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Verdi – Ernani 

The joy of trigger warnings hasn’t bypassed Buxton’s International Opera Festival where audiences for the new production of Ernani were advised to steel themselves for “death, blood, themes of physical and mental abuse, torture and suggestions of gun violence”. A comprehensive list and, in truth, a fair description of this piece of early Verdi which piledrives through a rapid turnover of events, most of them confrontational and delivered with the musico-dramatic equivalent of clenched fists. 

Celebrated in its day though not so much in ours, Ernani is so rarely staged now that its story may be unfamiliar. But it’s basically about a woman chased by three men: one she loves (the eponymous Ernani), one she doesn’t, and a King who also tries his luck with her. Needless to say, it ends badly. But not before an assault course of twists, turns and sudden changes of heart that are just about explicable in terms of the honour-system of 16th Century Spain where we’re meant to be; less so in Buxton’s minimalist staging that abandoned ruffs and crinolines for modern dress and modern values. 

That said, it was a tight, strong, punchily impactful show by Jamie Manton, done on a tapering set that thrust the action forward to the front row of the stalls in Buxton’s beautiful Frank Matcham Opera House. It had an energy that held good, start to finish. And a striking cast who swept through Verdi’s not so subtle but invariably alive score under a conductor, Adrian Kelly, who knows his business. Nadine Benjamin’s Elvira lacked vocal and dramatic focus, but she nonetheless threw herself into the part. And the three suitors – Alastair Miles, Andre Heyboer, and Roman Arndt – were all superb, with a conspicuously arresting dynamism from Arndt in the title role.  

This was a show that justified the “International” in Buxton’s name: it had distinctive class. And if you couldn’t say the same of all the other productions running at the same time in this busy festival – a miracle of industry that launches a conveyor belt of stagings on successive days -  they were none of them without virtues. 

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Haydn – La Canterina 

Playing in Buxton’s smaller, less formal auditorium, the Pavilion Arts Centre, was an obscure piece by Haydn called La Canterina which can probably be called his earliest-surviving stage work. Written in 1766 for the composer’s  Esterhazy empoyers, it’s an intermezzo-like trifle about a grasping minx – the Canterina (Songstress) of the title – who funds her lifestyle by seducing men with disposable incomes. Feigning illness, she’s revived by gifts of jewels. And it proceeds with thin predictability but for the throw-in of an accomplice/boyfriend who pretends to be her mother: cue for comic gender ambiguities. 

With just four singers and a small, onstage band – ably directed from the keyboard by Toby Hessel whose cleverly embellished accompaniment to the recitatives was a joy – it had charm and pace, staged like a Feydeau farce by Lysanne van Overbeek. And for such a trifle, the singers were surprisingly strong, with a fruitily forceful countertenor, Dominic Mattos, as the boyfriend/mother, and plenty of glitter-and-be-gay dazzle from Jane Burnell as the minx.  

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Ethel Smyth – The Boatswain’s Mate  

Also playing on the small Pavilion stage was something that I’d guess pulled curiosity-collectors to the Festival this year: Dame Ethel Smyth’s much talked-about but rarely seen The Boatswain’s Mate. Smyth has become a ‘cause’ in British opera, championed as a victim of unwarranted neglect; and since the resurrection of The Wreckers two years ago at Glyndebourne, she’s become a source of serious interest. 

The Boatswain’s Mate is a far smaller, slighter piece: a cheerful English comedy from 1916 about a botched attempt to woo the formidable landlady of a seaside tavern. She could almost be a prototype for Peter Grimes’s ‘Auntie’, functioning in a libretto whose humour looks forward to Albert Herring. But that’s as far as you could take meaningful comparison with Britten because, despite the best efforts of her champions to position her as an influence, she hadn’t Britten’s genius. The music of the Boatswain has, at best, the folksy bathos  of Edwardian parlour songs. It’s mildly entertaining, nothing more.  

But Buxton at least gave it a fair shot, in a straightforward staging by Nick Bond that brought the piece closer to modern times. An accompanying piano trio, playing Smyth’s own chamber-scale reduction of the score, did well enough. And in terms of voices it was cast at (unnecessary) strength with Elizabeth Findon as the landlady, Joshua Baxter her admirer, and the immensely likeable Theo Perry as the third part of what becomes a love triangle. Smyth devotees can only have been happy. 

Anna Dennis as Bellezza, Hilary Cronin as Piacere and Jorge Navarro Colorado as Tempo seated in Handel's Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno | Photo: Genevieve Girling

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Handel – Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno  

For me, though, the hit of the Festival season was a staging of something never intended to be staged, and at face value offering very little for a director to work with. Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno - The Triumph of Time and Disillusion - was Handel’s first ever oratorio, written in Italy in 1707, and potentially two and half hours  of tedious moralising discourse about how to lead a good life. The four characters are archetypes, with Beauty initially beguiled by Pleasure but encouraged to pursue higher ideals by Time and Disillusion. And you could fairly argue that the ultimate triumph of time in the piece is that it goes slowly. 

But – and it’s a big but – there are moments in the score that stop your heart, not least with music Handel would repurpose into celebrated operatic arias like Rinaldo’s ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’. Christian Curnyn, leading a baroque band in the mainstage pit of Buxton’s Opera House, handled all that with real finesse and purpose. 

And against the odds, director Jacopo Spirei somehow found things for the cast to do, embedding the longwinded argument in what looked like a 1970s suburban sitcom about two wayward daughters spending Christmas with their down-to-earth parents. Hovering between verismo, fantasy and whimsy, it was totally engaging – with minutely crafted and well-sung performances from Anna Dennis (Beauty), Hilary Cronin (Pleasure), Jorge Navarro Colorado (Time) and Hilary Summers (magnificently game as the Disillusioned seen-it-all-before mother). 

In all, this was a show that, with a quiet brilliance, not only found a way of staging the unstageable but found a tone for the piece that will haunt the mind of anyone who saw it. Not a crowd-puller perhaps, but work of serious quality. And Buxton at its best. 

buxtonfestival.co.uk