Past Production Reviews
14This year's Christine Collins Young Artists performance at Opera Holland Park was Puccini's La Boheme on 24 June 2016, in Stephen Barlow's new production, designed by Andrew D Edwards. Associate director Rose Purdie was responsible for directing the Young Artists, and associate conductor Paul Wingfield was in the pit with the City of London Sinfonia, with Alice Privett as Mimi, Stephen Aviss as Rodolfo, Christopher Cull as Marcello, Elizabeth Karani as Musetta, Julien Van Mellaerts as Schaunard and Richard Walshe as Colline, plus David Woloszko, James Harrison and Michael Bradley from the main cast as Benoit, Alcindoro and Parpignol. The production was deliberately theatrical, the students' garret was a stage with a stage, with the design evoking the stage at the Globe Theatre, and Marcello's painting was a full cloth back-drop. Throughout the opera these cloth back-drops were visibly changed by stage-hands (in 16th century gear), and for the end of Act One we had a street scene, with an illuminated moon and for the final climactic note from Rodolfo and Mimi (Alice Privett) we saw them in silhouette against the moon. During Act Three, when there was no backdrop and the city gates were set up in front of Holland Park House, a stage hand produced a snow effect.
Canopies flapped on a blustery June night but nothing could shake this scintillating new production out of its stride. Working against imposing yet fluid wood-panel designs by her fellow countryman takis, the Greek director Rodula Gaitanou has made OHP’s intractably wide stage seem like a walk in the park. Alison Langer’s cheeky factotum Oscar and Rosalind Plowright’s imperious sorceress Madame Arvidson were superbly defined, adding juice to the melodrama and singing with absolute conviction despite the silliness of their roles. Benjamin Bevan and John Savournin trod a fine line between comedy and darkness as the two would-be assassins, Ribbing and Horn, and there was a predictably strong cameo from Ross Ramgobin as the impecunious sailor Cristiano.
A masked ball is a time of play and role-play, celebrating the duality, the conflicting selves within us all, allowing us to set aside our everyday public mask put on an alter ego for the evening. It seems appropriate then that Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera has a deep fissure running down the middle of its drama. Is it a fragile, unfulfilled love story – Rattigan or David Lean with an Italian accent and rather more blood – or is it an exuberant piece of gothic horror with a love story and political agenda tacked on? The answer is, of course, both, and that’s the problem with Verdi’s mid-career drama: you never know which opera you’re going to get.
The young Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw was a hit in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at Garsington last month and this performance could be her last before she becomes an international star Those of us who heard the young Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw sing Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at Garsington last month were hit by a musical coup de foudre: where had this wonderful singer been hiding, and what else could she do? The answer to the second question has come with her performance as Lisa in the same composer’s The Queen of Spades at Opera Holland Park in London. This is a darker and more psychologically complex role, but she brings to it the same exquisite artistry, and the same luminosity of tone: catch her there before she goes – as she surely soon will – into international orbit.
Opera Holland Park brings its current season to a close with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, directed by Rodula Gaitanou and conducted by Peter Robinson. Musically, it’s exceptionally strong, though there are moments of theatrical unevenness. Gaitanou updates the work to the 1870s. The haunted rococo St Petersburg of Tchaikovsky’s imaginings has become the morally hypocritical city of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where we first see high society assembling in a posh-looking cafe, as Peter Wedd’s Herman and his army cronies look on and gossip. Rosalind Plowright’s decrepit Countess, surrounded by obsequious religious types, has buried her past and her conscience beneath an assumed veneer of sanctimony. Dostoevskyan riff-raff, meanwhile, lurk on the banks of the Winter canal, where Natalya Romaniw’s Liza meets Herman for their last, tragic encounter.
Simon Wilding came over very strongly as her father the Commendatore, singing an excellent bass.
Richard Burkhard’s Sir Joseph Porter is a splendid study in pomposity, and he delivers his dialogue and his patter song in a booming baritone that leaves no syllable unheard. As Ralph Rackstraw, the sailor who dares to love above his station, Peter Kirk deploys a powerful if slightly reedy tenor and a likeable stage presence. And his would-be nemesis, the hideous Dick Deadeye, is played with a terrifically villainous relish by Nicholas Crawley.
Movingly articulated at the close of this English-language performance by Grant Doyle’s big-hearted Forester, the inspiring final scene, showing him overwhelmed by the eternal beauty of the environment where he has spent his life, is underpinned by the soaring playing of the City of London Sinfonia in Jonathan Dove’s canny reduction of the composer’s original score under conductor Jessica Cottis.
Grant Doyle sings his noble epilogue about the passing of time and the meaning of life with total security, and seven years on from playing the Forester in Daniel Slater’s brilliant production for Garsington, he’s also won the right to meditate on ageing.
Conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren marshalling the musical forces with consummate stylistic expertise…this is world-class opera. 5 stars
Waldren is proving himself one of the most adept and dynamic young British Verdians
