La fanciulla del West
Opera Holland Park, June 19
With Aletta
Collins’s Opera North production behind us, and Richard Jones’s at ENO in the
autumn still to come, Opera Holland Park’s take on Puccini’s Western became the
filling in a Fanciulla sandwich that the increasingly numerous fans of
this great score will be keenly—if, perforce, slowly—devouring in 2014. I’m not
sure the details of Stephen Barlow’s production will last long in the memory:
his relocation and updating of the action to Las Vegas in 1951, with soldiers
from the ‘Atomic Testing Camp’ taking the place of Belasco’s and Puccini’s
miners, presents predictable inconsistencies and difficulties. The Polka bar
becomes a room in a casino, with plenty of women around besides Minnie;
Minnie’s special relationship to the men isn’t strongly established enough to
give the final redemption the shred of plausibility it needs; Minnie herself
becomes half Valkyrie, half Dolly Parton—a brightly-garbed, rootin’-tootin’
cowgirl in the outer acts, arriving to
save the day on the back of a Harley-Davison.
It’s often
a bit silly, not least the sudden appearance, thanks to a clever lighting trick
and a concealed door in a panoramic back panel (through which Minnie also makes
her first appearance in Act 1), of an aeroplane and air-hostess to whisk the
couple off into the sunset. But Yannis Thavoris’s designs display plenty of
ingenuity, with a decent log cabin for Act 2 whose two walls were closed
together to provide a feature for the final act, during which a rickety
signpost also served as an optimistic improvised gallows.
Musically
the performance I attended—with the young conductor Timothy Burke taking over
from Stuart Stratford, who was in charge of the rest of the run—was highly
persuasive. Burke drew sweeping, impassioned playing from a City of London
Sinfonia on fine form, and clearly enjoying itself; the aching nostalgia and
powerful vistas of the music came across with power. The principals made an
impressive fist of their roles, too. Susannah Glanville’s soprano doesn’t have
the steely power up top, but she nevertheless filled out Minnie’s phrases
effectively, and produced a convincing character, despite the challenges
imposed by the updating. Similarly, Jeff Gwaltney’s voice is some way off the
Dick Johnson ideal, lacking the necessary robustness and heft, but he also managed
to convince by clever employment of his resources, and excellent acting—matters
weren’t harmed by the fact he looked the part, too. As Jack Rance, Simon Thorpe
didn’t make quite as strong an impression as he might have, but he held up his
part of the love triangle reliably.
Barlow, too,
deserves praise for managing the large cast well, creating a tangible sense of
community—among the secondary roles, Nicholas Garrett’s nuanced Sonora and
Graeme Broadbent’s upstanding Ashby merit mention. As so often at Holland Park,
though, it was the sense of a company giving a performance its all that made
this Fanciulla so enjoyable and satisfying.
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