Buxton Festival
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The Buxton Festival is an annual summer festival of opera, music, and (since 2000) a literary series, held in Buxton, Derbyshire in England since it began in July 1979. However, its origins date back to 1936 when an annual drama festival was held until 1942 in conjunction with the London-based Old Vic Theatre Company.
Inspired by the restoration of the Buxton Opera House, a classic Frank Matcham building, Malcolm Fraser (then lecturing in opera at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester), saw its potential as venue for an opera festival, and he spent three years planning the first one while restoration was underway.
The restored Buxton Opera House was the venue for the first Buxton Festival in 1979 with presentations of Lucia di Lammermoor (in its first ever complete performance in Britain), followed by Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Two Fiddlers.
From these first successes, the Festival has made a significant impact on the operatic culture of Britain with new productions of rarely-performed operas (such as Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera (1980); Domenico Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (1981 & 1993); Kodály’s Háry János (in its British stage premiere in 1982); Vivaldi’s Griselda (1983, but not seen anywhere since its original Venice presentation in 1735); Cherubini’s Médée (1984, in its original French dialogue never seen in Britain); and, from 1986, many productions of Handel’s operas, as well as many others by Cimarosa (in 1989 it presented three).
Performers of the quality of Thomas Allen, Rosalind Plowright, Jean Rigby, Alan Opie, Nigel Kennedy, Cleo Laine, John Ogdon, Alan Bates, Dame Janet Baker, Victoria de los Angeles, and Sarah Brightman.
Since 2002, the Festival has presented five or six operas each summer. In 2006 it presented eight operas ranging from Mozart's early Apollo and Hyacinth to Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, but including works by Telemann, Monteverdi, Gluck, Britten and Bizet.
