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.