Three spirit

WHETHER you’re superstitious or not, three looks set to be a lucky number for Buxton Festival, poised on the brink of yet another bumper year. For this summer, the increasingly high profile event celebrates three decades in the spotlight with a feast of opera, music and literature - including, for the first time, three ‘home-grown’ productions - a source of understandable excitement for Artistic Director Andrew Greenwood. Along with The Poacher by German composer Albert Lortzing and Samson by Handel, there will be an English triple bill of chamber operas - Savitri and The Wandering Scholar, both by Gustav Holst, and Riders to the Sea by Ralph Vaughan Williams, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. As the Festival prepares to launch its 30th birthday programme, which this year will embrace an additional two days and will run from July 9 to 27, there certainly seem to be plenty of landmarks and features of local interest to acknowledge among more than 120 events. Charlotte Mosley, author of The Mitford Sisters, will be in conversation with the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, affectionately known as ‘Debo’ and the youngest, last surviving sibling in the family, as part of the Literary Series. This year’s programme of literary talks will also include A Life in Politics outlined by ex-Labour and SDP politician and life peer Shirley Williams, whose mother,novelist Vera Brittain, once lived in Buxton. Vera’s fascinating life will then come under the spotlight in Testament of Youth, a dramatisation of her autobiography, presented by Rohan McCullough. And another indomitable lady with Derbyshire links, Bess of Hardwick, will be remembered in the community production More Glass Than Wall, staged to mark the 400th anniversary of her death. Around 120 young people from Chapel-en-le-Frith, Hague Bar,Thornsett and Whaley Bridge have worked with nationally acclaimed composer James Redwood and a team of sinfonia VIVA musicians to create music inspired by charismatic Bess’s eventful life. Not that the overall focus could be criticised as parochial: as well as presenting operas from England, Germany, Canada and America, the Festival will include music by international composers from Donizetti to Debussy and Saint-Saens to Wagner. Expanding its horizons still further,world music from Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe will feature for the first time to bring different sounds and an even broader audience base to the catholic Festival mix. Highlights will be The Silk and Bamboo Ensemble of China, Son de Havana from Cuba, England’s New Scorpion Band, sitar player Purbayan Chatterjee of India, the Dojo Drummers from Japan, Extasis from North Africa and the Middle East and The Burning Bush from Turkey and central Europe. What with the ballet Romeo and Juliet with score by Berlioz, a series of opera talks, the inaugural Buxton Poetry Competition in partnership with the University of Derby Buxton, walks amid landscapes as diverse as Georgian Buxton and Chee Dale and food-related events featuring everything from Derbyshire dishes to a Festival Lunch, there’s more than enough to whet the fussiest of appetites. It’s all a far cry from the early days. Buxton Opera House’s potential as a venue for an annual opera festival was spotted by Malcolm Fraser, then lecturer in opera studies at the Royal Northern College of Music, in 1976. The following year, High Peak Borough Council embarked on a two-year renovation programme to return the theatre to its original glory; its stated raison d’être a summer opera festival run by Buxton Arts Festival Ltd. Princess Alice reopened the restored Edwardian gem on 30 July 1979, the first night of the first Buxton Festival. The inaugural theme was Sir Walter Scott and his influence on the other arts. Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor was the Festival opera and the children’s opera was Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Two Fiddlers, supported by a clutch of Scott-related musical events, films, lectures and late-night shows. Despite critical acclaim, the first Festival made a loss of £52,000, covered by a loan from Derbyshire County Council, overdraft guarantees from High Peak Borough Council and financial help from a private source. After a period of expansive artistic innovation matched by increasing financial instability, the Festival found its fiscal feet in the mid- 1990s and has not looked back since.Nowadays around 59 per cent of its income comes from ticket sales and only ten per cent from public sources; an unusual position for any arts organisation in the UK. From the start, the Festival’s hallmark has been to present rarely performed operas linked by a common thread, and past themes have included the Greek Revival, Shakespeare and Voltaire. More unusual works have ranged from Griselda, the first Vivaldi opera to be performed in Britain in 1983 to the British stage premiere of Kodaly’s Hary Janos the preceding year. A new dimension was introduced in 2000 by the then Chairman, Roy Hattersley, in the form of the hugely popular Literary Festival. With previous speakers ranging from Melvyn Bragg to Joan Bakewell and Matthew Parris to Michael Palin, it’s proved a massive hit with audiences since the millennium. This year’s programme will feature, among others, Menzies Campbell, Andrew Davies, Douglas Hurd, Joanne Harris, Penelope Lively and Janet Suzman. Small wonder then, that the Festival’s new Chairman, Dame Janet Smith, describes Roy as ‘a hard act to follow’ and declares herself ‘very nervous, but also very excited’ about its 30th birthday year. Dame Janet, who lived in Buxton from 1967 to 1980, says she has never missed attending at least one event per Festival.‘It has changed enormously in that time, and the most important change has been in its consistency over the past few years,’ she reflected. ‘In the past, I think the Festival’s reputation suffered as a result of the variability of quality, but now it is secure, both in its reputation and financially. ‘It’s a very big year for us, so I shall be here at the centre of things throughout. I’m very much looking forward to it. Last year’s Festival was successful, but I think this year’s is going to be even more so.’

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