Blood, beauty and wit at the Buxton Festival

Four operas in four days in the heart of the Peak District was a treat. They ranged from very light to deadly serious. Simply in terms of fine operatic singing, Buxton’s production of Verdi’s Ernani was terrific. The chorus were magnificent, as was Nadine Benjamin as Elvira. She is loved by three men: the bandit Ernani (who turns out to be the dispossessed Don Juan of Aragon), Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, after whom the opera was originally named, and Don Carlo, King of Spain, who later becomes the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but first appears disguised as a peasant. The Russian tenor Roman Arndt as Ernani was excellent, as was Alastair Miles as Silva and André Heyboer as Don Carlo.

The opera is based on Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, and became Verdi’s most popular work until superseded by his middle period operas such as Trovatore and Traviata. In the end, the king blesses the marriage of Ernani to Elvira, but Silva recalls that Ernani must now die to fulfil a pledge he once made, and silently hands him a dagger. After stabbing himself in the heart, Ernani expires in Elvira’s arms, reflecting times past when vows were taken seriously, particularly in Spain where this action is located.

For bloodiness and amorous determination opera doesn’t get much more serious than this, and with the orchestra of Opera North under the excellent baton of Adrian Kelly, artistic director of the Festival, this opera was thunderingly good. My only reservation was that although Jamie Manton’s staging emphasised the brutality, in which even the king participated, it gave little hint of what is happening in the story, despite the red arm bands. A quick read of the synopsis is recommended.

A complete contrast to this serious opera was provided by La Canterina, a delightful 2-act drawing room comedy by Haydn, involving four soloists. Jane Burnell plays a very pretty young lady who, with her lover the counter-tenor Dominic Mattos, disguised as a woman, have been conning wealthy donors to support her singing career. She is the object of amorous attention by two well-off young men, Jonah Halton and Helen Maree Cooper in a trouser role. This typically eighteenth century farce was wittily performed under the direction of Lysanne van Overbook, and beautifully sung under the musical direction of Toby Hession. It is what they once called an Intermezzo — a comic interlude intended to refresh the audience between the acts of a full length opera seria.

The other serious opera I went to was a reimagining of Carmen by the late theatre and film director Peter Brook. Unfortunately he has reordered the scenes to form a collage, quite confusing for those who know the original. A mime artist takes a leading role, and the splicing together of some scenes makes for even more confusion. The mime artist even becomes husband to Carmen at one point, though she’s unmarried in the opera. With Carmen’s four changes of costume, all done centre stage, this takes on the air of an intellectual exercise — the sort of thing one might applaud if it were a final project in a university art department. Having said that, Erin Gwyn Rossington in her bright red dress impressed vocally as Michaela.

Far and away superior to this was a throughly entertaining Singspiel called The Boatswain’s Mate by Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), whose opera The Wreckers was performed to great effect at Glyndebourne in 2022. She was well versed in Singspiel from her years in Germany, and also wrote the libretto to this one.  The main character is a redoubtable, youngish widow and pub landlady called Mrs Waters, superbly performed by Elizabeth Findon, whose voice exhibited effortless power and is clearly big enough to fill a huge theatre.

This witty story takes place in Margate, where one of the pub regulars Harry, sung by tenor Joshua Baxter, has proposed and been rejected several times by Mrs Waters. Harry inveigles a visitor, Ned, sung by lyric baritone Theo Perry into pretending to burgle the pub so that he (Harry) can claim the credit for fighting him off, thereby winning the landlady’s affection. It all goes frightfully wrong, as Mrs Waters decides to teach Harry a lesson. She recruits Ned into her plot, fires a gun, and tells the horrified Harry that she has killed the burglar. In the end it is clear that Mrs Waters has now found a new husband, namely Ned, as well as ending the unwanted attentions of Harry.

This is all huge fun, with never a dull moment, and beautifully staged by Nick Bond. Its music for piano, violin and cello shows Ethel Smyth to be not only a wonderful composer, but a witty librettist to boot.

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