney Todd is the most operatic of Sondheim’s musicals, A Little Night Music is the most operetta-ish, and with its lightness it fits well into the Buxton mix. In typical Sondheim fashion, it’s musically slender, but the waltz that infuses the score is haunting, and though Sondheim’s snappy New York-isms sometimes sit at odds with the sexual tensions of a Swedish summer night in 1900, A Little Night Music does at least contain his single greatest hit song – ‘Send in the Clowns’.
Buxton does it beautifully: Paul Kerryson’s production, designed by Phil R Daniels and Charles Cusick Smith, is all silver birch trees and glowing chandeliers, and the scenes flow fluidly. There’s a similar flexibility in the pit, thanks to the experienced Wyn Davies conducting the Northern Chamber Orchestra, and the show strikes a good balance between singing actors and acting singers.
Musical highlights are provided by an excellent “Liebeslieder” quintet, acting as a Greek chorus, and the best voices belong to Daniella Sicari as the young wife Anne Egerman, Matthew McKinney as her repressed stepson Henrik and Molly Lynch as the livewire maid Petra. The rest have all the presence they need, crucially the two old flames: David Leonard as the middle-aged lawyer Fredrik Egerman, and Janie Dee as the well-travelled actor Desirée Armfeldt – who is hardly the first actress to gargle her way through ‘Clowns’.
Until July 25. Tickets: 01298 72190; buxtonfestival.co.uk
