As the rapturous applause sounded through architect Frank Matcham’s lovely opera house in Buxton last Saturday, at the close of a magnificent first performance of Buxton Festival’s fabulous new production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, black-dressed functionaries stepped on to the stage to present bouquets to some of the singers.

They were all there to receive them, unlike the performers in line for floral tributes the previous evening after Charles Gounod’s La Colombe, the second part of a French double bill (Camille Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse Jaune was first). A behind-the-scenery search was needed to bring them out on view again for the hand-over.

All the recipients were women, including two in trouser roles. One of these was the mezzo-soprano Emma Carrington who in La Colombe made such a fine job of showing us the comic servant Mazet that it was a genuine surprise when this short-trousered urchin began to sing. Until the spoken dialogue came, when the female timbre of the voice could be recognised, I had thought (programme unconsulted) that we were listening to a counter-tenor.

This reminder that blokes don’t usually get stage bouquets (except in ballet) came at a time when my thoughts were on sexual equality, and how little of it there had been in the Victorian period — and indeed for many years afterwards.

For this, our fifth annual visit to the Buxton Festival, we stayed for the first time at the Palace Hotel, a huge pile (architect Henry Currey) looming over the town from an eminence beside the station (the London and North Western Railway made a major contribution to funding it). There was a fascinating account of its opening, in June 1868, in a supplement to The Buxton Advertiser. All four pages of it are displayed, framed behind glass, in the hotel foyer. Fully three of them are devoted to the lavish opening dinner, which interested me greatly, not least for its astonishing bill of fare that featured most edible creatures of air, land and sea and included lobsters, eels, sweetbreads, pigeons, roast meats in all variety, ducklings and leverets. Puddings galore followed.

All was perhaps necessary in view of the long speeches to come, in orotund vocabulary, every word of which was reported. Manager Mr Woolfe might have chosen his words a little more carefully, I thought, when he said that he and his wife “would leave nothing undone to satisfy everyone visitor who came to the hotel”.

The Advertiser’s report concluded: “Mr Mollady, in proposing ‘The Ladies’, said the proceedings of the evening had only been faulty in one respect — in not having ladies present . . .”

The Palace was full to busting last weekend for a wedding (which presumably explains why we were accommodated in a cramped room in what appeared to be a servants’ wing). The gay layout of tables dressed for the occasion rather mirrored what we were to see onstage during La finta giardiniera, which was updated to the present in director Harry Fehr’s production, brilliantly designed by Jannis Thavoris. The piece has a plot complicated even by the standards of opera buffa, as anyone who saw Garsington’s production of ten years ago will know. But there is much to delight in the music, which was expertly delivered by seven fine singers (and actors) and the Northern Chamber Orchestra, under conductor Nicholas Kraemer.

For a summary of the work’s appeal it is hard to better the words of the German poet Christian Daniel Schubart. He wrote presciently of it — the eighth opera by a composer aged just 18 — in 1775: “Flashes of genius appear here and there; but there is not yet that still altar fire that rises towards Heaven in clouds of incense — a scent beloved of the gods. If Mozart is not a plant forced in the hot-house, he is bound to grow into one of the greatest musical composers who ever lived.”

Excellent design was also a feature of the Double Bill. It was supplied by Lez Brotherston, the man responsible for the visual appeal of a string of dance ‘hits’ from Matthew Bourne, including his legendary Swan Lake. Here we get a split level set which delivers, on top, a garret dwelling (in obvious homage to La bohème) for La Princesse Jaune and, downstairs, the more lavish, if tatty, apartment of a chap so hard up that he feels obliged to serve his beloved’s pet dove (‘la colombe’ of the title) to her for dinner.

Tuneful both, with some delicious fake Japanese music in the first, these entertaining pieces were expertly presented under the baton of Stephen Barlow, the festival’s artistic director.

Buxton Festival is on till July 21, offering further performances of the three operas mentioned, plus a lot more besides, both musical and literary, with a flourishing fringe, programme, much of it comedy-focused. For full information go to buxtonfestival.co.uk