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.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - La fanciulla del West, 26 July 2019

Nationaltheater

Images: Wilfried Hösl

Minnie – Anja Kampe

Dick Johnson – Brandon Jovanovich

Jack Rance – John Lundgren

Nick – Kevin Conners

Ashby – Bálint Szabó

Sonora – Tim Kuypers

Tim – Manuel Günther

Sid – Alexander Milev

Bello – Justin Austin

Harry – Galeano Salas

Joe – Freddie De Tomasso

Happy – Christian Rieger

Jim Larkens – Norman Garrett

Billy Jackrabbit – Oleg Davydov

Wowkle – Noa Beinart

Jake Wallace – Sean Michael Plumb

José Castro – Oğucan Yilmaz

Pony Express Rider – Ulrich Reß

Andreas Dresen (director)

Mathias Fischer-Dieskau (set designs)

Sabine Greunig (costumes)

Michael Bauer (lighting)

Rainer Karlitschek, Lukas Leipfinger (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stellario Fagone)

Bavarian State Orchestra

James Gaffigan (conductor)

Many Puccini cognoscenti will speak of La fanciulla del West as Puccini’s finest opera – or at least his most musically interesting. In the latter case, I think I can hear what they mean, even if I do not agree. I continue to struggle, with the former claim, although this performance at the Munich Opera Festival made the most convincing case I have yet heard for the work. Its virtues were predominantly musical, in keeping with the work’s general valuation.

Whether in the pit or on stage, we were in hands far better, far more musical, than ‘safe’. One would have to travel far and wide to hear superior orchestral playing in Puccini, or indeed anything else, than from the Bavarian State Orchestra – and even then, one might well fail. Its lengthy experience in Wagner truly paid off, the composer’s renewed – not that it ever really vanishes – fascination with Tristan und Isolde there for all to hear: not just as superficial similarity, but as something more generative. For that and much else, the incisive, comprehending conducting of James Gaffigan deserves high praise indeed. Equally apparent here, especially in darker passages, was the related yet distinct haunting of Pelléas et Mélisande and, more broadly, Debussy’s music. It was Allemonde above all, though, that seemed to inspire the (apparent) workings of fate. Gaffigan captured to a tee the ‘American’, almost Gershwin-like character of the opening bars, proving himself – and the orchestra – distinguished guides to all of the score’s twists, turns, and transformations in between.

The principal trio of singers proved equally distinguished, unquestionably Wagnerian guides to the work’s course. Anja Kampe was, thank goodness, no goodie-two-shoes Minnie. In a more flesh-and-blood portrayal than I recall, this was a conflicted woman with, yes, much good in her, but also a beating heart that could take her to places unsafe, unwise, maybe even unwarranted. More than once, I was put in mind of her Kundry (with Daniel Barenboim, in Dmitri Tcherniakov’s magnificent production). I seem endlessly to repeat myself when it comes to performances from Brandon Jovanovich. I am certainly not prepared, however, to vary just for the sake of variation. His performance as Dick Johnson was everything we have come to expect from this intelligent, committed artist, as dramatically powerful as it was verbally acute, as sweet-toned as it was virile. John Lundgren’s Jack Rance was just as impressive: dark, malign, but also comprehensible, no cardboard-cut-out villain. From a fine supporting cast, I should single out Tim Kuypers’s Sonora. I do not think it is just the human agency of the role that has me do so; Kuypers made one feel there was considerably more to it than that.

Andreas Dresen’s production of La fanciulla del West premiered in March this year. (The opera’s first Munich outing, intriguingly, came in 1934, the city by then well and truly the Hauptstadt der Bewegung.) It does not do anything especially interesting with the work, but nor is it unthinkingly ‘traditional’, for want of a better word. A darker setting – literally, as well as metaphorically – is provided for the action, perhaps most notably for the first act at the Polka Bar. Mathias Fischer-Dieskau’s set designs, Sabine Greuning’s costumes, and Michael Bauer’s lighting are very much part of this. There were times when I wished for something more probing, more critical, but at least Dresen steers well clear of the folkloric. For my reservations remain concerning the work itself, more precisely its dramaturgy, and I cannot help but wonder whether a director might fruitfully contribute something more here. 

Some are doubtless more important than others. One can get worked up about the racism. It is well-nigh impossible for a thinking person in 2019 not at least to cringe. But I am not sure that it especially helps, unless one childishly rejects all art of the past on the grounds that it is not of the present. Perhaps, though, something more might be done to address the issue. It certainly is not here – but then, alas, Puccini tends more than any other opera composer of stature to suffer from a lack of critical stagings. The somewhat sprawling nature of the first act perhaps invites greater intervention than we found here.

It is the close, however, that seems most urgently to invite a more critical stance. If I find the happy ending unconvincing – Puccini is surely better dealing with tragedy, and that includes the hollowest of victories in Turandot – then that must, at least in part, pay tribute to the expectations the composer has set up and indeed to his playing with them. I wish Dresen had donea little more with the possibility of undermining that ending. Jack’s fumbling reach for his gun is at best half-hearted; then the curtain comes down, separating Minnie and Dick from the rest. Nor do I think the score escapes charges of sentimentality here. No matter: it is what it is, and perhaps one day I shall come to appreciate it as many others clearly do. For now, the magnificently vile sadism of Turandot will continue to work its magic. Puccini’s wish for a ‘second Bohème, only stronger, bolder, and more spacious,’ seems to me unrealised. Fanciulla is perhaps bolder, if only in aspiration; it is certainly more spacious, if not to its benefit; it is hardly stronger. There was no doubting, however, the strength of these musical performances; in many respects, that was enough for now.

La fanciulla del West, Opera Holland Park, Tuesday 3 June 2014

Holland Park


Minnie – Susannah Glanville
Dick Johnson – Jeff Gwaltney
Jack Rance – Simon Thorpe
Nick – Neal Cooper
Sonora – Nicholas Garrett
Trin – Jung Soo Yun
Sid – Peter Braithwaite
Bello – James Harrison
Harry – Oliver Brignall
Joe – Edward Hughes
Happy – John Lofthouse
Jim Larkens – Aidan Smith
Ashby – Graeme Broadbent
Wowkle – Laura Woods
Billy Jackrabbit – Tom Stoddart
Jake Wallace – Simon Wilding
Jose Castro – Henry Grant Kerswell
Pony Express Rider – Michael Bradley

Stephen Barlow (director)
Yannis Thavoris (designs)
Richard Howell (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Timothy Burke)
City of London Sinfonia
Stuart Stratford (conductor)


‘I like the atmosphere of the West’, Puccini wrote after seeing three of David Belasco’s plays performed on Broadway in 1907, ‘but in all the “pièces” I have seen, I have found only a few scenes here and there. Never a simple thread, all muddle, and, at times, bad taste and old hat.’ It was nevertheless there and then that the first dramatic seeds were sown for La fanciulla del West were sown; it would be written to a libretto after Belasco, dedicated to Queen Alexandra (!), and premiered in New York in 1910. Even after considerable compression, modification, and so forth, I am not convinced the work is a resounding triumph, though many Puccini lovers esteem it highly indeed. It is certainly full of musical interest: the Wagnerisms of old are perhaps not so prominent, though the love scene in the second act surely takes partly after Tristan, but the influence of Debussy in particular is fruitful indeed. Whole tone scales pervade the score, and there is more than the occasional nod to Pelléas. The story itself, the characters included, remains more of a problem. They are not the easiest people to care about, and without that, Puccini’s trademark emotional manipulations cannot do their work. He may have wished the opera to be a ‘second Bohème, only stronger, bolder, and more spacious,’ but that ambition would only fitfully be fulfilled. The sentimentality of the ‘redemptive’ ending is, alas, only too readily resisted.


Or so it seemed here, despite an excellent orchestral performance from the City of London Sinfonia under Stuart Stratford. The number of occasions when one really felt the lack of a larger orchestra was surprisingly small, the strings proving more luscious than one would have had any right to expect, the woodwind piquant and alluring, and the brass offering dramatical fatalism aplenty. Stratford’s direction seemed to me splendidly judged, those Debussyan resonances both readily apparent and seamless incorporated into the score. There is little that can be done about a rather annoying theme – friends tell me that it has been ‘borrowed’ by a composer of musical theatre, though it stands out like a sore thumb even before one is aware of that – but the score was certainly given its due. Stratford’s – and his cast’s – crewing up of musical tension during the second-act wager was beyond reproach.


Susannah Glanville shone as Minnie; I had not encountered her before, but was mightly impressed by her vocal reserves and the dramatic use to which they were bit. This was a performance that would have graced many a ‘major’ stage, not that the ever-enterprising Opera Holland Park has any reason to fear such lazy comparisons. Jeff Gwaltney sometimes struggled to make himself heard – in particular, his words – but offered a sensitive portrayal of Dick Johnson. Simon Thorpe presented the conflicting emotions of Jack Rance with considerable skill, permitting one initially to sympathise, then to be repelled. A strong supporting cast included a highly impressive performance by Nicholas Garrett as Sonora. Choral singing was likewise greatly to be admired.


The problem, then, lay with Stephen Barlow’s production. This, at least it seems to me, is a vulnerable work, and the updating to a 1950s Nevada atomic testing ground makes little sense. A number of those who know the opera far better than I do say that it is a work that resists relocation in any sense. I am not so sure; I can imagine, for instance, a metatheatrical treatment in Hollywood, which played upon musical themes as well as the more obvious metaphor of gold-digging. The name ‘Camp Desert Rock’ seemed to promise something that remained un-delivered, but perhaps that should come as a relief. Barlow’s concept, however ably assisted y Yannis Thavoris’s designs, seems not to involve any real re-thinking; re-location jars and perplexes, rather than reinvigorates. Puccini’s ‘never a simple thread, all muddle, and, at times, bad taste and old hat’? That would be too harsh, but work and musical performance alike are done no favours by pointless, eye- but hardly ear-catching interpolations, of Minnie’s final act arrival upon a motorcycle and the lovers’ subsequent airline departure. It was difficult to resist the conclusion that the opera would have been better off left in Gold Rush California.