Buxton Festival News
annual arts festival held in Buxton
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2024-03-28
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2023-11-13 07:42:00
Plenty of food for thought & some terrific singing: Oliver Mears' staging of Handel's Jephtha at the Royal Opera with a towering performance from Allan Clayton in the title role
[…] Concert performances of Handel's Jephtha are relatively common and I have seen many fine incarnations of the title role including John Mark Ainsley at the London Handel Festival, James Gilchrist with The Sixteen, Nick Pritchard with the Academy of Ancient Music at the London Festival of Baroque Music, Allan Clayton with Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the BBC Proms. But I have seen only been two significant stagings of the work, Frederic Wake-Walker's highly abstract one at the Buxton Festival in 2012 with James Gilchrist [see my review], and Katie Mitchell's highly realistic one which was widely shared with Mark Padmore in the title role [see my review of WNO's 2012 revival with Robert Murray]. These two took highly contrasting routes to solving the work's dramatic problems, because make no bones about it, staging a Handel oratorio is a challenge. Handel's imagination was a dramatic one, whatever he was writing, but writing oratorio […]
2023-10-30 08:00:00
Music of Innocence: Arvo Pärt, Mozart & Mahler from the Northern Chamber Orchestra
[…] soloist Nadine Benjamin. Mahler's symphony is being performed in the chamber orchestration by Iain Farrington. The programme begins with Arvo Pärt's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten.Established in 1967, the Northern Chamber Orchestra comprising approximately twenty-five musicians, an ensemble of distinguished chamber players, many of whom frequently step into the limelight as soloists. It currently presents an annual series of eight concerts at The King’s School and St Michael’s Church in Macclesfield, as well as contributing to the Buxton Festival both in the main opera productions, and in orchestral performances at St John’s Church in Buxton. Full details from the orchestra's website.
2023-09-28 08:05:00
Dramatick Opera: Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company in Purcell and Dryden's King Arthur at Temple
[…] After all the fondness for mixing spoken and sung in a spectacular setting was still alive and well in 1826 when Weber was commissioned to write an opera for Covent Garden; Oberon in its original form is effectively a semi-opera.There have been modern revivals of semi-opera in its full form, notably Glyndebourne's production of Purcell's The Fairy Queen (2009) and the Royal Opera's production of Purcell's King Arthur (1995), with a brave attempt at King Arthur by the Buxton Festival in 1986. But the style, dramatic inconsequentiality and sheer length mitigate against regular revival. So what to do? Too many of the best musical scenes in Purcell's semi-operas have little to do with the overall plot and often modern performances simply present the music on its own [Paul McCreesh and Gabrieli did that at their 2019 performance of King Arthur, see my review].Temple Music presented a performance of Purcell's King Arthur in Temple Church […]
2023-08-05 12:00:00
Mike Wheeler, in his last report from this year's Buxton Festival, is impressed by Sacha Rattle and Peter Donohoe