Nature smiled on the opening week of Opera Holland Park’s new season. There’s no better advertisement for semi-outdoor opera than an unseasonal heatwave, and it brought its own authenticity to Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, in a new production by Martin Lloyd-Evans. The wooden cabins and trestle tables of the set had a parched look and you could imagine the smell of pines and sagebrush as the evening grew dark in real time. And never more so than in the final scenes, where Puccini’s gunslinging heroine Minnie gets her man and the world flushes red and gold as they venture off into the sunset.
True, you needed to factor out the squawking of the Holland Park peacocks – and the blizzard that Puccini specifies in Act Two – but the point stands. La fanciulla is an unfamiliar opera (by Puccini’s standards, anyway) and Opera Holland Park prides itself on reaching new audiences. That means hiring directors who put storytelling front and centre, and it’s actually rather satisfying to see Puccini’s only Western done straight, with costumes and sepia-toned sets (by Anna Reid) that recognisably evoke California during the Gold Rush of 1849.
Most popular
Theodore Griffin
Ukraine’s Jehovah’s Witnesses are refusing to go to war
