Sunday 24 July 2016

Manchester Evening News article 22 July 2016


THE Buxton Festival is almost over, but now is a good chance to look back on the outstanding events of the only home-producing opera festival we get in the north west of England. Under artistic direction by conductor Stephen Barlow (who happens to be married to Ab Fab star Joanna Lumley), it’s achieving remarkable things.

There were three in-house opera productions this year: Beethoven’s Leonore, Bellini’s I Capuleti E I Montecchi, and Handel’s Tamerlano (the last a co-production with The English Concert).

I talked to Stephen about Leonore, Beethoven’s first version of what we know as Fidelio, a few weeks ago, and he was thrilled to be presenting a work he says is on fire with inspiration. It’s longer than the later score, so there’s music in it we never normally hear, and much of that is very beautiful – but is it better? I think the answer is a mix of yes and no … but it was well worth the trouble of mounting what is a pretty big opera in any terms, and director Stephen Medcalf and the whole team should be thanked for it.

The Bellini was more straightforward in that it’s a singers’ show – find really good voices and forget dramatic realism (it’s Romeo And Juliet, but an economy version with a greatly simplified plot and a duet for the star-cross’d lovers before they die). But – as well as fabulous singers – it had an imaginative production by Harry Fehr and a sure hand in conductor Justin Doyle.

Best of all, however, was the Handel. It’s a remarkably modern opera story, about an inhumanely merciless and capricious warlord and the defeated Turkish leader and his daughter whom he plays off against another vassal prince. Treachery and murder hover constantly in the air, and if you have a convincing couple of young hero and heroine, and a strong cast all round, it works powerfully despite two high men’s voices (to our ears).

With Paul Nilon as the defeated sultan, Marie Lys as Asteria, his daughter, and Owen Willetts as her lover, this was classy casting and the stand-out of the festival.

The whole production, by Francis Matthews, was distinguished by a restrained use of baroque performance techniques in movement as well as musical realisation, which for me made it all the more interesting.

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