The best singing I have ever heard at Opera Holland Park
Music of the late Romantic era, unabashedly wearing its heart on its sleeve, is what Opera Holland Park does best, and after a dodgy start, this year’s season comes to a close with two terrific programmes drawing on that territory. Cilea’s emotionally affecting melodrama L’arlesiana, a favourite here, has returned with sensitive conducting by Dane Lam and impassioned performances by Samuel Sakker, Yvonne Howard and Fflur Wyn gracing a forceful and lucid production by Oliver Platt; and there’s a deeply rewarding double bill of Wolf-ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta.
Il Segreto di Susanna belongs to that long-lost time when smoking was considered not only pleasurable but risqué for ladies, and sexually alluring too (remember Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep?). The premise of this 40-minute confection, dating from 1909, is featherlight: a newly married husband is upset by the smell of tobacco about the house, and concludes that it must emanate from the cigarettes of his wife Susanna’s lover. Following farcical misunderstandings, however, it transpires that she has no lover, and it is Susanna herself who is susceptible to the fragrant weed.
It’s a mere frippery, slightly overextended as such things always are, but beautifully crafted, with delicate orchestral colours that evoke Ravel, and something of the conversational sparkle of Verdi’s Falstaff. John Wilkie’s production is very nicely done, without overstatement, and Clare Presland, Richard Burkhard and John Savournin (as a silent conspiratorial butler) play their parts in high boulevard style. John Andrews conducts with grace and affection: it’s only a curiosity, but a very agreeable one.
Iolanta could have stood on its own: Tchaikovsky’s last opera, it’s an intense 90-minute drama, symbolist in idiom, in which the eponymous princess is redeemed from what appears to be psychosomatic blindness by the transcendent power of love. Opera Holland Park’s performance is an absolute cracker.
Tchaikovsky’s stirring score is honoured by Sian Edwards’s richly expressive conducting of the City of London Sinfonia; and Olivia Fuchs’s staging, imaginatively designed by Takis, is sensitive to all the libretto’s weird mystical implications without being pretentiously tricksy.
The cast is superb throughout, with gorgeous, generous singing from David Butt Philip as the handsome prince and Natalya Romaniw in the title role. Their grand duet at the climax sent shivers down my spine: I don’t think I’ve ever heard such rapturously wonderful singing at Opera Holland Park.
Every member of the cast is superb and the grand duet at the climax sent shivers down my spine