THE POACHER
Buxton deserves congratulation for bringing
Lortzing's best comic opera to British audiences.
The Guardian
Lortzing’s score is bright and cheery,
in post- Schubertian or sub-Mendelssohnian idiom. It’s a likeable, if not
very deep, toe-tapper with a preposterous plot: aristos in disguise mix with
the bourgeoisie to find love, but end up married to their own class after
all....For collectors of justly neglected masterpieces, this mildly amusing
tosh was worth encountering — once — especially in Mason’s elegant, stylish
and gently ironic staging, with a beautiful, green-hued indoors/outdoors set
and period costumes by Joe Vanek. Greenwood brings out the jollity and
forgettable melodiousness of a reactionary Biedermeier piece.
The Sunday Times
James
Rutherford holds the show together as the bumbling schoolmaster, and sings
the opera's most celebrated number - an extended bass aria that goes from
Rossini-like patter to proto-Wagnerian declamation - with verve. As
Gretchen, the young nymph to whom he's engaged (but quite willing to flog to
a passing Baron), Laura Parfitt projects chirpy vicacity.
Ashley Holland, Benjamin Hulett, Judith Howarth and Imelda Drumm make a
suitably eccentric bunch of aristocrats - all could have strayed from the
pages of Wodehouse or Waugh. Everyone's words are crystal-clear. And in the
pit Andrew Greenwood keeps this rustic score humming along merrily.
The Times
Judith Howarth
(Baroness Freimann) took on the biggest challenge, looking feminine whether
dressed as a man or not – and her voice sent shivers down the spine, as ever
it did. Imelda Drumm sang gorgeously and acted the drama-queen Countess
brilliantly.
Manchester Evening News
SAMSON
Tom Randle was a muscular and convincingly
hotheaded Samson; Russel l Smythe sang beautifully as his bewailing dad. And
Harry Christophers conducted some excellent period instrumentalists and a
well-drilled chorus with style and intelligence.
The Times
No matter how persuasively the director Daniel
Slater's present-day setting is executed, or how inventive Dan Potra's
designs may be, an oratorio, especially when staged, relies on good singing.
Buxton has cast well...
The conductor Harry Christohers captures the
pacing and shaping of the score, while the tone and technique of teh
Orchestra of the Sixteen is as responsive in its sweep as it is admirable in
its care over detail. The Festival Chorus, vital in its representation of
the Israelites on eminute and the Philistines the next, carries off its
double-sided role in a disciplined, sensitive and surprisingly spontaneous
manner.
The Independent
In
the hands of Slater and designer Daniel Potra, a largely static oratorio
assumes the violent immediacy of a news report. The chorus becomes a
khaki-clad, stone-throwing mob, while Samson is a broken torture victim
flung into the corner of a filthy cell. The brutality of the setting strikes
a discord with the sublimity of the music, yet it forces us to consider that
Samson - the perpetrator of a suicide mission that results in many innocent
deaths - is, by any objective definition, a terrorist...The musical
standards are equally arresting: conductor Harry Christophers establishes a
fine balance between outward urgency and internal repose; Rebecca de Pont
Davies sings with compassion as Micah and Rebecca Bottone with seductiveness
as Delila. Jonathan Best is outstanding as Harapha, and Tom Randle's Samson
taps into the full potential of what is perhaps Handel's greatest tenor
role.
The
Guardian
It is a terrific show: to remind you of the
material we are dealing with, Samson the Israelite is taken captive by the
Philistines in Gaza and tortured. Finally, he destroys the temple, killing
himself and a great number of Philistines in the process - one of the
original acts of suicide bombing, you might say. The production went for the
obvious contemporary parallels unflinchingly but without crassness;
meanwhile the lead performances from Tom Randle, a really good actor, and
Rebecca de Pont Davies, were extremely compelling.
The Guardian
Handel's
genius is at its most sublime in the magnificent choruses for the enslaved
Israelites and the gloating Philistines, here sung with infectious
enthusiasm by an ad hoc group of youngsters, conducted with force and élan
by Harry Christophers...This excellent cast animated Daniel Slater's updated
staging, in which the blinded Samson is a prisoner of a modern terrorist
organisation, the implication being that the righteous downtrodden Jews are
victims of the decadent Palestinians. A contentious concept, but it made
convincing theatre, realised with Daniel Potra's ingeniously versatile set.
The Daily Telegraph
With Harry Christophers
conducting and The Orchestra Of The Sixteen playing, the music was in expert
hands.That was just one of the strengths of the production. Director Daniel
Slater re-imagined the Bible story as a present-day Gaza hostage-taking (and
after all, in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, followed by Handel and his
librettist, it is also seen very much against the background of their own
time). The design by Daniel Potra (lighting by John Bishop) not only evoked
the windowless hostage’s cell, but turned the chorus into a Palestinian
crowd, Manoah into a present-day Jewish dad, and the pagan temple collapse,
brought by Samson’s last deed of strength, into another Middle Eastern,
suicide-based urban massacre.
Manchester Evening News
AN ENGLISH TRIPLE BILL
Staged with arresting simplicity by Michael Barry (director) and Nigel Hook
(designer), the English triple bill proves the surprise hit of the festival.
Savitri is a miniature masterpiece, Holst’s moving take on an Indian version
of the Alceste myth.
The Sunday Times
VW’s Riders to the Sea emerges as a jewel: the
powerful, heart-rending acceptance of death by the bereaved Maurya...Oliver
Gooch underlined the tragic beauty of Vaughan Williams’s eloquent score —
surely his finest opera, and thoroughly deserving of the renewed exposure it
is enjoying in the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.
The Sunday Times
Holst's frisky, folksong-infused sex comedy, The
Wandering Scholar - performed with terrific farcical verve by Hal
Cazalet, Gail Pearson, Mark Richardson and Kevin Greenlaw - proved to be a
spanking yarn, in every sense.
The Times
The festival’s marking of
the 50 years since Vaughan Williams’ death came in the third of its in-house
productions – the little-known one-act opera, Riders To The Sea. It was put
as a postlude to two one-acters by Holst, which gave a logical symmetry, as
Holst’s Savitri is about death and so is the VW piece. The Wandering
Scholar, a late, little gem of a comedy which came between, is emphatically
about life.The musical and direction team proved equal to this ambitious
scheme.
Manchester Evening News
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