Caccini - La liberazione di Ruggiero (Buxton, 2026)

Francesca Caccini - La liberazione di Ruggiero

Vache Baroque, Buxton International Festival, 2026

Jonathan Darbourne, Eloise Lally, Camilla Seale, Jon Stainsby, Phoebe Rayner, Filippo Turkheimer, Betty Makharinsky, Harriet Burns, Aina Miyagi, Tom Kelly

Pavilion Arts Centre, Buxton - 21st July 2026

The Buxton International Opera spread its wings this year, mixing up the traditional focus on rarely performed opera with a well-worn crowd-pleaser (La traviata) and an operetta (The Merry Widow). It was not a welcome development for my part - personally, I wouldn't take the trouble of flying over from Ireland just to see another La traviata (and yet I went anyway!)- but the regular Buxton attendees aren't getting any younger and there is undoubtedly the necessity of attracting a younger audience that might never have seen the classics. There were however still some rare gems worth that made a visit to the festival worthwhile, such as an inventive take on Handel's Amidigi di Gaula and an incredible opportunity to be taken back and see life breathed into a piece of opera history with Francesca Caccini's early opera La liberazione di Ruggiero.

Composed in 1625, the first opera to be composed by a woman, they don't come much more obscure than La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina. It's a rarely performed and not many would ever have had the opportunity or pleasure of seeing this 400 year old work staged. The quality of the work is beyond question, the challenge rather that it needs to be played by musicians specialising in early opera and in the playing of the instruments of the period. That would be someone like Vache Baroque and having seen their excellent production of Charpentier's unfinished 1687 chamber opera La descente d’Orphée aux enfers at Buxton last year, you could be certain that Caccini's only surviving opera was in safe and experienced hands. Front seat booked for this one.

La liberazione di Ruggiero is indeed a very rare opera, but I have seen it performed before in a production presented by Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Lir Academy of Dramatic Art in 2019 at the Abbey Peacock Theatre in Dublin. My review of that production covers the history of the piece, its qualities and the influence Caccini's work may have had; possibly just as important to the development of opera as Monteverdi. Historical importance aside, it's simply just a beautiful work in how the arrangements of baroque instrumentation work their magic musically and harmonically and in how Caccini chooses to tell the familiar story of the enchantress Alcina and her magical powers, keeping  Ruggiero captive in her twisted garden of discarded lovers who have been corrupted into living plants.

I've seen La liberazione di Ruggiero described as a comic opera - and indeed the 2019 Dublin production retained that element of the opera in their production - but evidently there are any number of ways that a director can reinterpret and reflect the work from a modern perspective. In contrast to how Handel's take on the legends around Orlando Furioso were successfully re-interpreted with more of a comic touch his Amidigi di Gaula at this year's Buxton Festival, director Eloise Lally and the Vache Baroque find a rather darker undercurrent running through Caccini's opera and chose to focus on that instead. That's one of the marvels of being able to see such works side-by-side at a festival such as this, seeing rare early works of opera treated with respect and with the intent to present their themes to a contemporary audience.

Without having to get too revisionist about it, it's clear from the fact that the opera was written by a woman - no less than the first ever opera written by a female composer - that she brings and places a distinctly feminine aspect on the work, with two women in powerful roles as sorceresses - Melissa and Alcina. They are not just opposing forces who use their power for good or for evil - or a least they don't have to be seen that way, and Eloise Lally's interpretation did provide a little more sympathy for Alcina. She may have turned her lovers into twisted trees and plants, but she was acting out of love, however misguided.

Without it having to be over-emphasised (although the programme synopsis does situate this version in the near future or "somewhere between the present and the future: a world ravaged by war") you could also see the dark world as one ravaged by an eco-disaster, war devastation, climate change that has destroyed nature, twisted it and corrupted the inhabitants of the planet. You could even see the magic of the sorceresses as the work of mad science creating destructive weapons, but the production leaves the work open to let such notions arise naturally out of the situation and have resonance in how they relate to the problems in the world that we are familiar with today. 

There isn't a considerable amount of dramatic action in La liberazione di Ruggiero, as is the case with nearly all early and baroque opera, but it has moments of exquisite beauty in how the situations lend themselves to be presented and those situations and expression are enlivened by the musical arrangements and the urgency of the singing. Those in turn are made magical by the vocal harmonies and the musical dissonance or less familiar sounds of the harpsichord (played by musical director Jonathan Darbourne), viola da gamba and theorbo - not to mention the alto, tenor and bass 'sackbuts', which are early trombones.

Needless to say, it all sounded incredible, particularly in the arrangement of the orchestra to the left and right of the stage, providing an enveloping musical environment for those of us in the stalls - the main continuo and accompaniment played to the right of the stage supplemented by triumphal and ominous blasts of the sackbuts and additional recorders on the left of the stalls. The surround musical performance adds another dimension to the performance of this opera, drawing you into the island with sweet sounds and persuasive rhythms that beguile and entrap.

It looked and sounded magnificent, a rare treat and a pleasure to be able to get close to and hear a work performed to such a high standard, aiming towards a fresh interpretation while retaining authenticity of the original instrumentation and character. Those are qualities are brought out in the superb stage production with fine singers with the perfect sweet voices necessary for this. Jon Stainsby in particular was strong and resonant as Ruggiero, tormented by Camilla Seale's darkly brooding Alcina and revived by Phoebe Rayner's lighter voiced Melissa - their voices suited to the nature of the roles. Harriet Burns, Betty Makharinsky and Aina Miyagi had a variety of lyrical roles that blended beautifully with the score. Here's hoping Vache Baroque return to the Buxton Festival soon.

External links: Buxton International Festival

Charpentier - La descente d’Orphée aux enfers (Buxton, 2025)

Marc-Antoine Charpentier - La descente d’Orphée aux enfers

Vache Baroque, 2025

Jonathan Darbourne, Jeanne Pansard-Besson, Gwilym Bowen, James Geidt, Betty Makharinsky, Naho Koizumi, Katie-Louise Dobson, Frances Gregory, Francis Gush, Lars Fischer, Michael Roche, Fi Silverthorn, Kenji Matsunaga

Pavilion Arts Centre, Buxton - 24th July 2025

Buxton often invite a specialist early opera company as an addition to the main programme at the Buxton International Festival, and this music always seems to be a good fit for the Pavilion Arts Centre in the town. Not equipped with an orchestra pit, it isn't always the best way to see reduced productions of full scale operas (Ethel Smyth's The Boatswain's Mate suffered from this last year) and the stage does need to be rearranged to accommodate a chamber orchestra as well as a stage performance for a baroque opera, but with some creativity - like the Liberata Collective's production of Handel's Orlando done with Baroque Gesture in the theatre in 2023 - it seems to work spectacularly well. This year Vache Baroque brought a thrilling and very rare work to this year's festival, Charpentier’s chamber opera La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, and it was one of the highlights of the festival.

The opera was composed between 1686-87 while Charpentier was commissioned to write works for Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise, a wealthy cousin of Louis XIV who became his patron. Charpentier, with a small company of musicians and singers, of which he was one himself, composed a number of pastoral and allegorical works for the Duchess at her urban palace in the Marais district of Paris. La descente d’Orphée aux enfers (The Descent of Orpheus into the Underworld) however remained unfinished at the time of the death of the Duchess in 1688. Intended to run to three acts, only the first two acts were set to music, the music for the third act lost or never completed, although it still exists in libretto form.

Charpentier has been going through a revival lately with a great deal of work being done on that front by William Christie. Having rescued and almost exhausted works by Rameau and Lully that have remained unheard for centuries, he and his Les Arts Florissantes company have turned their attention to this composer and will actually be performing a version of this same work in Valencia later this year (still without a third act sadly - although if ever there was a case for putting AI to good use, an attempt at recreation of the final act would be worth hearing). I'm sure that production will be marvellous, Christie always successfully dusting off ancient works like this and making them feel fresh and invigorating, but even if it is only half as good as this production by Vache Baroque at the Buxton International Festival, it will be marvellous.

The work itself is simply a marvel. Of course, the Orpheus myth has been the drama behind some of the greatest and indeed earliest opera works ever composed, but the story of a singer/musician, half-human/half-divine who charms demons and the god of the Underworld with his song, is an inspirational one for any composer. Charpentier follows the story we are familiar with, perhaps not jumping straight into the mournful grieving of Orpheus for the already expired Eurydice before plunging straight into hell as in C.W. Gluck's pared back Orphée et Eurydice, but allowing the work to have more life and colour, from the wedding celebration of the couple in Act I to the proposed depiction of the death of Orpheus torn apart by the furious Maenads in Act III.

Even without the missing third Act, Charpentier's La descente d’Orphée aux enfers is revealed here truly as a thing of great beauty. The strength of the composition is in how the Charpentier expresses the depth and dynamic range of human sentiments that the myth offers and elevates it with otherworldly music that is persuasive enough to provide an instructive moral on the nature of being human and yet through all those challenges aspire to follow our better nature. It has the purity of sentiment matched with artistry that Gluck was aspiring to bring back to opera in the reformist agenda of his own version of this story, in the process revealing himself to be a kind of Orpheus in this regard, reclaiming the power and the purity of the lyric drama.

With two extant magnificent acts to work with, Vache Baroque in this production directed by Jeanne Pansard-Besson, find beautiful contrasts in the settings and the music for each act. The wedding of Orpheus and Euridice in Act I is all beautiful pastel colours in the wedding costumes, highlighting the colour of the occasion and the music before it all turns to horror when Euridice is bitten by a snake and dies. The lively performance was of course stylised but felt natural and celebratory, not just of the wedding but of the music composed for it. The second Act was just as engaging and stylised for the journey into Hades, the condemned souls Orpheus encounters there wearing black and white costumes like Gothic clowns somehow feeling strangely appropriate. The movement choreography also played an important role - all credit to Simeon Qsyea - with two dancers included in the team, mirroring the flow of the haunting music in Act II but also the journey from ceremony to chaos in the first Act.

The singing voices also fully matched the intent of the composition and its meaning, playing their part in the remarkable dynamic of the drama. The fervency of Gwilym Bowen's Orpheus was matched by the unyielding authority of James Geidt's Pluton. The sheer strength of will that is needed to overcome such an impossible endeavour could be felt in such contrasts. In between there was some wonderful ensemble singing and performing, but I also noted wonderful lyricism in Frances Gregory’s Persephone, the bell-like clarity of Naho Koizumi's Daphné and the beautifully blended bass of Martin Roache’s dual role of Apollo and the Promethean Tityé. All were only enhanced by the complementary harmonies of the other voices.

The musical performance under the guidance of musical director Jonathan Darbourne was exquisite. It's always a pleasure to hear period instruments playing such beautiful music, but it's just as thrilling to hear it blend so well with the beautiful writing for voices. Sitting in the front row of the Pavilion Arts Centre takes you as close as you'll ever come to being on an opera stage, to being actually in the opera - another charm of this venue - and from there the separation of voices, the beauty of each and the harmonising of voice types just hits you and brings the whole depth of emotion of the tragedy of the story of Euridice and the boundless ambition of Orpheus to the forefront. It really is a tragedy that the third Act of the opera is lost, but this absorbing work and performance nonetheless felt wonderfully complete.

External links: Buxton International Festival