Buxton Festival is the UK’s largest opera festival and the only one dedicated to producing rarely performed opera, that cannot be seen elsewhere. It boasts a unique setting in the magnificent Edwardian Buxton Opera House designed by Frank Matcham.

The Sunday Times
‘The survival - and present good health - of the Buxton Festival is a cause for rejoicing, certainly for those who have experienced the pleasures offered by the delightful Derbyshire spa town and its enchanting opera house.’

PMF involvement:

1991 Weir's The Black Spider, an opera for children

2001 Verdi's Un giorno di regno

2003 Donizetti's Maria Padilla

2004 Rossini's Il turco in Italia

2005 Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

2006 Gluck’s Armide

2007 Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux
3 December 2008
Mary Plazas in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux
Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux

The Sunday Times

‘... it makes for riveting music drama, especially when it is sung with such fervour as here, by a cast 
that any of our national opera companies would be proud to field. Mary Plazas’s feisty Elizabeth, Susan Bickley’s passionate Sara and David Kempster, as the cuckolded Duke of Nottingham, are thrilling in their angry confrontations. Andrew Greenwood, Buxton’s new artistic director and the conductor of Roberto propels the music along with verve and bags of Italianate braggadocio.’
The Independent

‘Although Donizetti's gripping re-telling of the Elizabeth-Essex saga is based on the Queen of England, there were two stars in Buxton Festival's Roberto Devereux. Mary Plazas sings Elizabetta, displaying her versatility as a singing actress in this bloody tragedy. But in the role of Sara – the unfortunate "other woman" locked in to the geometry of passion, jealousy, fate and revenge – Buxton allowed itself luxury casting in Susan Bickley. Both shine: Plazas successfully (and seemingly effortlessly) negotiates her virtuoso role with its range, ornamentation and – in the closing "Vivi, ingrato" – expansive yet restrained emotion. Bickley not only irradiates her role with pathos and subdued passion; she performs regally.

Andrew Greenwood, the festival's new artistic director, draws authoritative playing from the Northern Chamber Orchestra, and, under Stephen Medcalf's direction, this magnificent razor-sharp Roberto Devereux - sung in Italian - lacks nothing in intensity.’
Gluck’s Armide
Gluck’s Armide

Opera

‘Robert King’s robust conducting and the fine precise playing of the Northern Chamber Orchestra gave constant pleasure. The near-through-composed structure of the work remains astonishing for its day(1777). It’s a great score, and justice was done to it.’
 
Sunday Telegraph

‘Lang staged it with real flair. Aided by Jason Southgate’s attractive set and costumes.’

The Independent

‘Robert King conducts the Northern Chamber Orchestra and Festival Chorus in a biting and impassioned account of this enchanting score, bringing out the velvety sensuousness of the slumber scene, and clearly relishing Gluck's evocation of demonic evil. Lang directs with a sure feeling for the opera's intensity, and has secured, in Rosana Lamosa as Armide, a vocally fleet and roundly characterised seductive sorceress. A sound cast (the largest ever assembled by the festival) produces sparky and sweet-voiced singing, with even the essential smaller roles given depth and dimension.’