Georgiana, Buxton International Festival, review: a little faddish and two-dimensional, but this new opera is rococo fun
Sadly lacking in the wealthy socialites who support its southern counterparts, Buxton Festival is the poorest, pluckiest and most endearing of the summer opera jamborees. It also tries very hard. Under new management this year – chief executive Michael Williams comes from South Africa, and music director Adrian Kelly is a young British conductor otherwise based in Salzburg – its 2019 programme includes Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, a baroque rarity by Caldara, and the première of an opera based on the life of a local legend – the scandalous châtelaine of Chatsworth, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806).
Instead of an alarming modern score, the music has been adroitly woven together by Mark Tatlow, using extracts from various operatic works by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century composers – a potpourri principle known as pasticcio (pastiche), commonly adopted in Georgian London and not totally dissimilar to the current Mamma Mia! style of jukebox musical.
Using Amanda Foreman’s best-selling biography of Georgiana as a prime source, Michael Williams has concocted the libretto. Clever and charming, scheming and ruthless, Georgiana gambles recklessly and frolics sapphically with the equally rackety Lady Bess Foster, who’s also having an affair with her husband. Georgiana’s further extra-marital shenanigans result in an illegitimate child who’s taken away from her. She dies unhappily and Bess succeeds her as Duchess.
Georgiana emerges as a rather vacuous heroine – too much is fashionably made of her same-sex proclivities here, too little of her Whiggish political leanings, and a final appeal for sympathy for her plight seems hollow in the light of her relentlessly silly and self-serving behaviour. The other characters are equally two-dimensional, with Charles James Fox (Aled Hall) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Geoffrey Dolton) presented as a camp double act commenting sarcastically on the scandal during the interludes.
Such an approach may be historically and psychologically unsubtle, but the material is winningly unpretentious and amusing without being sloppily vulgar or cheaply anachronistic. Williams has a gift for slick rhyming lyrics, and the music provides them with fluently charming accompaniment. Scores by Mozart, Thomas Linley, Paisiello, Soler and Storace have been plundered and reworked in a series of brief solos, duets, trios, ensembles, interspersed with passages of spoken dialogue and culminating in one large-scale aria for Georgiana. It’s a patchwork affair, but an overall sense of elegant urbane rococo, sprinkled with Beggar’s Opera demotic, holds it all together.
Matthew Richardson provides crisp and witty direction, handsomely framed by Jon Morrell’s austere but imaginative designs. A multi-tasking cast of eight works as a resourceful team, and I guess all its members are enjoying themselves considerably. Samantha Clarke sings lustrously in the title role, nicely contrasted with Susanna Fairbairn’s Bess; Benjamin Hulett has some virtuoso moments as the choleric Duke of Devonshire and Olivia Ray adds a touch of class as Georgiana’s mother. Mark Tatlow conducts the Northern Chamber Orchestra with bags of verve. The result is excellent light entertainment that the audience lapped up with palpable gratitude.
Until 20 July, in repertory with Eugene Onegin and Lucio Papirio Dittatore. Tickets: 01298 72190; buxtonfestival.co.uk
