La Wally, Opera Holland Park, OHP, August 2011

Act I of this opera is super, ending with Wally’s famous aria Ebben! Ne andrò lontana (Well then! I shall go far away) sung with great dramatic purpose by Gweneth-Ann Jeffers.

Wally and Stromminger, all photos Fritz Curzon

Rather than sing this as a set piece aria, she alternated beautifully between pensive moments and real power. Her stubbornly narcissistic father Stromminger, well-portrayed by Stephen Richardson, has thrown her out after making a fool of himself, throwing a punch at a young man named Hagenbach and landing flat on his back. Realising his daughter cares for Hagenbach, he stupidly insists she marry his mate Gellner, for whom she feels nothing. She has her father’s stubbornness, refuses point blank and leaves their Austrian village to live in the mountains.

That’s the end of Act I, dramatically staged by Opera Holland Park, with a wonderful shooting incident where someone holds a beer glass at arm’s length while a shot is fired shattering the glass.

Hagenbach and Wally

In Act II a year has passed and Wally’s father, a wealthy farmer, is now dead. All might be well for a marriage between Wally and Hagenbach, but things go badly wrong, and Act II loses momentum. The fact that it’s a bit confusing is illustrated by reading various synopses, which don’t agree on whether Hagenbach is now betrothed to a tavern owner named Afra. Gellner tells Wally he is, but Gellner’s a 24-carat prat whose idiotic machinations lead to Wally’s decision to marry him if he’ll kill Hagenbach, which he tries to do and fails. In the end in Act IV — yes there are four acts — Hagenbach comes into the mountains to find Wally and shouts up to her. This starts an avalanche that kills him, and Wally leaps to her death.

The libretto is based on Wilhelmine von Hillern’s tale from the Tyrolean Alps: Die Geyer-Wally (The Vulture-Wally). The rather odd name Wally is short for Wallburga, which was also the name of an English missionary, canonised on May 1, who gave her name to the term Walpurgis Nacht for the spring festival on that day. There may also have been a young woman Wallburga Stromminger, whose legend led to von Hillern’s story.

Gellner and Stromminger in Act I

The libretto is by Luigi Illica, before he started collaborating with Puccini whose theatrical sense would not have tolerated such unsympathetic characters, nor the unnecessary complexities of Act II. This is where Wally insults Afra, so Hagenbach insults Wally (but the relationship between Hagenbach and Afra is not clear, nor the extent to which the insult to Wally is fully intentional). She feels slighted so she decides to marry Gellner and have Hagenbach killed. Odd. Momentum is never quite restored after Act I, and the opera has not entered the standard repertoire despite a successful first night at La Scala in 1892. The composer, Catalani (1854–93) came from the same town as Puccini who was four and half years his junior. He was a fine musician who took over as professor of composition at the Milan conservatory after Ponchielli’s death. Greatly influenced by Wagner, he tried to match music to words, but the vocal line in this opera keeps changing and the effect is not memorable. The music is sophisticated, but perhaps unnecessarily so. For example, in Act I Wally’s friend Walter (a high soprano part, nicely sung by Alinka Kozari) launches into a song of the Edelweiss, which one might expect to be given a folk melody, but it isn’t and it’s over dramatised. Perhaps Catalani might have achieved more later, but he suffered ill health and died of TB before he was forty.

Hagenbach looked charming and was well sung by Adrian Dwyer, with Stephen Gadd performing strongly as Gellner, along with Heather Shipp as in the thankless role of Afra. Peter Robinson’s conducting was first rate, and Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production showed huge energy and commitment from everyone. I’m delighted that Holland Park has put this on, and while there are good reasons it’s not in the standard repertoire, they do a terrific job of bringing these little known operas to the public. Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz was another case in point this season, and in 2012 they will do his one-act Zanetto as part of a double bill.

See this while you can. Performances continue until August 12 — for details click here.

Fidelio, Holland Park Opera, OHP, July 2010

Beethoven’s only opera is a plea for justice, an idealistic cri de coeur from a composer who originally wanted to dedicate his third symphony to his hero Napoleon, only to be vastly disappointed when the general declared himself emperor. In this story, Florestan has been secretly imprisoned for two years by Don Pizarro, simply because he had exposed him as a rascal. When Pizarro hears that the Minister of Justice will arrive the next day he decides to murder Florestan and bury him before the visit. That all goes vastly wrong owing to the intervention of Florestan’s wife Leonore, who has been working at the prison under the assumed name of Fidelio.

Florestan and Leonore, photo by Fritz Curzon

Yvonne Howard as Leonore/Fidelio started gently and built up power as the evening progressed, performing well in her role as a man. But what really brought fire to the evening was Tom Randle as Florestan. As soon as he opened his mouth to sing in Act II, we had some real emotion and his voice was a powerful and welcome addition to what had gone before in Act I. At the start of the opera, Nicky Spence had given a rather vicious portrayal of an immensely frustrated young prison warder, Jaquino, desperately wanting Sarah Redgwick as Marzelline, the daughter of Rocco the jailer. She, in love with Fidelio, sang well, more strongly in my view than Stephen Richardson as Rocco, who was engagingly human, but a little underpowered. Phillip Joll sang strongly as the corrupt prison governor Don Pizarro, but portrayed a rather insipid character, not helped by the production where the movements of the guards on his first entrance looked very contrived. The prisoners chorus in Act I was the high point of that Act — powerfully sung.

The prisoners, photo by Fritz Curzon

However, the production’s main weakness was in Act II. When Njabulo Madlala entered as the Minister, foreshadowed by two goons with shades, he had entirely the wrong body language for such a powerful man, behaving more like a police community support officer new to the beat. But what really made this 2003 production by Olivia Fuchs so unsatisfactory was the inconsistency of having microphones and photographers accompanying the Minister, showing an open society, whereas Pizarro can apparently imprison someone for merely personal reasons. Was there a coup? I think the story has been perverted, and if the essay in the programme that mentions Guantanamo Bay reflects the producer’s intentions then this is not the opera it’s supposed to be. Are Pizarro’s prisoners supposed to be terrorists? I think the original idea has been lost in this rather incoherent staging, where the Minister pretended to glug down red wine straight from the bottle, and the nasty prison warder who had beaten everyone with his stick handed round loaves of bread. At the end the audience booed Don Pizarro in true pantomime style.

Fortunately the City of London Sinfonia played well under Peter Robinson, giving Beethoven’s music the serious tone it deserves.

Un Ballo in Maschera, Holland Park Opera, July 2009

This Verdi opera is based on an 1833 play by French playwright Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), which in turn is loosely based on the death of King Gustav III of Sweden. He was the victim of a political conspiracy, and shot while attending a masked ball. The opera was first given in 1859, but in a different guise because the censor would not allow a king’s murder to be represented on stage, and the setting was transposed to Boston. The king was replaced by the colonial governor, renamed Riccardo, and his secretary Count Ankarström was renamed Renato. The fortune-teller Madame Arvidson (based on Ulrica Arfvidsson, the most famous fortune-teller in Swedish history) was called only by her first name, Ulrica. Legend has it that the king went to Madame Arfvidsson in disguise, as happens in the opera, and she warned him, “Beware the man with a sword you will meet this evening, for he intends to take your life”. After the king’s murder many of her clients were apparently scared away and she died in poverty.

This production by Martin Lloyd Evans, with designs by Jamie Vartan, set everything in the modern world, centred on the US Government. I found Act I a bit fussy with all the mobile phones and the rushing around, but I thought things improved later and gave a sense of reality to the drama. The key scene in the opera is the Act II midnight encounter between the king and Amelia, where they are surprised by Amelia’s husband Ankarström, and she veils her face. He has come to warn of the conspiracy, and as the king escapes he commands Ankarström to escort the veiled lady back to town without enquiring after her identity. Unfortunately the conspirators intercept them and when her veil comes away in the tussle, and Ankarström sees it is his wife, he joins the plot and the king’s fate is sealed. In this production, Amelia was disguised by sun glasses and a blond wig, rather than being veiled, and the encounter took place in the back-streets, with drug addicts and other ne’er-do-wells appearing and vanishing. Act III was back in the government building, and the scene between Ankarström and his wife, joined later by the conspirators, was very well played, with party guests entering through a metal detector. When the party was underway the guests stayed mainly behind a screen, which I thought focussed the drama well.

Rafael Rojas was to sing King Gustav (presumably the US President in this production) but being out of voice on opening night he acted the part, with David Rendall singing it beautifully from the orchestra pit, and the two of them combined their forces to perfection. Count Ankarström was Icelandic baritone Olafur Sigurdarson, whom I saw last year at Holland Park as Barnaba in La Gioconda, and the year before in L’amore dei tre Re; his voice was strong and fitted the part well, though he lost his pitch at one point. The vital role of Amelia was brilliantly sung by South African soprano Amanda Echalaz — she seems to be a coming star on the operatic stage. The page, portrayed as a young woman, was very charmingly sung by Gail Pearson, the fortune-teller by Carole Wilson, and the conspirators, Counts Ribbing and Horn by Paul Reeves and Simon Wilding. Peter Robinson conducted with great sensitivity to the singers, and I thought this was altogether a very fine Ballo.