Golden Oldies

famously intimate Buxton Opera House played host to new stagings of Gypsy and a pair of Italian gems: Donizetti’s send-up of the entire operatic business in a youthful farce, played here in an English adaptation by Kit HeskethHarvey as Viva la Diva, and Rossini’s picturesque and vocally thrilling La donna del lago.

Derived from Walter Scott’s 1810 poem The Lady of the Lake, the Rossini is a tale of romantic love and clan warfare set amid Scotland’s lakes and mountains during the reign of James V.

Historically, it’s tailor-made for Buxton. It was to Buxton’s Old Hall (now a well-favoured hotel) to which James V’s daughter, Mary Queen Scots, was occasionally taken. Less well known, I suspect, is Rossini’s friendship with the music-loving Italophile William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, the ‘Bachelor Duke’, whose father created Buxton as a spa resort.

Rossini would have loved the elegance and intimacy of Matcham’s Opera House as surely as he would have been baffled by the rag-bag of designs undermining the essential integrity of Jacopo Spirei’s new staging. This was at its most compelling in moments of sustained stillness – such as the wonderful Act I meeting between Ellen, the young lake-dweller, and the King, disguised and pursued by rebels. The scene haunted Wagner’s imagination.

Máire Flavin’s Elena and Nico Darmanin’s King came closest to meeting the demands of music Rossini wrote for a Naples company that was vocally without equal in its day. There was also some fine choral work, and incisive conducting from festival director Adrian Kelly, proto-Verdian in its drive and élan.

Christine Rice (left) as the witch and Natalya Romaniw as Rusalka

I last saw the opera at Garsington in 2007. That self-styled specialist in audience alienation David Alden reduced it to a series of routines worthy of a Billy Connolly show, with a drunken King, lager-lout huntsmen and cigar-smoking deer reading Country Life.

Whatever its inconsistencies, the Buxton revival was innocent of any such folly.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON IT’S CRYING TIME AGAIN

When we used to watch Top of the Pops as a family bonding exercise, my son, Oliver, then aged four, made the following astute observation. He said most pop songs divided into only two genres: either ‘crying’ or ‘shouting’.

This still holds up. But some artists manage to combine both crying and shouting. This is where Paolo Nutini comes in and why he’s back with a number-one album after six years of not troubling the charts.

Nutini is a Paisley-born singersongwriter of Tuscan descent (he is an honorary citizen of Barga) who signed to a major label aged 18. The Scottish lad cornered the market early in teenageboy-in-bedroom charm, writing tender, sensitive songs with raw, thin-skinned lyrics about his feelings.

He has claimed to have smoked weed every day of his adult life, which may have something to do with the recent hiatus. If you’re thinking, ‘But I’ve never heard of Paolo Nutini,’ all I can say is ‘Oh yes you have.’

He’s a production line; one of those singers whose latest number one – and he had hit after hit – was forever on a loop in the All Bar One after work, every Friday throughout the noughties. He has a distinctive sound – a cross between Rod Stewart and a Mumford with the high sweetness of Cat Stevens.

If you like James Morrison or James Blunt, you’ll like Paolo Nutini. And you’ll have sung along to all his previous bangers – New Shoes, These Streets, Jenny Don’t Be Hasty (about his relationship with an older woman – hurray!) – and you will love his new album, Last Night in the Bittersweet, too. Or your money back, as they say.

In sum, he had a charmed career until he got bored (I have a theory that nobody survives success) in 2017 and vanished – until his Risorgimento this summer of 2022.

He’s touring to sell-out crowds. The sure-fire hit is Through the Echoes – and this is where I have to make my confession.

I was in Tuscany when he played in Pistoia this July and, reader, I didn’t go. I had guests. But my friend Emma did, and I have no hesitation in cutting and pasting her expert verdict here (why pay the dog etc).

‘Nutini was sensational. At the risk of sounding like a knob, I swear it was the most soulful concert I’ve been to. Set in Pistoia piazza among ancient buildings, Nutini sang with his heart and made the 99-per-cent-Italian audience of 5,000 feel special and very lucky to be there.’ Through the Echoes proves that Oliver was almost right 20 years ago. An artist who can convey crying and shouting in the same song is guaranteed a special place in the history of pop.

Paolo Nutini in Pistoia, Italy, July 2022