Turandot, Opera Holland Park, 23 June 2026

Images: Pablo Strong

Princess Turandot – Anne Sophie Duprels
Calaf – José de Eça
Liù – Fflur Wyn
Timur – Jihoon Kim
Ping – Josef Jeongmeen Ahn
Pang – Joseph Buckmaster
Pong – Zwakele Tshabalala
Emperor Altoun – Robert Burt
Mandarin – Wonsick Oh
Prince of Persia – Jamie Formoy
Young Turandot – Lara Ronxin Quattrone

Opera Holland Park Youth Chorus (chorus master: Joe Cummings)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfornia

Naomi Woo (conductor)

Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary and the centenary of Puccini’s death, Opera Holland Park completed its set of the composer’s operas with a semi-staging of his final, unfinished work, Turandot. One might wish for a full staging, but one cannot have everything—and relatively little was lost. This made for a fitting crown to a season far from over, or perhaps better an extended encore to its new Fanciulla del West.

Anne-Sophie Duprels and José de Eça (previously Dick Johnson) came together to do something strikingly both similar and different as Turandot and Calaf. Their performances proved to be on a similarly outstanding level too, once again as fine a dramatic soprano and tenor as I can recall hearing at Holland Park—and considerably superior to those one might encounter at many of the opera firmament’s starriest houses. Whatever the dramaturgical depravity of the work – a big ‘whatever’ – both navigated its difficult, some might say impossible, relationship between fantasy and realism with all the fine attention to words, line, and their combination one could hope for. Duprels’s Turandot stood and sang on the threshold of a new life, slowly warming as much as melting. De Eça’s ardour swept all before it, Fflur Wyn and Jihoon Kim’s compassionate Liù and Timur included—which, alas, is as it should be. Wonsick Oh’s Mandarin was a chilling, yet human – indeed, human partly on that account – master of ceremonies, ably assisted by the protean solo-ensemblists of Josef Jeongmeen Ahn, Joseph Buckmaster, and Zwakele Tshabalala’s Ping, Pang, and Pong. Robert Burt’s Emperor Altoun and Jamie Formoy’s Prince of Persia afforded vivid, crucial, ‘smaller’ contributions.  

The role of the chorus is particular important in this opera. Opera Holland Park’s Chorus and Youth Chorus both impressed, both in themselves and in combination with the City of London Sinfonia, which again gave a mighty impression of a much larger band. The CLS now sound like old Puccini hands, which of course they are: warm, incisive, steely by turns, relishing and communicating the ripe post-Wagnerism and still astonishing modernism of the score in equal measure. If there were a few moments when any orchestral reduction would suffer by comparison with the full score, Tony Burke’s resourceful work, strange electronic organ intervention aside, contributed greatly to the success of the performance. A panoply of percussion enhanced the musical theatre of cruelty, as well as looking forward to the later twentieth century.

So too did Naomi Woo’s conducting, screwing up the tension where required and richly expansive where called for. Echoes of Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others were relished, as, equally important, were the many cases in which Puccini takes the lead and others follow. It was difficult not to hear sentiments of Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, for instance, not least in the arguably still more twisted combination of torture and hope on offer here. As ever, that tantalising early morning conversation between Puccini and Schoenberg, when the ailing elder composer travelled to Florence for the Italian premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, hovered in the musical air. Holland Park’s celebrated peacock chorus contributed vocal embellishments, apparently as engaged with the sadistic dramaturgy as the rest of us. If Franco Alfano’s completion remains unsatisfactory, we cannot always hope for Berio. It has the merits at least of bringing to the surface in its listless wagnerismo parallels – arguably more than that – with Siegfried and Brünnhilde. 

Eleanor Burke’s direction was an equal partner in that (as, of course, were our Calaf and Turandot). The semi-staging concentrated, naturally, on character and narrative, and did so very well, whilst nonetheless framing their unfolding with reference to a child, the young princess, first having opened her music box and later handing it to the cruel princess she was to become. The importance both of childhood experience and of the problematical yet fascinating tension between Carlo Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte and Puccini’s realism was brought to our attention, for us to ponder and experience as our minds and mindsets permitted. This was not the place really for an overarching concept, though we were free to contribute one as we wished. Dress, as opposed to full-scale costume, was stylish in red and black. 

This was, then, another distinguished production from Opera Holland Park. A good number of audience members raised their hands at the outset, when asked by CEO and Director of Opera James Clutton if this were their first time. It is difficult to imagine they would have been anything other than greatly impressed, just as the rest of us were. For there was no mistaking the warmth and sincerity of the final applause. What next? Dare we hope for the aforementioned Dallapiccola, perhaps in tandem with Busoni’s Turandot? Someone should, at any rate.

La fanciulla del West, Opera Holland Park, 26 May 2026

Minnie – Amanda Echalaz
Jack Rance – Robert Hayward
Dick Johnson – José de Eça
Nick – Zwakele Tshabalala
Ashby – Alaric Green
Sonora – Aidan Edwards
Trin – Jamie Formoy
Sid – Joe Ashmore
Bello – Michael Temporal Darell
Harry – Dominick Felix
Joe – Hugh Beckwith
Happy – Matthew Duncan
Jim Larkens – Samuel Snowden
Billy Jackrabbit – Freddie Tong
Wowkle – Kezia Bienek
Jake Wallace – Blaise Malaba
José Castro – Ronald Nairne
Pony Express Rider – Robert Jenkins

Director – Martin Lloyd-Evans
Designs – Anna Reid
Lighting – Jamie Platt
Choreography – Róisín Whelan
Fight director – Haruka Kuroda

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Dominic Ellis-Peckham)

City of London Sinfonia

Matthew Kofi Waldren (conductor)

Images: Craig Fuller

This year, Opera Holland Park celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Now a fixture in London’s operatic calendar, it continues to put many allegedly starrier stages to shame, not only through the quality of its productions and a wise stewardship that continues to build on its particular artistic strengths, but also through the genuine warmth of its welcome to newcomers and seasoned operagoers alike, and to its commitment to community and sustainability. Puccini has always stood at the heart of its offerings, so opening the 2026 season with a new production of La fanciulla del West, directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans and conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren, was fitting and welcome. It turned out to show the company at its best: an interesting, intelligent staging, with excellent musical values, including a City of London Sinfonia one would never have guessed from the sound included only five first violins and a well assembled team of seasoned and newer vocal artists.

When talking about how differently an opera – or any other performing artwork – has struck one on different occasions, it is always difficult to know how much to attribute to the performance, broadly conceived including production, and how much to oneself. It will often be a combination of both; the important thing to remind oneself is that one may be more or less receptive at different times. I suspect, as an astute critic said to me during the interval, that Fanciulla may be a work that speaks more readily to those of a certain age. Its themes become more apparent, as well as more meaningful. (That may also be in part a reflection of coming to know it better.) But I am pretty sure it was only that; much in Lloyd-Evans’s production skilfully drew out the work’s dramatic concerns without overt interventionism, tracing a careful and involving path between its tricky combination of realism and redemption, neither of which it seems desirable, even possible, to underplay, let alone jettison. 

First among these themes is surely loneliness; at least, it felt so here. I do not doubt a more overt, even contemporary thematization could work too, but a hallmark of this production was to draw it out of what we could imagine the work ‘itself’ to be. Related to that and with similar contemporary resonance, period setting notwithstanding, is the theme of migration. For these are people who have come to California from across the world, not only the continent. In that lie their hopes, their fears, their sadness, and their possibilities to build something new—such as love. The dramatic, emotional point of the first scene, of men meeting at the Polka saloon, unsure of how they can and should relate to one another, whether missing their ‘homes’ elsewhere or otherwise, comes across strongly. Minnie and Dick Johnson are not so different, though they step out from that generality. And, as Minnie reminds us, none of them, her included, has clean hands: this could readily tilt into a Brecht-Weill Mahagonny, although ultimately its direction could hardly stand more strongly opposed. 

That is all in the work, one might say, and in many ways that is so, but one is led to understand and feel that with greater clarity and indeed emotional depth than I can previously recall. Dancing with another, faute de mieux, is touching in its heterosexual wariness but also its brief joy, though the ‘real thing’ lies between the central couple—and between them alone. We follow its origins, its rekindling, its blooming, its crisis, and its victory, through detailed, yet never fussy direction that supports every character onstage to trace a plausible path. There are set-piece moments, as there are in the work. They make reference, or at least conform, to our ideas of the Western, brought further to life in Anna Reid's resourceful designs and Jamie Platt's lighting. But they are never mere clichés: they have a function, narrative and emotional, and effect that function well.  

Waldren’s direction of the CLS and its playing were first-class. If you would have me down as a sceptic for chamber orchestra Puccini, even in so skilful a reduction as that by Ettore Panizza, you would be right. Not only, though, was I convinced from the outset; the question never arose in the first place. Here was a sound that was throughout just right, a gorgeous string sheen the icing on a cake of many ingredients, often dissolving in strikingly modernist fashion before our ears, whilst never forgetting its ‘Italian’ – forgive the essentialism – heart. Flexible yet directed, warm yet variegated, here was a Fanciulla that evoked the Puccini of his past and future, whilst reminding us how close much of it stands to Tristan und Isolde, to Debussy, and to the operas and film scores of Korngold and company. If I had a slight doubt, I wondered whether it might move on a little faster at times, but such matters come down to taste more than judgement. Passages of suspended time had their own dramatic motivation, palpably received throughout a packed audience.

 

Amanda Echalaz’s Minnie was similarly world-class: a far more complex character than I have seen and heard before and all the better for it. There were goodness and wisdom there, to be sure, but also pride and even resentment: as was very much her right. Her alchemy of words and music was shared by the charismatic José de Eça, at least as lovelorn and with all the greater need for a redemptive arc. One could not but root for them, much as one feared (even when one ‘knew’) darker forces would win out. Robert Hayward’s Jack Rance married a Scarpia of the West with something deeper, doubtless drawing on his experience in Wagner up to and including Wotan. No one sentimentalised, crucial in this of all composers, and the drama was all the richer for it. Cast from depth, a community was brought to life by singers such as Zwakele Tshabalala’s Nick, Alaric Green’s Ashby, Aidan Edwards’s Sonora, and many others, not least Kezia Bienek’s loyal Wowkle. This, though, was very much a company effort, with an outstanding chorus trained by Dominic Ellis-Peckham at its beating heart. All contributed to something greater than the sum of its considerable parts.

 

For the ending not to seem trite, even silly, it needs broader, redemptive resonance: not an easy task for our age. It is arguably here that the work needs a little help, and the question is raised as to what sort of work it really is. Clearly it is not a tragedy, though it has seemed to be leading that way. Nor is it a comedy, save in the sense that it is not a tragedy. It is easier, I think, to take Turandot as a perverted, even repellent version of the latter. It might be easier to take Fanciulla as such, if it had a greater mythological element to it, as Wagner does even in Die Meistersinger. Tristan is a tragedy that, in the older or at least George Steiner sense, turns aside too. Whilst one might draw a comparison here, perhaps the problem is that it does not feel appropriate, for various reasons, of which realism is only one. The point is not, of course, classification, Aristotelian or otherwise, for its own sake. It is perfectly fine for a work simply to be itself; ultimately it must be. But when doubts linger concerning the happy ending, such questions more or less inevitably arise. A potential future carved out for the lovers is hard-won in its way, It is difficult to argue with Minnie’s admonitions and persuasion: she deserves it. But do we believe in it? In Così fan tutte, of course we do not: that is the point. If I am still not entirely clear what the point is here, first the problem may well be mine, and second this came far closer to convincing me than any performance previously, the dress rehearsal I was fortunate enough to attend included. So there was an emotional truth to what we saw and heard in committed performance, as in staging, as in work. The three came together in just the way opera of most kinds should.

Happy thirtieth anniversary, then, Opera Holland Park. It has been a pleasure to share a good few of those years with you, and I hope to share many more of them.

Hänsel und Gretel, Opera Holland Park, 14 June 2023

Hänsel – Charlotte Badhma
Gretel – Laura Lolita Perešivana
Peter – Paul Carey Jones
Gertrud – Meeta Raval
Witch – Eleanor Dennis
Sandman – April Koyejo-Audiger
Dew Fairy – Charlotte Bowden

John Wilkie (director) 

Neil Irish (designs)
Robert Price (lighting)

Michael Spenceley (movement)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Dominic Ellis-Peckham) 

Children’s Chorus from the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School (chorus master: Scott Price) 

City of London Sinfonia

Kărin Hendrickson (conductor)

Hänsel (Charlotte Badhma), The Witch (Eleanor Dennis), Gretel (Laura Lolita Perešivana), 
Images: Ali Smith

It is always a joy to return to Holland Park: to Opera Holland Park, that is, the park itself being available all year around. Sometimes, the sense of it heralding summer can seem wildly optimistic; doubtless it did for those initially sampling the year’s first production, Rigoletto. Now that spring has finally not come, winter having suddenly jumped into summer, the season’s second, Hänsel und Gretel, was able to bask in that long anticipated magic of sunshine and warmth gradually ceding, peacock cries and all, to nightfall for the final act. 

Peter (Paul Carey Jones)

Hänsel, of course, is so magical a work that temptation can be to love it too much. Occasionally during the first two acts, I wondered whether conductor Kărin Hendrickson might be heading in that direction: not that, if I am honest, I mind. Someone taking her time is increasingly rare in music of many kinds, and the last thing one wants here is someone rushing us through the opera’s relatively few minutes. If I were to be excessively critical, I might say that there were a very few occasions when the score felt as if it were on the verge of losing momentum, though I am not sure it ever quite did. Instead, Hendrickson was setting up a considerable and welcome contrast with the antics and resolution of the third act, wrapping things up nicely, having allowed us to enjoy the ride. The City of London Sinfonia played like a little more than ‘fourteen angels’. Though a small band – notably smaller (strings 5:4:3:2:2) than we generally hear, and in a trickier acoustic too – they offered a dynamic and related emotional range to match any. It seemed clear that they enjoyed playing for Hendrickson—and doubtless to play such ‘late-Romantic’, for want of a better term, music too. If we want to hear the Staatskapelle Dresden and Colin Davis, we can go to the recording, but then we shall miss live performance and magical setting. 

Opera Holland Park Chorus

A likeable, characterful cast added much to the proceedings. Charlotte Badhma and Laura Lolita Perešivana complemented and contrasted each other in just the right ways, vocally and gesturally, as Hänsel and Gretel. Paul Carey Jones’s positively Wagnerian Peter was luxury casting indeed; here is a singer who knows how to make his voice carry, even many yards offstage, and yet there is no lack of flexibility, quite the contrary. Meeta Raval’s revealed a lyric soprano with distinct dramatic flair as Gertrud. Eleanor Dennis had a whale of a time as the Witch, in a performance as well sung as it was acted. April Koyejo-Audiger’s Sandman and Charlotte Bowden’s Dew Fairy eagerly took their chances to shine, as did members of the Opera Holland Park Chorus and a children’s chorus from the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. Above all, this was a collaborative and sustainable performance. 

Gertrud (Meeta Raval)

For better or worse, productions of this work tend to shy away from its darkest subtexts. John Wilkie’s was no exception here. I admit to not being entirely sure what Wilkie’s concept was. Updated to the interwar years, there seemed in the first scene to be an interest in the family’s poverty, albeit an interest not really sustained. Fairytale, dream-like characters had already appeared in the Overture, lending a sense of mystery; their choreographed return at the end of the second act seemed (at least to me) less motivated. I suspect something psychoanalytical was intended. For whilst this was certainly no militantly traditionalist staging, an overall framework eluded me, as did the significance of the Witch peeling off exaggeratedly ‘feminine’ clothing to reveal a ‘masculine’, albeit highly caricatured military uniform. Fascism, I suppose, though more of a Fawlty Towers variety than something more sinister—or meaningful. In any case, she was soon gone. Perhaps that was the point; if so, it was a distinctly odd one. None of this detracted unduly, though, in what remained a lovely yet never too lovely evening,  sampling ideas that might yet be considered a little more seriously and/or magically.

Eugene Onegin, Opera Holland Park, 15 June 2022

Tatiana – Anush Hovhannisyan
Onegin – Samuel Dale Johnson

Lensky – Jack Roberts
Olga – Emma Stannard
Mme Larina – Amanda Roocroft

Filipievna – Kathleen Wilkinson
Prince Gremin – Matthew Stiff
M. Triquet – Joseph Buckmaster
Zaretsky/Captain – Konrad Jaromin
Solo tenor – Phillip Costovski

Julia Burbach (director)
takis (designs)
Robert Price (lighting)
Jo Meredith (movement)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus director: Richard Harker)
City of London Sinfonia
Lada Valešová (conductor)

 

Eugene Onegin (Samuel Dale Johnson).
Images: Ali Wright

Sharing a single set by takis with Carmen—typically resourceful, sustainable practice for Opera Holland Park—Julia Burbach’s Eugene Onegin proved a puzzling affair. The idea, I think, was to move between monochrome and colour, perhaps playing with memory and/or dreaming, but too much remained obscure or arbitrary (at least for me). Burbach seemed unsure whether to opt for realism, something more symbolic, or even a coherent melange of the two. Presumably, the uniform light colours of the first scene were intended to evoke a sort of Chekhovian boredom, but it seemed at odds with Pushkin, let alone Tchaikovsky.  Having everyone dressed in similar finery in that opening scene also suggested a chorus of nobles rather than peasants. For these were clearly the same people we encountered in the ball scene, and I do not think the intention was to suggest some sort of Russian Petit Trianon. Quite why some were playing badminton, I have no idea; it proved distracting in the wrong way, as had ‘peasant’ dancing earlier on. A turn through colour to black largely made emotional and narrative sense, yet details continued to sit oddly with the overall ‘picture’. Nothing ever quite moved convincingly, nor settled down.

It was also unquestionably the most heteronormative Onegin I have seen: a perverse distinction, one might say. Not only is there no sign, no inkling, nor even the slightest twinkling of an eye, of homosexual subtext; the characters are conventional enough in their relationships to be plausibly heterosexual. Perhaps if one were viewing work and creator from a Putinesque standpoint, that might signal cause for celebration. To the rest of us, it may seem strange or evasive.

That said, the cast did a fine job within these confines. Jack Roberts (an OHP Young Artist) and Emma Stannard gave a fine impression of Lensky and Olga as a young couple giddily in love. Their sheer enthusiasm proved infectious, not least given the curiously static production. Roberts’s sappy tenor and Stannard’s deep-toned mezzo proved just the vocal ticket too. Samuel Dale Johnson’s offered a thoughtful, well-sung performance as Onegin, both beguiling and infuriating in his mood swings. If the visual haunting demanded by Burbach in the Letter Scene seemed somewhat contrived, Dale Johnson’s subtler vocal version thereafter, culminating tragically in buyer’s remorse, was far more convincing. Anush Hovhannisyan’s Tatina gained in confidence as the evening went on: character development of course, but also, I think, in strength of performance. By the final scene, this was a formidable portrayal indeed. There were no weak links onstage, Kathleen Wilkinson’s Filipievna and Konrad Jaromin’s appearances as Zaretsky and the Captain especially catching the ear.

Tatiana (Anush Hovhannisyan)

Lada Valešová’s direction of the City of London Sinfonia seemed, laudably, engineered to follow these particular performances and production, rather than being imposed upon them. Was her languorous, intimate way with the first act too much of a muchness? That is probably a question of taste. It is not how I hear the work, but there was a thoughtful approach at work here. I missed a sense of abandon in the big public scenes, though Valešová’s scrupulousness offered alternative rewards.  One should also bear in mind that she was working with—and emphatically with—a chamber orchestra. A larger orchestra, as well as a different production, may well have brought forth a different musical reading.

Carmen, Opera Holland Park, 10 June 2022

 

Carmen – Kezia Bienek
Don José – Oliver Johnston
Escamillo – Thomas Mole
Micaëla – Alison Langer
Frasquita – Natasha Agarwal
Mercédès – Ellie Edmonds
Zuniga – Jacob Phillips
Moralès – Jevan McAuley
Le Dancaïre – Themba Mvula
Le Remendado – Mike Bradley

Cecilia Stinton (director)
takis (set designs)
Johanne Jensen (lighting)
Isabel Baquero (choreography)

Children’s Chorus from Cardinal Vaughan School
Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus director: Richard Harker)
City of London Sinfonia
Lee Reynolds (conductor)

Image: Ali Wright

 
Carmen was the last opera I saw before the end of the world. Not necessarily what I would have chosen; for many of my friends it was Fidelio, whose absence from my truncated Beethoven Year I regretted deeply. But then none of us chose pandemic, lockdown, death, misery, and the rest. It was good, though, to have opportunity to exorcise another pandemic ghost, albeit in different guise. Cecilia Stinton’s new Holland Park production has little in common with Martin Kušej’s staging at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden; nor did Lee Reynolds’ traversal of the score, in his own, skilful, new reduction correspond to my memories of Daniel Barenboim. 

Different strokes…? Doubtless, yet I could not help but regret the lack of rethinking, especially in staging. There are half-hearted nods to a feminist turn, which in context come across more as odd than enlightening, for ultimately what we see is highly conventional, permitting of little to say other than what it is not. We lacked, thank goodness, Francesca Zambello’s notorious donkey; otherwise, this was a ‘period’ tale, in uniforms and frocks. It all looks a bit like a school play. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s radical decentring of Carmen could not be more distant; the unremitting intensity of Calixto Bieito’s much ‘straighter’ retelling in Franco’s Spain seems a world away too. There is some ‘colourful’ dancing and other musical comedy-style ‘business’. Children hand around postcards advertising Escamillo’s fight. Don José elicits strikingly little directorial interest, but it would be difficult to say any of the characters was fully treated. And that, bar a peculiar role reversal at the opening, is more or less it. It seems odd that anyone might need a course in orientalism at this stage, but there we are.

Reynolds’s conducting had none of Barenboim’s revisionism either, yet proved more compelling than the staging. The City of London Sinfonia was on sharp form, clearly in sympathy with its conductor’s carefully gauged balance of drive and lyricism. If I missed the sense of numbers contributing to a sum greater than their parts, that is often the case here; and I realise, especially in the ‘authentic’ opéra comique version, that I could readily be accused of wanting to turn the opera into something (more Austro-German, Nietzsche forbid) than it is. Reynolds and the orchestra supported the cast and led the action where necessary and appropriate. No one could or should reasonably have been disappointed, save for the inevitable reductions in scale of a chamber orchestration. Even then, different balances—not least, more prominent woodwind—had one reconsider one’s position on the work: no bad thing, given its ubiquity. 

Kezia Bienek fully inhabited the title role, insofar as the production permitted. Hers was a Carmen, quite rightly, not inclined to take any prisoners, yet far from one-dimensional. Vocal delivery was well centred on the text as a whole (that is, words and music) and stage presence fitted the bill splendidly throughout. If the staging seemed rather to leave Oliver Johnston to fend for himself, he proved well able to do so, giving us an intelligently sung Don José. Thomas Mole’s dark tone was just the thing for Escamillo, in another intelligent reading. Micaëlas rarely disappointed, but that is no reason not to celebrate Alison Langer’s performance, beautifully and touchingly sung. A fine supporting cast and excellent performances both from the Opera Holland Park Chorus and pupils of Cardinal Vaughan School compensated in good measure for what I—though not, I think, the audience as a whole—perceived as lack of ambition in the production.  

The Cunning Little Vixen, Opera Holland Park, 13 July 2021

Images: Ali Wright
Vixen (Jennifer France) and Fox (Julia Sporsén)

Vixen – Jennifer France
Fox – Julia Sporsén
Forester – Grant Doyle
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Ann Taylor
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Charne Rochford
Priest, Badger – John Savournin
Harašta – Ashley Riches
Chocholka – Harriet Eyley
Lapák – Natasha Agarwal
Jay, Rooster – Grace Nyandoro
Woodpecker – Chloë Pardoe
Innkeeper – Phillip Costovski
Innkeeper’s Wife – Yolanda Grant-Thompson
Pepík – Alys Mererid Roberts
Frantík – Claire Ward
Frog – Daniel White
Caterpillar—Toby Yates
Grasshopper – Ben Jardim
Young Vixen – Estella Charlesworth

Stephen Barlow (director)
Andrew D. Edwards (designs)
Rory Beaton (lighting)
Sarita Piotrowski (choreography, movement)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Dominic Ellis-Peckham)
City of London Sinfonia
Jessica Cottis (conductor)

 

Forester (Grant Doyle), Schoolmaster (Charne Rochford)

Our present condition lends us, perhaps more than ever, to think of what has led us here, how things really are now, and where the world will take us next. Or so we fancy: for some of us that is doubtless the case, for others less so, and is it really that different from other stages in our earthly existence? Plus ça change? It is too early to tell. Whatever the truth or otherwise of such claims, an opera that decentres humans without obliterating them, turning our attention to the life cycles of which that of our species is but one—and an intrusive one at that—has much to say to us right now.


Enter The Cunning Little Vixen; indeed, enter the cunning little vixen Sharp-Ears. A particular strength of Stephen Barlow’s new production for Opera Holland Park is the heightening of a sense of interaction—perhaps neither good nor bad, but just ‘how it is’—between the natural and human worlds, in this case a decidedly urban world portrayed with sparing use of designs and props but decided suggestion, subtlety, and dramatic impact. We see Terynka on stage at the opening, a reminder not only of the intertwining—real, though less crucial than we might think—but also of the constructed parallels between the poacher Harašta’s forthcoming marriage to Terynka and the life, loves, and death of our vixen—and what will become in turn of her daughter. There is sadness, both of regret and of grief, in that, not least with respect to the lovelorn Schoolmaster, who has always admired Terynka from afar. There is also danger: danger that humans might encroach on that natural world too far: not for nothing are our urban foxes, human and animal, seen by a recycling bin. The natural world exists here too: we probably see foxes in London more often than elsewhere in the country. Should we? That is probably a meaningless question. How, then, might we effect some sort of return, for our sake and theirs, to a more ‘natural’ life-cycle? And should we?

 

Terynka

That love (probably) and sex (definitely) lie at the heart of such conundrums, intertwined and parallel, is clear too. Much is done, probably all to the better in the age of coronavirus, by suggestion, again by intersection and parallelism. That word ‘intersection’ reminds us of gender issues, contemporary and age-old, too. The scene in which the vixen tempts hens to leave the apparent safety of their masters, animal and human, by presenting a utopia of women’s (and animal) rights seems especially crucial in this staging, both as high-point and as dead-end. Make of that what you will in light of the loss of their eggs and thus their potential for motherhood and, ultimately, the continuation of their species line. Are not, though, humans doing that anyway? Do we only care when, to borrow from Strauss and Hofmannsthal, a vixen rather than a forester/farmer steals their shadow?


There are rightly no easy answers, but they are posed: as they are in the musical performances, here very much of a piece with what we see. As so often in Holland Park, a sense of company that is more than its parts—like opera, like society, like nature?—is palpable and productive. Jessica Cottis’s direction of Jonathan Dove’s skilful reduction of Janáček’s score—very much a work of art in its own right, accordion and all—is fiercely alert in the moment; yet it also, as must any comprehending Janáček performance, senses and conveys the often surprising ways in which what might seem to be difficult, even rebarbative fragments are magically, indissolubly pieced together. The orchestra, here an attentive, lively City of London Sinfonia, takes on still more of that role when the work is sung in English, thus losing those foundational, generative Czech speech rhythms (even for those of us who speak no Czech). The decision is doubtless wise in a world permitting little international travel, a largely English cast (and audience) responding to the immediacy of a common tongue, a witty updating of Norman Tucker’s translation very much delivered and heard in the here and now. The ear compensates, as do the mind and eye.

 

Young Vixen (Estella Charlesworth), City of London Sinfonia, Jessica Cottis (conductor)

It was, then, the sort of performance in which it is tempting to re-list the cast and attribute good things to all of them. Such an approach, if slightly tedious, would doubtless be warranted. If I only single out a few performances that particularly caught my ear (and other senses), such words should be taken as indicative rather than exclusive. Jennifer France and Julia Sporsén offered lively, loving portrayals of Vixen and Fox, similarly alive in the moment yet allusive to broader, more cyclical (and/or ruptured) themes. Grant Doyle’s detailed way with words and music had me wonder what he would have made of the original Czech, though only in retrospect. As a key bridge between one world and another, he not only made things fit but ensured that they moved us in our human state of alienated longing. So too, albeit more exclusively on the human side, did Charne Rochford’s Schoolmaster. Ashley Riches operated as Harašta with a fine vocal and stage swagger, seemingly knowing yet ultimately foolish. All contributed, though; the operatic ecosystem would have been considerably the poorer without any. Surely that offers its own, broader moral.

The Queen of Spades, Opera Holland Park, 2 August 2016

Holland Park Theatre

Herman – Peter Wedd

Lisa – Natalya Romaniw
Countess – Rosalind Plowright
Count Tomsky – Richard Burkhard
Prince Yeletsky – Grant Doyle
Polina – Laura Woods
Masha – Daisy Brown
Chekalinsky – Aled Hall
Surin – Simon Wilding
Governess – Laura Zigmantaite
Chaplitsky – Oliver Brignall
Narumov – Henry Grant Kerswell
Master of Ceremonies – Timothy Langston

Rodula Gaitanou (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (designs)
Simon Corder (lighting)
Jamie Neale (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Philip Voldman)

City of London Sinfonia
Peter Robinson (conductor)
 

The Queen of Spades has been doing rather well in and around London of late. I have only seen two stagings recently before this, but know of quite a few others. Of those: Opera North offered a rare lapse at the Barbican, about which the less said, the better; ENO, last year, offered strong vocal performances but a truly catastrophic production. All in all, then, Holland Park, as so often, came off best.

 

Rodula Gaitanou’s production tells the story well, and offers some probing beneath the surface – although not so much when contrasted with reports of Stefan Herheim’s recent staging in Amsterdam. (By the same token, however, OHP does a great deal with more limited resources; it would in any case be unreasonable or downright absurd to expect every opera production to be an event on the level of a Herheim production.) I did wonder whether the sight of two men beneath an arch in the penultimate scene was intended as an oblique reference to Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, but, given the darkness, it was a bit difficult to tell. Perhaps that is the point. There is, in the late-nineteenth-century updating – time of composition, I presume – some sense of pitting a self-consciously beautiful society against more human desires, noble and base alike. Cordelia Chisholm’s designs will certainly delight those who wish to see ‘traditional’ productions, doubtless ignoring the fact that the opera is not set when it ‘should’ be.

The Countess seems to rule the roost in a fashion beyond what one might expect; this is, perhaps, an ageing society, unable to accept the need to change. If I felt that some of those points might have been pushed a little harder, there is something to be said for not doing so either. We all have particular tastes, and have no right to insist that everything should be as we should have done it; indeed, we should be willing to learn from things done differently – and done well. I found that, on reflection, the production had more to offer than I had initially thought; there is certainly much to be said for relative subtlety. (Just as there is much to be said, from time to time, for agitprop!)

 

It was, perhaps inevitably, Rosalind Plowright’s Countess who made the strongest dramatic impression. Although she does not have very much to sing during the first act – here, Tchaikovsky’s three acts were condensed into two – she held the stage just by entering, let alone by painfully, agonisingly, walking across it with her sticks. (I thought a little of my first encounter with Waltraud Meier in the theatre: as Ortrud as Covent Garden. The character has little to sing at all in the first act of Lohengrin, but I could not keep my eyes off her.) And the insight into her interior life, above all to her past, was moving, evoking an historical canvas far wider than we were explicitly or even implicitly told. Natalya Romaniw did not disappoint as Lisa, although I felt that her character came more into its own following the interval; a freer, more daring performance to be seen and heard. Again, perhaps that was the point. Peter Wedd’s Herman was, I am afraid, harder to like. The character seemed less impetuous than annoying, somewhat generalised, even wooden acting meaning that it was difficult to feel much chemistry between him and his beloved. As melodrama there was something to be said for such a performance, but there was much that it lacked; a fine vocal performance might have compensated, but that was not to be either. Grant Doyle’s Yeletsky, however, was very fine indeed: darkly conflicted, and beguiling of line.

 

Other, ‘smaller’ roles were all taken well, Richard Burkhard’s Tomsky, Daisy Brown’s Masha, and Laura Zigmantaite’s Governess particularly catching my ear – without that reflecting negatively upon any of the other singers. It was the Opera Holland Park Chorus, though, which so often stole the show. Expertly trained, not just musically but in its Russian too (insofar as I could tell!), by Philip Voldman, and responding well to detailed direction, choreography (Jamie Neale) included, the chorus members performed equally well as individuals (highly impressive waiters, for instance, in the first scene) and corporately. We shall doubtless see and hear more from many of them.

 

Ideally, we should have heard a larger orchestra than the Holland Park pit can accommodate. There were certainly times when the lack of a greater body of strings detracted from Tchaikovsky’s Romanticism. However, there is a good deal of (neo-)Classicism to the score too; that often thrived under Peter Robinson’s direction. The Mozart pastiche music – which, of course, never quite sounds like Mozart, but gives us a good idea of Tchaikovsky’s limited understanding of Mozart – came off particularly well, but so did the obsessive qualities of the score. The City of London Sinfonia woodwind were on particularly good form, and the strings performed creditably indeed, given their limitation in number. Opera Holland Park’s productions tend to evoke above all a splendid sense of company, of an evening that is considerably more than the sum of its parts; this was no exception.

 

 

La bohème, Opera Holland Park, 11 June 2016

Holland Park Theatre

Mimì – Anna Patalong

Rodolfo – Shaun Dixon
Marcello – Andrew Finden
Musetta – Elin Pritchard
Schaunard – Frederick Long
Colline – John Savournin
Benoît – David Woloszko
Alcindoro – James Harrison
Parpignol – Michael Bradley
Customs Sergeant – Alistair Sutherland

Stephen Barlow (director)

Andrew D Edwards (set designs
Howard Hudson (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Children’s Chorus and Chorus (chorus masters: Scott Price and Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia
Matthew Waldron (conductor)

 

Ever since a friend was reported as having said he’would like something in return for modern-dress Shakespeare (how quaint that term seems now, as if anyone would bat an eyelid!), namely an Elizabethan-dress staging of Look Back in Anger, I have been curious about the possibilities of ‘down-dating’, as I suppose we might call it. Rarely, if ever, do we see it, though. Stephen Barlow’s new production of La bohème does just that, however, relocating the action to that very same period. Indeed, I notice that the RSC’s Props Department is credited in the programme for ‘their co-operation and contribution’. Andrew D Edwards’s designs look gorgeous: both sets, making excellent use of the Holland Park stage and environment, and costumes.

 

What are we to make of such a move? Not having asked Barlow and that, perhaps, not being entirely the point in any case, I shall, without implying ‘intention’, say a little about what I made of it, or thought one might make of it. One could, I suppose, say that it does not matter, say what ‘we’ often say about the time and period, that in some respects, at least, it is the least interesting aspect of a production. That, I think, would be a half-truth, but a half-truth nevertheless. I doubt many of us would be complaining if an opera set in Tudor England were convincingly updated to nineteenth-century France, and certainly not to the present day, although we might well ask why, and with what success. Why there and then, in that case? For me, the immediate resonance was with Shakespeare’s London. Rodolfo, our poet, perhaps something of ‘Will’ about him: perhaps more Shakespeare in Love than Shakespeare ‘himself’, but how much do we know of the latter anyway? A leather doublet becomes him, as does distraction from his quill. Given not only the poetical but metatheatrical concerns of the work, I wondered whether, following the first or even the second act, we should discover that it had all, or partly, been a play within a play, or some such device, but no – with the possible exception of the decidedly, deliberately artificial device of casting snow upon the scene in the third act. Perhaps that is the point, or at least could be made to be the point: we are all metatheatrical now, we all create our own metatheatre, even when something is apparently played ‘straight’. That, I think, is undeniable, although I suspect the particular relocation is, at any rate, not entirely arbitrary. Shakespeare’s London, or our creation of it, speaks to an English audience as strongly as pretty much any other possibility.

 

Perhaps the justification is that: we know it, or think we know it, and thus we find it easier to explore. I have no problem in principle with exchanging Montmartre and a Southwark tavern. It was all rather fun, and genuinely surprising. Other productions might delve deeper – although, frankly, very few do. Not everything can be directed by Stefan Herheim, whose Oslo staging is in a class of its own. This works well, on its own terms. The enigmatic programme quotation from Two Gentleman of Verona – which I only saw afterwards – might speak for itself, then, so long as we do not start silly gushing about alleged ‘timelessness’. Nothing is timeless; nor is it helpful or interesting to consider it so. ‘Oh, how this spring of love resembleth/The uncertain glory of an April day/Which now shows all beauty of the Sun/And by and by a cloud takes all away.’ We are free, then, to consider correspondences and connections insofar as we wish.

Having a young cast of such considerable theatrical ability helps. Rarely has the sexual attraction between Mimì and Rodolfo seemed so evident. Anna Patalong offers a beautifully sung, clearly heartfelt performance. It would take a sterner heart than mine not to root for her. Shaun Dixon sometimes sang out a little too much for my taste, but the acoustic can be a tricky one. There was certainly no doubting his commitment, nor his idiomatic command. Andrew Finden’s Marcello was intelligent, thoughtful, impetuous: the quicksilver quality of his exchanges with Elin Pricthard’s gloriously charismatic Musetta, every inch the self-conscious stage queen, yet most genuine in concern and charity at the close, would have been worth the price of admission alone. Frederick Long and John Savournin made at least as much of Schaunard and Colline as any artists I can recall. The sense of student camaraderie can rarely, if ever, have been so strong; nor can the dangers of that play-acting which ultimately fails our tragic heroine. David Woloszko’s Falstaff-like Benoît was not only an obvious comic turn, but very well sung too, as indeed were all of the ‘smaller’ roles’.

The OHP Chorus and Children’s Chorus were, quite simply, outstanding. Barlow’s work with them had clearly been thoroughly internalised. They knew what they were supposed to do, and did it, without ever seeming over-rehearsed. Vocally, one could hear every word, and in a coherent musical whole too. Matthew Waldron’s conducting doubtless helped greatly in that respect. There was never the slightest danger of sentimentalisation, in a sharp-edged account, which kept the excellent City of London Sinfonia on its toes throughout. I was surprised how little, if at all, I missed a larger body of strings; in a fine performance, one’s ears (almost always) adjust. It was not all so driven, though; where the music needed, wanted to dance, it could do so happily, not least during Musetta’s second-act ‘show’. There would be no harm in relaxing a little as the run progresses; by the same token, however, there is nothing to complain about, and a great deal to savour, here. OHP’s Puccini Midas touch works its magic once again.

 

Spitalfields Festival: Polyphony/CLS/Layton - Haydn, J.C. Bach, Mozart, and Handel, 16 June 2015

St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch

Haydn – Symphony no.101 in D major, ‘The Clock’

J.C. Bach – Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major, WC 41

Mozart – Symphony no.4 in D major, KV 19

Handel – ‘Dettingen’ Te Deum, HWV 263

Ashley Riches (baritone)

Polyphony

City of London Sinfonia

Stephen Layton (conductor) 

 

This final Spitalfields Festival concert promised a taste of ‘Georgian London – Global Metropolis’, each of the works being written for eighteenth-century London (well, perhaps in the case of the Mozart symphony), although at different times. There was much to enjoy, even if, as a whole, the programme worked somewhat awkwardly. I could not help but wonder if Stephen Layton would have been better off programming another choral work, and losing one or two of the orchestral pieces, since his strengths undoubtedly lie in the former realm.

For that reason, the greatest work on the programme, Haydn’s Symphony no.101, fared least well. The first movement’s introduction had an air of mystery, albeit with decidedly low vibrato: that, despite an acoustic that ought to have alleviated the worst of ‘authenticke’ excess. That acoustic rendered the Presto exposition proper too much of a scramble, fine detail too often lost. There was little in the way of sonata form dynamism. Perhaps surprisingly, the slow movement fared better: characterful, with meaningfully darker passages well integrated. The minuet, alas, failed to smile, and its trio failed even slightly to relax. Still, the nature of the material and many of its implications were clear. The finale was certainly fast yet somehow remained ponderous; like so much of what we had heard previously, it lacked the life that great Haydn conductors such as Jochum, Klemperer, or Davis brought to this music. The City of London Sinfonia’s woodwind proved a euphonious joy throughout.

We do not hear much of Johann Christian Bach’s good-natured if somewhat interchangeable music. Layton presented an affectionate reading of this Sinfonia concertante, in which again the CLS wind proved excellent soloists indeed. The first movement was welcoming in spirit, even before the soloists entered. Shortcomings, such as they were, related more to the work itself. A siren following on from the final note offered amusement. It was a relief not to have the Larghetto taken absurdly fast, as is increasingly the norm in such music. Instead, it seemed imbued with the spirit of the outdoor serenade, even looking forward to Mozart. Much the same could be said of the closing Minuet, stylishly and warmly performed.

I am reasonably sure that this was the first time I had heard Mozart’s Fifth Symphony in concert. Layton and the CLS proved alert in the first movement, possessed of a winning, if small-scale, swagger. A sense of the exploratory was certainly apt. The slow movement might have exuded greater warmth – we felt distant indeed from Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic – but spoke sensibly enough for itself. Youthful ebullience characterised the finale, although balances were less than ideal. It was difficult, moreover, to discern much affection for the composer and his work in Layton’s merely efficient direction.

No such reservations for Handel’s ‘Dettingen’ Te Deum. Ashley Riches and Polyphony made their mark magnificently, in vocal contributions as incisive as they were sonorous. Georgian militarism – John Brewer’s Sinews of Power – was announced loud and clear, trumpets and choir responding to and inciting one another. Handel’s borrowings amused rather than irritated. An excellent command of rhythm was proportionate with harmonic development. Expectations were aroused and fulfilled. This, at least, proved a thrilling, resoundingly musical conclusion not only to the concert but to the festival as a whole.

Il trittico, Opera Holland Park, 5 June 2015

Michele – Stephen Gadd

Giorgetta – Anne Sophie Duprels
Luigi – Jeff Gwaltney
Frugola – Sarah Pring
Tinca – Aled Hall
Talpa – Simon Wilding
Soprano Amante – Johane Ansell
Tenor Amante – James Edwards

Sister Angelica – Anne Sophie Duprels

Princess Zia – Rosalind Plowright
Abbess – Fiona Mackay
Monitress – Laura Woods
Mistress of the Novices – Kathryn Walker
Sister Genovieffa – Johane Ansell
Sister Osmina – Kathryn Hannah
Sister Dolcina – Rosanne Havel
Nursing Sister – Chloë Treharne
Alms Sisters – Anna Patalong, Sarah Minns
Novices – Naomi Kilby, Ellie Edmonds
Lay Sisters – Rebecca Hardwick, Chloe Hinton
Child – Matteo Elezi

Gianni Schicchi – Richard Burkhard

Zita – Sarah Spring
Lauretta – Anna Patalong
Rinuccio – James Edwards
Gherardo – Aled Hall
Nella – Elin Pritchard
Betto – Simon Wilding
Simone – William Robert Allenby
Marco – Ian Beadle
La Ciesca – Chloe Hinton
Spinelloccio – Henry Grant Kerswell
Gherardino – Barnaby Stewart
Buoso – Peter Benton

Martin Lloyd-Evans, Oliver Platt (directors)

Neil Irish (designs)
Richard Howell (lighting)

City of London Sinfonia

Stuart Stratford (conductor)

Time was when many felt compelled to ‘make allowances’ for ‘smaller’ companies. Now, more often than not, the contrary seems to be the case, instead apologising for their elder and/or larger siblings: ‘But of course, it is far more difficult for House X, given the conservatism of its moneyed audience,’ as if House X might not actually attract a different, more intellectually curious audience by programming more interesting works. At any rate, there is now no more need, if ever indeed there were, to ‘make allowances’, and it is difficult really to consider a company with such extensive programming as Opera Holland Park to be in any meaningful sense ‘smaller’. This new production – reusing its 2012 Gianni Schicchi – of Puccini’s complete Trittico may well be the best thing I have yet seen and heard at Holland Park.

Yet again, any reservations I might pre-emptively have held in abstracto concerning a small-ish orchestra (the outstanding City of London Sinfonia, strings 6:5:4:3:2) vanished within a few bars; the acoustic may sound unpromising in an unpromising performance, but in one such as this, with truly excellent conducting throughout from Stuart Stratford, there was no problem whatsoever. Dynamic contrasts and continuities could hardly have been more powerfully – and sensitively – communicated. Climaxes were shaped with unfailing conviction, matched, one felt, with as true an understanding as Puccini’s own of the dramatic ebb and flow. Indeed, the importance of rhythm, and its inextricable alliance to increasingly adventurous harmony, was projected in Il tabarro as almost a symphonic poem of the Seine itself – were that not woefully to underplay the role played by Stratford’s splendid cast. The post-verismo (if in fact we are post-) darkness of the score, lit by shards one might relate to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, or Debussy, but which one would be quite wrong to consider in any sense derivative, told of a Paris both distinct from and yet related to La bohème, Puccini’s self-quotation playful acknowledgement rather than necessity, so deeply imbued with style and meaning was the musical account.

Different colours, different sound-worlds presented  themselves in Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, the tragic noose tightening inexorably in the former, all the more powerfully for its radiant feminity (from which Poulenc surely learned so much in Dialogues des Carmélites. I initially hardly felt like hearing the latter, immediately following the tragic denouement of Suor Angelica. Performance put me right, the revels now begun of a scherzo as full of zest and the comedic complexities of commedia dell’arte as the Petrushka score that more than once came to mind. Nothing was permitted to outstay its welcome, ‘O mio babbino caro’ for once a genuine moment of well-natured self-parody rather than a would-be reversion, in which members of the audience may sit back and ‘enjoy’. Indeed, Dante’s great comedy itself seemed to loom over the enterprise as a whole – just as, in very different circumstances, it had over Calixto Bieito’s brilliant Berlin double-bill of Schicchi and Bluebeard’s Castle earlier this year.

 

The casts were also as fine as I can recall from OHP, perhaps even finer still. Even given a certain amount of duplication, the number of singers involved is large, so as often put a strain upon one of those ‘larger’ houses. Here, no one disappointed, and the whole, as the well-worn cliché has it, was considerably greater than the sum of its parts; indeed, there was a real sense of company, such as one is more likely nowadays to find in relatively ‘smaller’ circumstances. Anne Sophie Duprels convinced equally in the conflicted roles of Giorgetta and Suor Angelica, her musical and dramatic focus and shaping every inch the equal of Stratford’s. Stephen Gadd and Jeff Gwaltney had one believe just as strongly in them and their plight in Il tabarro; it may not be a lengthy opera, but these felt like fully drawn characters, and the ‘smaller’ parts offered much of great interest too. So did those in the other two operas. Other singers to stand out – although it hardly seems fair to do anything but repeat the cast list – were a vehement, Rosalind Plowright as La Zia Principessa, nobler than the convent hierarchy, but possessed of similar, ruthless, yet perhaps ultimately more conflicted coldness. Family lines exert their own pressure, as we should shortly be reminded in Gianni Schicchi. Richard Burkhard’s protean Schicchi, Sarah Pring’s slightly but not too outlandish Zita, and Anna Patalong’s beautifully sung Lauretta headed a cast of true depth in that final instalment.

As night fell, the qualities of the three productions declared themselves in different ways; that change in light – and temperature – proved especially telling during the course of Suor Angelica. Neil Irish’s arched backdrop for Il tabarro, commenting yet expanding upon the ruins of Holland House, moved to the foreground for the laundry – inevitable thoughts concerning convent repression there – in Suor Angelica and the bedroom for Gianni Schicchi, laundered clothes serving dual purpose in the two latter operas. There was, however, no attempt to force the three operas closer together than that; they told their own stories, and we made connections as we would. Martin Lloyd Evans (Il tabarro and original director of Gianni Schicchi) and Oliver Platt (Suor Angelica and revival director of Schicchi) respected the works, which in turn seemed to respect them for it. Movement and designs were in keeping with the dictates of the action, scenic and musical alike, keenly observed without drawing undue attention. The tragedy and comedy of human existence were the focus, from pit and stage alike.