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.

Owen Wingrave, Guildhall, 23 February 2026

Silk Street Theatre

Owen Wingrave – Sonny Fielding
General Sir Philip Wingrave – Harry Jacques
Miss Wingrave – Lowri Probert
Mrs Coyle – Hannah McKay
Mr Coyle – Oliver Williams
Mrs Julian – Manon Ogwen Parry
Kate Julian – Gabriella Giulietta Noble
Lechmere, Narrator – Tobias Campos Santiñaque

Director – Martin Lloyd-Evans
Set designs – Laura Jane Stanfield
Costumes – Katie Higgins
Lighting – Zoé Ritchie
Video – Kamila Przybylsk

Guildhall School Orchestra

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Images: David Monteith-Hodge
Mr Coyle (Oliver Williams) and Owen Wingrave (Sonny Fielding)

The Guildhall’s performances have long played an important role in London’s opera ecology, as well as offering invaluable opportunities to its students. Generalisations and comparisons are of limited value; every year is different and repertoire will grow out of the students available rather than being imposed upon them. Nonetheless, the works chosen for the Guildhall’s termly shows has tended to range more widely both than might be expected and than that of the other conservatoires (which, of course, very much have their own strengths). Henze, Hindemith, and Respighi have all featured alongside Mozart, Purcell, and others over the past few years. Britten is far from unfamiliar territory in this country, but Owen Wingrave is rarely seen anywhere. Hats off, then, to the Guildhall for staging it in a chamber orchestral reduction by David Matthews. 

After a slightly shaky opening, the orchestra of young musicians gave a committed, even authoritative account of the score under Dominic Wheeler. Pacing convinced throughout. The music’s undeniable creepiness – a Britten trademark – shone through, as did its mechanistic progress. A flute solo here, a harp flourish there, Death in Venice-like percussion pervasive: these and more left one in no doubt as to the identity of the composer, though rarely at ever does he sound at his more inspired. Recorded children’s choir music, courtesy of the Cardinal Vaughan School’s Schola Cantorum, breathed life and death into evocation of the Wingrave family residence, Paramore. Martin Lloyd-Evans’s resourceful production moved from military academy to Paramore, taking in other locations with a refreshing absence of fuss. Things were played pretty straight, but none the worse for that. Occasional video additions enabled reference both to the outside world and to the family portraits of the house. Stage and musical direction were evidently conceived in collaborative sympathy.   

Lechmere (Tobias Campos Santiñaque)

Each of the young stage artists impressed in what is neither easy nor grateful music. In the title role, Sonny Fielding combined close attention to the text with a moral insistence that clearly impressed the Coyles, brought to life (insofar as the work permits) with skill and humanity by Oliver Williams and Hannah McKay. Lowri Probert’s rich mezzo was just the thing for the stubborn spinster Miss Wingrave, increasingly contrasted with the breakdown of Manon Ogwen Parry’s Mrs Julian and her more ideologically driven daughter Kate, here given a fine vocal and stage performance by Gabriella Giuletta Noble. Harry Jacques’s offered a creditable elderly general: not the easiest of tasks for a young singer. In many ways, the show was stolen by the lively Lachmere (and Narrator) of Tobias Campos Santiñaque, a properly animating presence in an opera that certainly needs one. 

For the problem, I am afraid, lay squarely with the work itself. I have not read the Henry James short story on which the libretto is based, but on this evidence The Turn of the Screw must be a far superior adaptation, whether by Myfanwy Piper or Britten. For me, it is Britten’s finest opera, so there is no doubt that composer and librettist could work together well. Indeed, it is difficult to believe Owen Wingrave comes from the same team, let alone ultimately from James. Where, in the earlier work, musical process is certainly to the fore, it is meaningful and generative. Here, too often, one simply hears gears grinding and changing to no evident end. Much of the orchestral writing is desiccated and there is strangely little in the way of idiomatic, let alone inviting, vocal writing. Word-setting and even straightforward are often awkward (as opposed to merely mannered). Dramatically, the work is still more flawed: most ‘characters’ are barely such at all, only really coming into being at the close. Instead, people who mostly never change their mind simply exchange pre-formulated statements on war, which either we shall mostly agree with (in Owen’s case) or find absurd (most of the rest, with rare glimpses of something more equivocal and interesting from the Coyles and Lechmere). 

Mrs Coyle (Hannah McKay)

What might be done with the opera? Would making it more overtly topical help? Perhaps, although could one, really? One could doubtless set it in any number of current or recent ‘conflicts’, though I am not sure the concerns would translate. Most Londoners likely to be attending an opera are unlikely to be rabid militarists; they hardly need telling what they know already. Any number of Ukrainians or Russians, say, might with very good reason decide to flee conscription, but I am not sure so many would be making pacifist declarations at a military academy (or near enough) and angering their ‘old’ families. Perhaps it could be turned more evidently against Russian (or other) nationalism, I suppose, though its dramatic flaws would not be helpful. The other possibility, it seems to me, would be to take ‘pacifism’ as part proxy for homosexuality and other sexual repression, surely a subtext at least for what is going on here. That might actually unleash greater potential for production characterisation, though again the works’ flaws would remain. 

Perhaps, then, Owen Wingrave simply works better as a television opera. I can imagine things ‘said’ might work more as reflections. Shots of the house, its portraits, its grounds and so on might likewise work better on screen. Or perhaps not. None of this is intended as criticism of a valiant attempt at revival. Anyone curious would be well advised to make an effort this week; it is difficult to imagine another opportunity coming our way soon. At the very least, you will encounter committed musical performances in an operatic rarity.

Così fan tutte, Grange Festival Opera, 10 June 2023

Fiordiligi – Samantha Clarke
Dorabella – Kitty Whately
Guglielmo – Nicholas Lester
Ferrando – Alessandro Fisher
Despina – Carolina Lippo
Don Alfonso – Christian Senn

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)
Dick Bird (designs)
Johanna Town (lighting)

Grange Festival Chorus (chorus master: Tom Primrose)
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Kirill Karabits (conductor)

Guglielmo (Nicholas Lester), Dorabella (Kitty Whately),
Fiordiligi (Samantha Clarke), Ferrando (Alessandro Fisher)
Images: Craig Fuller

To Hampshire and The Grange for the second of what should for me be three productions of Così fan tutte this summer. I cannot yet comment on Munich (Benedict Andrews/Vladimir Jurowski) but Oslo (Katrine Wiedemann/Tobias Ringborg) makes for an interesting comparison. Both had good casts, though if pushed, I should say The Grange had the edge. Though there were a good few things to admire in conductor and orchestra in Oslo, here the wonderful Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and an inspired Kirill Karabits unquestionably offered the superior experience. It was, however, in staging that the greatest contrast was to be found. Whereas Katrine Wiedemann’s production sometimes verged on the bizarre and failed to add up to more than the sum of its parts, Martin Lloyd-Evans trod a highly ‘traditional’ line. Neither seemed to me especially revelatory, though by the same token, neither lacked positive qualities. Ultimately, though, it was difficult not to conclude that both would have benefited from a greater dose of abstraction – or, paradoxically, even historical specificity – so as to penetrate more closely to the (broken) heart of Mozart and Da Ponte’s extraordinary musical laboratory. 

Here, Così is set somewhere on the Bay of Naples – we see advertisements for visits to Herculaneum and Vesuvius – in the eighteenth century. Nothing wrong with that, of course: we do not need a multi-storey carpark for the sake of it. But whereas, say, Oliver Platt’s 2018 production for Opera Holland Park, one of the best I have seen, used that setting to go further, to venture into the work’s exquisite, sadistic cruelty via the commedia dell’arte, this seems content to stay where it is and to offer an often fresh eye for detail within that framework. There is a nice sense of a world beyond, of a tavern in which intrigue takes place, populated by recognisable human beings. There is a definite ear for music, action often carefully choreographed so as to fit rhythm and even harmony: not at all something we can take for granted, however much we should be able to. That, presumably, was a matter for both director and cast; whoever is responsible should be duly congratulated. I was less sure about the second-act portrayal of Fiordiligi and Dorabella as drunk. I can understand why one might wish to resort to some sort of drug to ‘explain’ their actions, but ultimately that seems to me to miss the point of the action (singular). It certainly, however, chimed with the state of some of the audience, newly returned from the long interval, heartily signalling their approval. There was nothing, then, to scare away the horses, which may well have been the intention.

Karabits and the orchestra, however, provided deeper insight aplenty, in a performance that seemed almost to have come from the golden age of orchestral Mozart. It was probably not faultless; what, apart from Mozart, is? But I cannot recall a single slip, which would usually register with stark clarity in so cruel a score. More to the point, tone was warm and variegated; articulation was telling, without drawing narcissistic attention to itself; and line and tempi proved quite without reproach. Karabits’s equally musical and theatrical reading offered great cumulative power and wisdom, and orchestral soloists played like angels. So often, one fears that orchestral Mozart has been lost forever; Karabits and the Bournemouth SO showed this categorically not to be the case. I am usually a sceptic when it comes to harpsichord continuo playing during orchestral passages. Peter Davies’s contribution was, however, a model of its kind: neither exhibitionistic nor impeding, but rather enabling performance and, briefly on occasion, beguiling too.

Don Alfonso (Christian Senn)

Samantha Clarke impressed greatly as Fiordiligi, her performance truly building towards an explosive ‘Come scoglio’. Kitty Whately, also Holland Park’s Dorabella, proved every inch – note? – her equal, yet properly different in character. Their collaborative chemistry was notable, as was that between Nicholas Lester’s Guglielmo and Alessandro Fisher’s Ferrando, both offering finely sung and acted performance, similarly (yet differently!) differentiated. Da Ponte and still more Mozart offer, in a sense, all that is needed here, yet that is arguably only to beg the question.  Christian Senn’s presented a wily and subtle master of ceremonies in Don Alfonso. Carolina Lippo’s complementary Despina was alert and knowing, no mere caricature, ‘Una donna a quindici anni’ a brilliant welcome back after the interval. Even the chorus, sharply directed by Lloyd-Evans, made an uncommonly fine musico-dramatic mark. If one must choose, it will always be the score; in that respect, we could not reasonably have hoped for better.

Margot la Rouge and Le Villi, Opera Holland Park, 23 July 2022

Margot, Anna – Anne Sophie Duprels
Sergeant Thibault – Samuel Sakker
L’Artiste – Paul Carey Jones
Lili Béguin – Sarah Minns
Nini – Laura Lolita Perešivana
La Patronne – Laura Woods
First Soldier – George von Bergen
La Poigne – Jack Holton
Second Soldier – Alistair Sutherland
Totor – David Woloszko
First Woman – Chloé Pardoe
First Drinker – Sean Webster
Second Drinker – Matthew Duncan
Third Drinker, A Man – Peter Lidbetter
Waiter – Richard Moore
Police Inspector – Dragoş Andrei Ionel
Roberto – Peter Auty
Guglielmo – Stephen Gadd
Dancers – Fern Grimbley, Isabel Le Cras, Gabriella Schmidt

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)
takis (designs)
Jake Wiltshire (lighting)

Jami Reid-Quarrell (movement)

City of London Sinfonia

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

Francesco Cilluffo (conductor)

Images: Ali Wright
Chorus, Le Villi

Opera Holland Park’s new double-bill of operatic rarities proves a great success, highly recommended to anyone slightly curious to hear works off the beaten track. Delius’s Margot la Rouge, written from 1901-2 but unperformed until 1983, and Puccini’s first opera, Le Villi, here given in its 1884 two-act revision, were both unsuccessful entrants in the Milan publisher Sonzogno’s competition for new one-act operas. In Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production, both open with a father and his daughter, the unfortunate tales to follow initiated by the latter leaving the former. (Make of that what you will.)

Delius’s 45 minutes or so tell a straightforward story in which the woman Marguerite/Margot, fallen into Parisian prostitution, has a chance meeting with her childhood sweetheart, Thibauld, which rekindles their relationship, only for her pimp-lover, L’Artiste, to explode with anger, stab Thibauld, and in turn be stabbed by Margot, who is arrested. There is little in the way of dramatic conflict or surprise; people act precisely as one might expect them to. There is a frankly absurd number of cast-members for a work so short. But it is musically interesting, Delius not only at his most Wagnerian, but far more directed (or conventionally directed) than many of the composer’s more wandering scores. Lloyd Evans and his team summon up a seedy Paris bar, a storm, and various comings and goings with a gutsy verismo spirit that matches what one hears from orchestra and singers alike. If ultimately Margot la Rouge comes across more as a sketch in search of expansion, it certainly does not outstay its welcome and has much to fascinate audiences of various tastes.

Le Villi is, unsurprisingly, the more accomplished, finished work, the level of craftsmanship from Puccini at so early a stage in his career little short of astonishing. The Gothic tale has more in common with French and, perhaps still more, German Romanticism than one might expect. Here, takis’s shell of a bar transformed into a woodland house, Roberto and Anna, celebrating their betrothal, are separated by Roberto’s journey to Mainz to collect his inheritance. Waylaid by a Mainz ‘siren’, he fails to return, choosing instead a city life of debauchery, and Anna dies, her father calling for supernatural vengeance from the Villi who inhabit the forest. Roberto, having finally resolved to return home, meets these fairies instead of his beloved; they do as the legend foretells, dancing him to death.

Puccini is likewise not without Wagnerian influence here, but his truer predecessors seem to be earlier German (and again French) Romantics, as well as the purveyors of French grand opéra and ballet. For, in this early opera-ballet, what surprises most is just how much Puccini sounds like himself. Melodies, harmonies, scoring, if not so much characterisation: so much of his later mastery is already close—and sometimes more than close. Lloyd-Evans’s resourceful production takes full advantage of the magical descent into darkness an evening at Holland Park offers. Again, it tells the story directly, with a sharp eye for detail, and offers plenty for one to consider after the event, as indeed does the work itself.

Both orchestral reductions, by Andreas Luca Beraldo, seemed to me highly successful, in that I pretty much forgot we were not hearing quite the real thing. That success must also of course be attributed to Francesco Cilluffo and the City of London Sinfonia.  Cilluffo’s conducting, energetic yet long-breathed, was imbued with every inch of the conviction necessary to lift such scores off the page. The CLS sounded fuller of tone than many an opera house orchestra of twice the size. It drove the action as much as supported the singers in a true partnership between pit and stage. The Opera Holland Park Chorus, finely trained by Dominic Ellis-Peckham, proved both polished and enthusiastic in its singing—and game in its dancing too. Jami Reid-Quarrell’s choreography, whether for the chorus or the three Villi dancing, was sharp, illustrative, and dramatically conceived.

At the heart of both operas lay the outstanding singing of Anne Sophie Duprels: heartfelt, incisive, and variegated. She was poignantly partnered by Samuel Sakker as Thibauld in Margot la Rouge, Paul Carey Jones’s Artiste offering a contrasting, commanding, and vicious stage presence. The size of the cast offered a host of young singers opportunities to shine, all of them well taken. As Le Villi’s Roberto, Peter Auty might have graced any operatic stage. His marriage of vocal heft, lyricism, and command of detail fully complemented Duprels. Stephen Gadd’s performance as Anna’s father Guglielmo should also be commended. As so often at Holland Park, this was a fine company achievement.

Indeed, I think it was worth drawing attention to the achievement of the greater team at Holland Park. From Director of Opera James Clutton down (not to forget recently departed colleague Michael Volpe), or perhaps better, from a committed team of volunteers up, this is a friendly, welcoming, high-achieving company, crucial both to this country’s operatic ecology, past, present, and future, and also playing its part in building a more sustainable theatre in the broader, ecological sense. Since the pandemic, OHP has taken still greater care to work in partnership with local suppliers; a wonderful array of upscaled furniture provides audience seating; the auditorium has been constructed from reclaimed wood and recycled shipping containers. Art for art’s sake matters; let no one tell you otherwise. But art is never solely for art’s sake. To survive, it must assume and further social, environmental, and political responsibility. When everything goes right artistically, as it does here, that is even better, but human striving, artistic and social, matters greatly in itself and will only do so more as our world belatedly confronts a host of crises that never should have been permitted to reach this stage. Every theatre company, every orchestra, every artist, every partner organisation will have its/his/her/their own solutions, but they must work together too; that includes us as audiences. What better place to learn from hard work, effort, and example than here in Holland Park?

 

Dialogues des Carmélites, Guildhall, 5 March 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Chevalier de la Force, First Commissary – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Marquis de la Force – Jake Muffett

Blanche de la Force – Lucy Anderson

Thierry, Second Commissary, M. Javelinot, Gaoler – Bertie Watson

Prioress, Mother Jeanne – Georgia Mae Bishop

Sister Constance – Claire Lees

Mother Marie – Emily Kyte

Second Prioress – Michelle Alexander

Carmelites – Eva Gheorghiu, Myramae Meneses, Victoria Li, Alice Girle, Siân Dicker, Ana Marafona, Isabelle Peters, Catherine White, Meriel Cunningham, Natalie Davies, Anne Reilly

Sister Mathilde – Lucy McAuley

Chaplain – Daniel Mullaney

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)

takis (designs)

Robbie Butler (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

The Guildhall’s termly opera offerings have long tended to be more adventurous than those of the Royal Academy or Royal College when it comes to repertoire. In June, we shall have the mouthwatering prospect of a double-bill of Hindemith’s last opera, The Long Christmas Dinner, and Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement. Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is probably as mainstream as I have heard here, with the exception of a fine Marriage of Figaro in 2013. I am not sure that the performance I heard marked the school’s greatest achievement, but there was nevertheless much to admire – and yes, the final scene did what it must when the nuns came before the guillotine, bringing tears to my eyes and a sense of redemption through grace.

The first act in particular seemed somewhat unsettled, the gentle – often deceptively so – flow of Poulenc’s orchestral writing often seeming to elude conductor Dominic Wheeler, and the cast seeming to have been encouraged to perform in a fashion more suited to Italian verismo. French opera more often than not presents a difficulty: not just in the language but in the style too. Perhaps the brashness of the orchestral sound and some decidedly odd balances were as much a matter of the difficult Silk Street acoustic as of anything else. Stravinsky came to mind, quite rightly, but it did not always seem quite the right Stravinsky, and he certainly would have required greater precision too. Fortunately, matters improved considerably in the second and still more the third acts: much better than the other way around! And it was good to have opportunity to see and to hear the opera in its proper three acts, rather than, as often the case, having a break part way through the second.

Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production worked well enough, although the balance or perhaps even opposition between naturalism and something more minimalistic, even symbolic, sometimes seemed arbitrary rather than productive. I have nothing against the opera being set when it ‘should’ be, but the danger then can be that it then comes to seem to be ‘about’ the French Revolution, which it really is not. There were some beautiful costumes from takis to look at. More to the point, his relatively sparse set designs achieved a good deal by suggestion – as well as possessing an aesthetic appeal of their own. A Carmelite convent is surely not in any case intended to be lavish. The true theme of the opera, Divine Grace, shone through just enough, if perhaps less consistently than it might have done.

The young cast had much to recommend it. Perhaps rather oddly, given their distinctly lesser roles, the men foten stood out as much as the women, Daniel Mullaney’s Chaplain and Eduard Mas Bacardi’s Chevalier and First Commissary both offering finely sung, dramatically considered performances. Perhaps the starring role on this occasion was that of Emily Kyte’s Mother Marie. We were reminded more than once, as much through acting as through vocal means, that not only does the opera has its roots in her telling of the story, but of her especially problematical role in the narrative. Lucy Anderson’s Blanche proved a little vocally wayward to start with, but once settled, proved well able to engage our sympathies. A nicely contrasted, yet strangely complementary, pair of prioresses, Old and New, came our way from Georgia Mae Bishop and Michelle Alexander. Choral scenes were well directed, scenically and musically, offering the necessary sense of a threatening and, yes, revolutionary backdrop.

The Rape of Lucretia, Guildhall, 24 February 2016

Silk Street Theatre, Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Collatinus – Milan Siljanov

Junius – Daniel Shelvey
Tarquinius – Christopher Cull
Male Chorus – Thomas Atkins
Female Chorus – Elizabeth Karani
Lucia – Jennifer Witton
Bianca – Elizabeth Lynch
Lucretia – Katarzyna Balejko

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)

Jamie Vartan (designs)
Mark Jonathan (lighting)
Dan Shorten (video)

Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

 

I shall not beat about the bush: this was the best performance of The Rape of Lucretia I have seen. It would be difficult – indeed unduly contrived, if not quite so contrived as the opera’s wretched Epilogue – to find anything much at which to cavil in the excellent performances from Guildhall musicians under Dominic Wheeler, or indeed in Martin Lloyd-Evans’s taut, powerful, musical production. Seen in the round, the orchestra at the same level as the stage, this could be experienced almost as a piece of music theatre, and emerged all the more strongly for it. Jamie Vartan’s designs are spare but telling, Mark Jonathan’s lighting subtly doing a great deal of the work. The Chorus has been there all the time, sharp-suited singers walking around the stage, through the audience, beforehand: pensive, maybe impatient, hurrying us to start and yet delaying. Or is that all in the imagination? Who can be sure? And does that matter? We do not really know who they are, after all. But, until that final, supremely unconvincing Christian promise of redemption – Britten’s own fault: one wants to shout, ‘What on earth has this to do with Christ’s Passion? – I responded to them in a way I have not before. Kinship with the not-quite-real, yet all-too-real, qualities of The Turn of the Screw is apparent to an unusual extent.

 

The Romans are portrayed convincingly in near-modern dress: perhaps the time of composition, maybe a little earlier? The narcissism of army dress uniform tells its own tale, especially when we sit so close to the action. One can certainly feel the physicality, the provocative nature of an opera, which, despite its unusual – for Britten – centrality of a female character, ultimately falls back just as much as the others upon male sexuality. The domesticity of Lucretia’s realm, its illusory peace, is hauntingly caught: spinning with echoes of a past fondly remembered, soon to be savagely destroyed forever by Tarquinius’s deed. We feel, as did Britten, the closeness, the monstrousness of war; but is society always in a state of war in one way or another? Is sex also war by other means? Nothing seems black and white here; Collatinus, after all, grows into his role, into compassion and forgiveness.

 

The singers impressed both vocally and as actors. I could not, if I wished, have selected a weak link. Milan Siljanov, Daniel Shelvey, and Christopher Cull played the three men similarly at first, distinctions becoming later. Where Cull’s Tarquinius lost control of his actions via excellent vocal control, Collatinus and Junius pulled in different directions. Attention to words and music was exemplary. Likewise with Katarzyna Balejko’s rich-toned, imploring Lucretia: a victim with whom one could sympathise deeply, not that that would do her any good. Jennifer Witton and Elizabeth Lynch proved equally sympathetic women of the household, trying to do their best in an impossible situation, their lack of success again a factor drawing us in to their particular and general plight. Thomas Atkins and Elizabeth Karani carefully, excitingly trod a fine Choral line between observation and participation.

 

That, as I suggested above, served to highlight connections with The Turn of the Screw: not just onstage, but perhaps still more importantly, in musical terms. (The distinction seemed unusually false in this case.) For not the least of this cast’s and this production’s virtues was the strong impression they gave that their decisions sprang from Britten’s highly ‘constructed’ score. That could not have happened, of course, without highly committed, concentrated playing from Wheeler and the excellent young orchestral players. The closed forms may be more overt, less complex than those of Wozzeck, but the cumulative effect was perhaps not entirely dissimilar. Figures, harmonies, rhythms lodged themselves in the mind and would not let go: like the tragedy enacted on stage. If only someone could solve the problem of that Epilogue… Otherwise, and in any reasonable sense, outstanding! I have no doubt that we shall see and hear much more from these singers; I look forward to doing so.

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.

Le nozze di Figaro, Guildhall, 6 March 2013

Silk Street Theatre, Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Figaro – Hadleigh Adams, Joseph Padfield

Susanna – Raphaela Papadakis
Doctor Bartolo – James Platt
Marcellina – Roisin Walsh
Cherubino – Catherine Backhouse
Count Almaviva – Ben McAteer
Basilio – Adam Smith
Countess Almaviva – Magdalena Molendowska
Antonio – Piran Legg
Don Curzio – Joshua Owen Mills
Barbarina – Lauren Zolezzi
Bridesmaids – Alison Langer, Bethan Langford

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)

Bridget Kimak (designs)
Declan Randall (lighting)
Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

James Adkins (video)

Chorus and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Dominic Wheeler (conductor)


What a wonderful surprise this turned out to be! Whilst your reviewer would be more likely to tire even of Tristan than of Figaro, he approached this evening in somewhat jaded fashion. Had the experience of once again teaching this term’s ‘Mozart’s Operas’ undergraduate course led him ever so slightly to take an opera whose perfection yields only to that of Così fan tutte? At any rate, this sparking performance, from an engaging cast of young singers, in – for once – an appropriately sized theatre came as a tonic. Not everything was perfect, of course, but it proved as a whole a superior experience to a number I have experienced in the most celebrated of houses.  

 

I was initially sceptical concerning Martin Lloyd-Evans’s staging, which relocates the action to a present-day American electoral campaign, Almaviva the candidate, in what, judging by the hint of ‘local colour’ from the chorus – a slightly questionably ‘Occidentalist’ touch, I thought – might perhaps have been New Mexico. The Overture depicts illegal immigration, the Count included, suggesting hypocrisy in the ‘two years later’ Republican hard line upon his successors. That all might sound rather remote from the concerns of Figaro – and it is really. But it is little more ultimately than a framing device, permitting the action proper to take place within a hotel campaign headquarters, making some sense of the subservient staff roles allotted to Figaro, Susanna, et al. Less jars than one might expect; the droit de seigneur does not take so very much transformation into workplace harassment. The richness of an eighteenth-century society of orders is lost, of course – how commonplace a late-capitalist hierarchy of money and politics seems by contrast – but we have the former in the back of our minds anyway.

 

There is some surprising re-ordering in the third act. For instance, ‘E Susanna non vien ... Dove sono’ after the Count’s aria came as quite a jolt. I assume the point to have been to place the Almavivas in closer dramatic counterpoint. In a fashion, it worked, but I am not sure that it was worth the upheaval; Mozart’s tonal planning is not lightly to be tossed aside. However, the production must be vigorously applauded for eschewing the wretched ‘traditional’ cuts in Act Four, permitting us to hear both Marcellina’s and Basilio’s arias. They are not simply ‘worth hearing’; they contribute immeasurably to Da Ponte’s construction of a battle between the sexes and place Figaro’s aria, which can otherwise seem to signal a somewhat bewildering change of focus, in context. Great Mozart conductors as well as poor ones have assented to the cuts; that does not make them any more palatable.

 

Dominic Wheeler’s direction of the score surprised me too. I do not mean that personally; so far as I can recall, I have not heard him before. However, I have become so wearily resigned to present-day conductors having not the slightest understanding of Mozart, that to find one whose name is not Davis or Barenboim conducting so warmly sympathetic an account comes as a genuine surprise. Very little, if anything, was hard-driven. (One of the greatest problems, perhaps the greatest, we experience today is conductors who think that denying music space to breathe – and that does not by any means equate to crotchets per minute – is somehow ‘exciting’ or ‘dramatic’; it is of course quite the opposite.) Tempi were generally apt, only the Countess’s arias proving problematical, the first dragging – again, not a matter of speed, but of insufficient harmonic motion – and the second proving a little too rushed. More to the point, Mozart’s harmonic-dramatic development was for the most part ably communicated: no mean feat. If there were occasions when the orchestra – strings 8.7.5.4.2, quite adequate for a small theatre – lost momentum, none ultimately proved so very grievous, and there was much fine playing to be balanced against such lapses.

 

There was, moreover, not really a weak link in the cast; every one of the Guildhall singers shone in one way or another. A slightly shaky start soon gave way to a vigorous performance from Ben McAteer as the Count. His Countess, Magdalena Molendowska, however unflattered by her costume in the third and fourth acts, showed considerable dignity in stage presence and in voice. Raphaela Papadakis proved a lively Susanna – without which any performance will fall flat. Catherine Backhouse was splendidly convincing as Cherubino in gawky female guise. Even if the coloratura of her aria sometimes proved a little much, Roisin Walsh offered a convincing Marcellina, at the very least matched by those taking the other ‘smaller’ roles, amongst whom I should single out Lauren Zolezzi’s beautifully sung Barbarina. The greatest praise should, however, be offered to I due Figaro. No need to worry: I have not taken on an unaccountable tendresse towards Mercadante. An ailing Hadleigh Adams, however, ceded his arias to Joseph Padfield. I wondered whether he need have done, so convincing were both his stage presence and his handling of Mozart’s quicksilver lines; indeed, there seemed to be no need whatsoever to make allowances. Padfield, however, offered an equally convincing, slightly darker, assumption of the arias from the side of the stage. Both singers richly deserved their enthusiastic applause, as did the production as a whole.