Buxton International Festival

Another new Buxton initiative this year is Platform 3, described by Nick Bond – director of Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig (★★★★) – as aiming to establish “a platform for all ages to create, perform and engage with the arts”, but more especially “providing opportunities for young singers, musicians, designers, producers and actors”. There’s an outstanding wealth of youthful talent on stage for this revival of a piece inhabiting the borderland between opera and musical theatre.

Alasdair Middleton’s libretto is an invented fairytale derived from Norwegian and Romanian sources in which King’s daughter Flora is more or less obliged to marry a Pig, who eventually (as is the way with these things) turns out himself to be a handsome King.

Simple and economical yet effective designs by Ellie Klouda form the backdrop to Bond’s skilful staging, with a small but vitally engaged pit band to one side, confidently conducted by Katherine Stonham.

Back in the early 1950s, and despite having commissioned Malcolm Arnold’s setting of Joe Mendoza’s libretto drawn from William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy, BBC Television rejected the resulting one-act comedy The Dancing Master as being ‘too bawdy for family audiences’. Following a second turn-down from Granada Television, Arnold shelved the opera and moved on – hence no performances during his lifetime.

It was only in 2020 that conductor John Andrews made a recording with a near-identical cast to Buxton’s, after which the piece belatedly came to wider attention.

Transferring the action from Wycherley’s period to a BBC radio studio around the time of the opera’s composition, Susan Moore’s staging (★★★) works efficiently: her costumes are pinpoint accurate, while the cast, who enter fully into the spirit of her conceit, do everything possible with the material, even if the facetiousness of Arnold’s score feels a touch relentless.

A place in the repertoire seems unlikely, but Buxton’s initiative in finding room in its programme for this neglected score deserves credit, while one can scarcely imagine a more committed advocate for the piece than Andrews himself.

Posterity remembers Pauline Viardot, who was born exactly 200 years ago, as a great opera singer, inspiring and/or creating several major roles; but she could have enjoyed an equally successful career as a concert pianist, and in more propitious times would have made headway as a composer: in recent years her songs in particular have become more and more familiar.

Her Cendrillon (★★★★★) – an operetta based on the Cinderella story – was premiered in 1904, when she was 83 (she died in 1910). It’s an entirely delightful piece, given a well-acted, attractively designed staging at Buxton. Laura Attridge directs with keen focus and Iwan Davies provides the flawless piano accompaniment.

A narration has been added – unnecessarily, surely, for this plot – and, oddly, the sung parts remain in French, while the dialogue is delivered in English translation.

But everything else works admirably, from the fin-de-siècle designs to the individual performances, especially Nikki Martin’s winning account of the title role, Camilla Seale’s graceful Prince Charming (originally a tenor role, here reassigned to a mezzo), and Pasquale Orchard’s pinpoint-accurate Fairy Godmother. But the entire show is a treat.

Martin Constantine’s staging of Acis and Galatea (★★★) leaves a more mixed impression, though it starts lucidly enough: we’re at a scientific conference in 1962, in which Handel’s 1718 pastoral serenata is used as a case study. But its progress becomes ever more idiosyncratic and at times mystifying, though it never quite loses the lighter touch that this ironic take on an ancient myth surely requires.

The musical performance is impeccable, with thoroughly stylish singing from Anna Dennis (Galatea), Samuel Boden (Acis), Edward Grint (Polyphemus), Jorge Navarro Colorado (doubling Damon and Coridon) and the chorally employed David de Winter.

Conductor Christian Curnyn demonstrates complete mastery of Handel’s idiom. The orchestra is superb.