La rondine, Opera Holland Park, London, review: Opera Holland Park continues to fly the flag in leafy Kensington
Puccini's heart-breaking story of love and loss opens the 2017 Opera Holland Park season
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With all the major country-house opera companies now in full swing, we can compare their strengths and weaknesses. Glyndebourne – the one they all dream of emulating – remains superbly itself, both artistically and in terms of the ‘experience’. Garsington has now settled into its new home on the Getty estate at Wormsley, and is maintaining its artistic excellence. Grange Park Opera has done a conjuring trick, magicking up a new opera house almost overnight in the charming grounds of an Elizabethan estate in West Horsley: an iffy opening production means we must wait to see if the artistic fare is worth the slog of getting there. Michael Chance has created an upstart new company, Grange Festival, in the old Grange Park; ditto re their artistic fare, given a similar slog into the wilds.
Meanwhile Opera Holland Park continues to fly the flag in leafy Kensington: rus in urbe, and infinitely easier of access. OHP snares top-flight young singers – Ashley Riches and Ben Johnson in Don Giovanni – and its production of Puccini’s La rondine represents a sparky stab at a lyric comedy generally seen as problematic. And if the stage is problematic too – too wide and shallow, too distant for a good acoustic – all this is transcended by a cast commandingly led by the charismatic Elizabeth Llewellyn, Matteo Lippi with his gorgeously Italianate bel canto, and Stephen Aviss as a flamboyantly camp and mellifluous poet. Direction by Matthew Kofi Walden is sure-footed, designs by takis are inventive.
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