Risk assessment

Someone at the Buxton International Festival had a wry smile on their face when programming this year’s trio of operas. To sandwich together Verdi’s Macbeth and Mozart’s Lucio Silla — charged tales of political tyranny, both — with Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring is a juxtaposition as canny as it is risky.

Dictatorship takes many forms, it says, and whether your choices are prescribed, your desires proscribed, by a Roman dictator or by the tweed-bosomed ‘self-appointed chief constable’ of a small Suffolk village makes little difference. But comedy is the drawing pin to the balloon of tragedy, bathos beats pathos nearly every time, and while Britten’s exquisite satire on parochial politics emerges whetted to a stiletto point, both Mozart’s teenage experiment with opera seria and Verdi’s first Shakespeare adaptation come off bloodied by the encounter.

Francis Matthews’s Herring is so overflowing with anarchic glee that it quite literally spills out from under the curtain. Before Buxton’s heavy velvet has even had a chance to rise, a couple roll out from under it, locked in an energetic embrace. It’s the first of many signs that the genteel, pre-war world of the village of Loxford survives in spirit only, whatever its lip-pursing ladies might believe.

Updated to its year of composition (1947), Britten’s opera becomes even more pointedly a tale of a community and a nation on the cusp of emancipation, preparing to seize new freedoms and bury old hierarchies in the rubble of the Blitz. Designer Adrian Linford gets in on the fun with a cleverly deconstructed set that distils the essence of Englishness — a telephone box, a country garden, a spidery conservatory — into a three-dimensional collage. A photograph of Churchill watches over Yvonne Howard’s magnificent Lady Billows, Loxford’s Lady None-Too-Bountiful, as she marshals her own forces to combat local vice and indecency.