A star is born at Buxton: Alexandra Nowakowski
Buxton Opera House
The first three days of the Buxton Festival featured three very operas from the composers Franz Lehár, Verdi and Handel. Lehár’s Merry Widow, originally an operetta set in Vienna, was shown in the updated setting of New York. The original involved the embassy of a fictitious grand duchy, which had the problem of keeping the vast wealth of a rich young widow “in the family” by finding her the right husband. Her former lover Count Danilo is the obvious choice, but he will absolutely not marry for money and rebuffs all attempts at romantic involvement of any sort, preferring to spend time with the charming ladies of the night at Maxim’s.
Updating this to modern times was a challenge relished by comic actor and director John Savournin, who changed Vienna to New York, with the grand duchy as a mafia family. His witty take on the story is a co-production with Opera Holland Park, Scottish Opera and the D’Oyly Carte Company. Baron Zeta who heads the grand duchy’s claim to secure the young widow’s funds becomes Don Zeta, head of New York’s crime families, with Danilo his consigliere. The female characters, now in an even more male-dominated setting than the original, still have serious agency, none more so than the wealthy widow Hanna Glawari, brilliantly performed by Paula Sides. She and Dominic Sedgwick as Danilo, whose well-tempered urbanity hid his unresolved passion for the Widow, made a perfect match, and Richard Burkhard as Don Zeta showed fine comic timing.
Savournin’s production, revived by Bence Kalo, finds just the right balance between comedy and pathos, and the toe tapping music was delightfully played by the Buxton Festival Orchestra under the baton of the Head of Music, Iwan Davies.
Great fun, but on the second night Buxton hit the heights in Verdi’s La Traviata. I was bowled over by the Polish-American coloratura soprano Alexandra Nowakowski as Violetta. On a personal note, this was one of the very first operas I ever saw, with the famous Montserrat Caballé in the main role. Wonderful though her singing was, along with her glorious dress, she certainly did not look the part of “the frail one”. Ms Nowakowski did, however, and I left the theatre hugely moved, so much did she embody the heroine’s consumptive weakness on stage. So who is this young singer, about whom I knew nothing?
Apparently she took over at short notice from Nadine Sierra at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the main role of the sleepwalking Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Could Buxton match her vocally with a suitable Alfredo? They did, with fine support from the excellent Armenian tenor Tigran Melkonyan. He gave us a strongly sung Alfredo, with the experienced French baritone André Heyboer as Alfredo’s father. This Traviata was beautifully conducted by Adrian Kelly in an elegant production by James Hurley befitting the Parisian world of the mid-nineteenth century, but it was Alexandra Nowakowski’s Violetta that carried all before it. She alone made this Buxton visit worth every penny.
Contrasted with these works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the third day was a Handel opera, Amadigi di Gaula. This 1715 opera, written for an English audience, adapts a medieval Spanish epic, Amadís de Gaula, where the King of Gaul falls in love with and eventually marries Oriana, daughter of the King of England. Like any chivalric romance, it involves numerous characters, and complicated subplots, but Handel’s work uses just four characters (Amadigi, his companion Dardano, Oriana, and the sorceress Melissa), all with high voices. The rough outline of the story is that Melissa has become infatuated with Amadigi, and imprisoned everyone: Oriana in a tower, and Amadigi and Dardano in her garden. After various deceptions, visions, and trials, the two lovers, Amadigi and Oriana, are finally united, though in the process Amadigi has slain Dardano who became a rival, and Melissa has stabbed herself when she realises her supernatural powers are impotent against the power of love.
Handel was an expert at using male voices in very high roles, and in this opera all four voices are in the normal female range: Amadigi an alto castrato, Dardano a contralto, and Oriana and Melissa sopranos. Here at Buxton the first two of these roles were well taken by male singers: Jake Ingbar and James Hall, and the soprano roles equally so by Rowan Pierce and Hilary Cronin, all supported musically by the English Concert under the baton of Erin Helyard. Stage direction by Olivia Fuchs was thoroughly up to date with the cast sharing pictures on mobile phones. This production of an opera nearly three centuries old was Handel for the modern young world.
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