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)
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| 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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