Hugh Canning [Times Online, 20 July 2008]

Almost 30 years have passed since the enchanting Derbyshire spa town of Buxton first hosted an opera festival. It opened modestly in 1979 with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, but the following year it raised the stakes exponentially with Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, starring Thomas Allen in the title role, and Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict, in which Ann Murray and her husband, Philip Langridge, sang the squabbling lovers.