Buxton Festival Nights
18 July

Buxton and Llandudno are our two summer operatic shrines.

In previous years, we've tended to holiday in Llandudno and to take day trips out to Buxton. This year, we reversed the process and took our holiday in Buxton.

Wednesday morning saw a gentle start to a busy day with much organising of clothes and packing of cases. We're not exactly going to the ends of the earth but, nevertheless, there was still a formidable amount of articles to be accumulated - reading materials, various medications, laptop, music centre, maps, tickets, etc, etc.

Robert packed himself up as well. On the doorstep he gave me one final, parting gift. We'd been talking about smoking. He acknowledged that he rarely smoked and tended to do so only around the time of a performance. Then, realising that he had smoked whilst he had been staying with us and spotting the trap that he had set for himself, he flung his hands into the air in a spontaneous madcap gesture and mocked himself with "Darlings, it's all been a performance".

The air of self-mockery, the sunny delight in the logical traps that language ensnares us in, the perspicacity, the warmth, the humanity, the ability to act out the worst of us, the twinkle in the eye - there's only one other person in the world that I know of who can encapsulate all of that in one throw away gesture; and that's me.

Genetics will out, I tell you.

We dropped Robert off in the centre of Liverpool to do his own set of explorations and headed off via lunch at Borders on the Speke shopping park into the Cheshire and then Derbyshire countryside.

After some excellent driving over the tops by the Cat and Fiddle, we arrived at our hotel, the Alison Park, in good time for Ross to take his afternoon nap whilst I settled in.

We'd been greeted at the reception by a pleasantly cheeky chappie who turned out to be David, one of the joint proprietors. A sunny and somewhat saucy demeanour coupled with exquisite skin tone led the two of us into the misplaced idea that he batted for our side. In the event, I later met his two young children and, although that is absolutely no guarantee of respectability, I'm sure that his slightly risqué greeting to us was more a product of well-tempered hosting than anything else.

For convenience sake, we ate evening meal at the hotel and enjoyed beef (for Ross) and salmon (for me) before leaping into the car to get to the Opera House. We needn't have bothered. Not only was the theatre but a short journey away, it was also pretty much on the flat all of the way - this is not to be taken for granted in a valley town like Buxton.

Our first operatic entertainment was Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor and it was most pleasurable. In fact, it makes you wonder why this piece hasn't been given professionally in this country in my memory. It may not be the greatest music ever written but it is more than apt and at times possesses a great lyrical tunefulness - I'm particularly thinking of Fenton's second act aria here. And it has charm.

And that, of course, may be the point. Major opera companies haven't done charm or elegance very well for quite some time now. In fact, about two thirds of the way through the evening, I was musing to myself about how much I was enjoying the presentation, when it occurred to me that I could conceive of two instances which would totally destroy the experience for me.

The first would have been if the performance had been given in the original German thus destroying the direct connection between stage and audience in this entertaining confection. And the second would have been if the director has chosen the path of some deconstructionist production style.

Luckily we were spared both.

Of the principles, I really liked Hal Cazalet's light tenor in the rôle of Fenton just as he had won me over as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream. James Rutherford was a very young Falstaff and came over like a big, bouncy Billy Bunter type but it was all in keeping with the evening's fun and games. John Graham-Hall cropped up in another of his astonishingly good cameos as Slender.

Gail Pearson was effective as the young Anne Page whilst Helen Williams, who took the title rôle in Semele two years ago, gave a ripe and fruity performance as Mistress Ford. Andrew Greenwood, a regular conductor at Buxton with La Périchole and Maria Padilla already under his belt, kept an affectionately tight rein on the orchestra allowing sentiment and lyricism to blossom.

I don't know if I would want to go racing off to see this particular piece at every conceivable opportunity - it's just not that much of a revelation. However, if in another ten years' time another production came my way, I would certainly consider giving it a go. A good and deserved three stars.

Thursday was a non-opera day so we used the time to make a journey to Lyme Park just south of Stockport. The house itself was closed but we had a happy few hours in the gardens and parks. The herbacious borders were a colourful delight and there was even a small valley garden with some gunnera proving that we needn't have travelled all the way to Cornwall for such delights.

Lyme Park is one of those National Trust properties which host outdoor theatrical events and it's within a comfortably easy reach of Crosby so I'm sure that we are set to return at some point. After all, there is the house to see.

Whilst Ross rested in the afternoon, I strolled round Buxton and finished off reading Joanne Harris's Sleep, Pale Sister. This is her earliest novel, written before Chocolat and then overshadowed by the second novel's greater success. This was its resurrection and, whilst I can see why the author and the publishers would want to do this, I really didn't enjoy the book after the first fifty or so pages. It's a plainly nasty attempt at Victorian Gothic on the lines of Wilkie Collins. It was less than average and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. One star.

Come evening time, we had a most pleasant meal at the local Pizza Express waited on by two affably smiling and matey young men of comely disposition. There was an awful lot of crouching down by the industrial steel refrigerators to access and move stock thus displaying much white knicker above the line their corporate black trousers - Calvin Klein seemed to be the brand of choice or maybe that was a corporate decision as well. Their maître d'hôtel was a vaguely familiar face who turned out to have waited on us on several occasions at the Pizza Express at Salford Quays when we have eaten there before Opera North performances.

Friday morning gave us the opportunity to do a little more site seeing. We essayed Poole's Cavern, a natural limestone cave, which happened to be just up the road from the hotel. We were drawn here because of information gleaned from the tourist brochure. Normally, it's not sensible to even attempt places like this with a wheelchair - by and large, God does not design the natural world with accessibility issues in mind. However, the owners of the facility had installed a series of cameras so that the deep interior could be viewed on TV monitors back at the information centre.

We arrived at about opening time and were the first visitors of the day. Our tour guide, one Tom from memory, was another smiling, matey, comely, blokey chap (is Buxton staffed exclusively by a certain class and age of young man and, if so, how come?).

Partly because we were the first (and only for a while) visitors; partly because Ross was in his wheelchair and therefore we could not take the whole tour thus incurring the sympathy vote; and partly because we were friendly and asked sensible questions and made intelligent and appreciative comments, we got more details and background data out of Tom than he would normally have given. A frequent refrain from him was "Well, I don't normally cover this but...".

We pottered the afternoon away before another evening meal at the hotel followed by a leisurely stroll through the Pavilion Gardens to the Opera House for our second operatic entertainment with Mozart's Ascanio in Alba.

A few quick facts; Mozart was fifteen when he wrote the work and it was composed as a special commission to mark the wedding of the Archduke Ferdinand (one of the youngest and least attractive sons of the Empress Maria Theresa) to Princess Maria Beatrice d'Este. And, frankly, if the piece hadn't been written by Mozart, we would never have heard of it again. I'll cut to the chase and say that the work really only deserves two stars ; the performance, however, merits three.

Harry Christophers kept the music moving along nicely but, although there were beautiful felicities in some of the individual showpiece arias, it was only the final trio which shone out musically with some ravishing harmonies. Gillian Keith was splendid as Silvia and William Purefoy, who was less noticeable in Semele, was absolutely first-rate as Ascanio (and I'm not a big lover of the counter-tenor voice). The other three rôles are pretty much padding. Tom Randle was his usual professional self as the holy man, Aceste; Ross enjoyed Lynda Russell's Venus more than I did; and, whilst Elizabeth Cragg coped heroically with Fauno's stratospheric music, I still found her voice to be a little thin.

Stephen Lawless's production was a model of inventive restraint, having fun with the work but not swamping it with cleverness. The audience received the performers at the end with the sort of open enthusiasm reserved for a light sourbet confection on a warm summer's evening.

Saturday morning was grey and quite chill. There was not a lot for us to do. Ross was feeling a little depleted after a few full days and so required some downtime. I was feeling out of sorts with the world. Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was a delayed downer after talking with Robert, maybe it was some physical fatigue after three days of hefting Ross around in his wheelchair. Anyhow, I too needed a bit of space but also felt nerved by the idleness.

In previous times, I would have handled this sort of mood badly. Instead, I just did some yogic breathing and asked my body what it needed; more clothes, a little sustenance, no caffeine and calm came the answer and so that's what I did.

The day brightened at lunchtime and Buxton threw itself into carnival Saturday. Ross and I, after a rest in the park, retired to the hotel and let the world get on with enjoying itself for a while.

Then, whilst Ross slept and once I had finished scribing, I took a stroll into the town centre and caught the tail end of the festivities. It's all based around the tradition of well-dressing. There are prizes for the best dressed well, a carnival queen and a grand parade on floats with all of the local voluntary, charitable and public sectors getting dressed up for the admiration and amusement of us all.

Because the route around the town centre was so extended, the crowds never felt as oppressive as I feared they might have done. Around me, mostly young families had a whale of a time and many a three-year old did the excited dance of delight that characterises that age group. However, probably the most ecstatically happy group of people were the troupe of middle aged men dragged up as cheer leaders. What is is about middle aged hettie men and women's clothing?

That evening, Ross and I had intended to have a meal in town. However, the carnival crowds had filled the usual restaurants. More worryingly, at six in the early evening, other eating places like tea shops, fish and chip places and coffee houses were either closed or closing. Where was the entrepreneurial spirit?

In the event, we bought some salad, some pork pies, some juice, some strawberries and some carrot cake from the Co-op and ate it in the park. It was a lot cheaper and quite nourishing. So thank you, burghers of Buxton, for preventing us from spending our money on you.

It was very reminiscent of the first days of the Festival when the town of Buxton seemed completely indifferent to the presence of so many arts attenders in the place. You didn't necessarily want kow-towing to but a little effort to make facilities available so that we could spend money would have been nice.

And whilst we are on this theme, I should like to pay tribute to the Pavilion Gardens, Buxton's central park. We've spent quite a bit of time there, walking through, sitting and eating, reading books and newspapers, passing the time. It's a glorious place to be.

It's well laid out, well stocked with trees and plants, well maintained. There seem to be no end to the variety of walks that you can take along its leafy paths with some new and charming vistas offered up across the lawns, over the lakes, along the rivers, down from the bridges, among the trees. It reminds me, of an evening, of the walk across the Meadows in Edinburgh. It has that peace and calm but with infinitely more variety.

It didn't always used to be like that. At the start of the Festival, the same garden area was a dump and not an area you'd willingly spend time relaxing in with prospects more akin to a battlefield.

We ended up there for most of Sunday morning. I'd been intending to attend a performance of Mozart's Coronation Mass in one of the local churches but the weather was clement and the crowds were amiable and a solitary accordion player leavened the sounds of children playing and assorted birds vocalising. So, I sat with Ross under the shade of a tree near to the Winter Gardens and we read for a couple of hours in perfect contentment.

I'm currently about half-way through Phillipa Gregory's The Virgin's Lover which is the story of Robert Dudley and Elzabeth I. After the disappointment of Virgin Earth, it's a great improvement although not quite in the same league as The Other Boleyn Girl. I suppose that that first book had the novelty of finding a new author's voice but the story was also less well known. Elizabeth I's rein is a fairly well travelled path. Still, it's a good and involving read if a little ponderous at times.

After lunch, we toddled over to the Palace Hotel for a recital. I say toddled but, because of its positioning, the journey was probably one of the most arduous we've made all week. Another festival goer was singing the praises of this establishment to us but its positioning and the atmosphere of reeking snobbery told us both that we'd made a wise decision staying where we are.

The recital itself, given by Gillian Keith (Silvia in Ascanio in Alba) with Simon Lepper on the piano was quite delightful. We were treated to songs by Schubert, Poulenc, Strauss, Rachmaninov, Debussy and some contemporary British composers. Overall, I should say that her voice was best suited to the Strauss and the Rachmaninov. It has a lovely silvery, bell-like quality. She would make a lovely Pamina on current form and there's probably a few Strauss heroines beckoning her in a decade or so's time. Three stars.

Another bonus was the presence of Tom Randle in the audience. Both my Rossi and me salute him as a very desirable hunk on manhood amply filling out his tight, white Levis in all the right places.

Another quiet afternoon and wholesome meal at the hotel brought us to our final operatic outing for the holiday...

English Touring Opera's production of George Frideric Handel's Ariodante which was quite splendid and a real treat to round off the vacation.

For the first two acts, given without interval and lasting some hour and three-quarters, the whole enterprise was in the groove, singing, characterisation, scenic and musical presentation, all combined into one glorious whole. I've known shorter, complete works feel longer in duration.

Most of the cast I'd seen and heard elsewhere - Louise Mott in The Secret Marriage, Ashley Catling in The Thieving Magpie, Andrew Slater and Rachel Nicholls in Cosi fan tutte and Jonathan Peter Kenny in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Only Sinead Campbell was a newcomer to me. None disappointed and their contributions produced a greater whole. In fact, I was so entranced that I could easily be persuaded to go again but for the fact that the final performance clashes with the wedding this weekend.

I owe my continued attendance of Handel operas to my dear Rossi. Without his championship of the Baroque, I doubt that I should have attended this or Jephtha or Semele. And I should really have missed out on some big treats.

And that was it. A short walk home across the park in the twilight. Bed. Breakfast. And a journey home.