A touch of heartfelt class for a tacky tale
Iris Opera Holland Park
Opera Holland Park assumes a new identity this summer as a charitable trust, no longer under the aegis of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. With Investec as lead sponsor and the remarkable duo of James Clutton and Michael Volpe at the helm, the future of this popular and agreeable institution looks bright.
Its first independent season is being inaugurated with Mascagni’s Iris, last staged here in 1997. OHP has made a speciality of exploring similar pieces from this fin-de-siècle repertory, uncovering both gems and duds in the process. Iris emerges here as a pretty tawdry affair, but one that exerts a certain grisly fascination.
Nominally set in a Tokyo slum, its plot is minimal if protracted and sluggish. The eponymous central figure is an innocent starry-eyed child abducted by a gentleman admirer and placed in a brothel. After her blind father curses her, she ends up killing herself in a sewer.
The action is bookended by a massive choral Hymn to the Sun, almost Mahlerian in its reaching for transcendental splendour. This casts a laminate of mystical-philosophical claptrap over an otherwise largely pornographic narrative focused slaveringly on the spectacle of a lusty young man deflowering a virgin by a seduction bordering on rape, expressed through music of squishy, slushy chromaticism.
Most of the score is very turgid and merely pretentious, but there are moments when a sickly orientalist perfume fills the air and the spine tingles. It is certainly more ambitious than that of Mascagni’s better-known
Cavalleria rusticana, borrowing exotic effects from Wagner (including a growling prelude presumably inspired by Das Rheingold) and the harmonic fantasies of orientialism.
OHP does this dubious affair honour. Stuart Stratford conducts with exemplary firmness, never forcing the temperature above boiling point and drawing idiomatic playing from the City of London Sinfonia. Olivia Fuchs’s staging, bleakly based on the image of bamboo cages and downplaying conventional Japonaiserie, doesn’t glamorise or shirk the unpleasant element of voyeurism.
I wasn’t hugely impressed by the dour Russian bass Mikhail Svetlov as Iris’s father or buff American tenor Noah Stewart as her nemesis – the latter sang coarsely loud and often out of tune. But the chorus was radiant in sun worship, and that wonderfully intelligent singer and imaginatively resourceful actress Anne Sophie Duprels gave a heartfelt performance in the title-role that made what could be merely repellent emotionally plausible and touching.