Umbrellas appear to be the fashionable onstage opera accessory these days. Big white ones form the backdrop to Richard Studer’s new production of Falstaff at Longborough. Big blue ones were a prominent feature of Olivia Fuchs’s Garsington Opera at Wormsley opener The Magic Flute. Now the same director shows us black ones brandished, tightly furled, by the well-drilled chorus in her highly satisfying Saul at Buxton Festival.

This would seem to be a way of finding something for the singers to do with their hands in a work which — in common with Handel’s other oratorios, and indeed operas — makes no very great demands in terms of action. It is certainly better than the puzzling, bare-handed semaphoring, sometimes with palms painted green, we see at other times.

One of three home-grown offerings that began the increasingly ambitious annual festival, this Saul (like Glyndebourne’s 1996 Theodora) transports us back to the world of 20th-century American politics. The familiar Bible story works well translated to this sphere. Jonathan Best’s presidential-style Saul leads an impeccable cast, among whom Anne Marie Gibbons’s David (right) is outstanding. Conductor Harry Christophers and his Orchestra of the Sixteen create an evening of musical delight.

Maria di Rohan, an equally unfamiliar opera by Donizetti, supplies an impressive vehicle for the superb voice of Mary Plazas, the star international soprano brought up in Cholsey, who is in the title role. This is a feast of melodic invention, with an intensely dramatic plot built around deceptions and duels, with the unheard and sinister figure of Cardinal Richelieu pulling strings in the background. The importance of time to the story is reflected in Frances O’Connor’s compelling designs, which show us the ticking interior of a clock.

The success of this production, conducted by the festival’s retiring artistic director Andrew Greenwood, makes one wonder why the work has yet to regain the popularity enjoyed by other of Donizetti’s operas.

The same is true of Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon — a complicated story of a grieving father’s hunt for his missing child — except that the acknowledged absurdity of the plot supplies an explanation for the neglect.

It is set amid a theatrical background not dissimilar to that presented in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, with a prima donna of a leading actress dazzlingly depicted by coloratura soprano Gillian Keith. Russell Smythe is the searching dad and Wendy Dawn Thompson the waif-like daughter with whom he is eventually reunited. Mr Greenwood again conducts.

There are further performances of all three operas over the next two weeks. For tickets call 0845 12 72 190 (www.buxtonfestival.co.uk).