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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
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Brian Sewell's rating
Reader rating
Outsiders: Anne Mason and Manrico in Opera Holland Park's Il Trovatore
Consolations are few for those who do not care for the rituals of summer. The sun burns pale skins and insects feast on it; cricket is to be abhored as the most tedious of sports and an obscure form of mathematics dependent on juggling the statistics of Wisden, the game’s recording angel; and tennis is now a woeful thing of services faster than any Ferrari can accelerate, and of lusty women uttering orgasmic yelps and grunts. What’s left?
Opera Holland Park is the answer. Country house opera — two castrati and a square piano — must seem to the sane man mad enough, but opera in a public park, “Where dogs at parting day are walked to pee/ The helicopter wheels his droning flight/ Where peacocks shriek from every nearby tree/ And police car sirens rend the startled night,” must seem madder still. And so it is, yet in its way it works, for the audience of a thousand souls, the full-blooded orchestra, singers who know how to lob their voices over it even at full tilt, and the elegant ruins of Holland House that form the stage and scenery are all contained in a vast tent, and once the overture begins, it seems that all the air outside the tent a solemn stillness holds.
Over the past decade Opera Holland Park has become part of the pattern of my life, an annual feast of the old favourites of which one never tires, the thumpers and the war-horses of opera, and a thing too of rediscoveries, of operas so long forgotten that for most of us hope of ever hearing them has been abandoned.
Again and again I have been surprised at how effective productions have been in lending sense to plots that seem absurd, and sensibility to music dulled by repetition, done, not through the outrage of removing La Traviata to Cricklewood in Harold Wilson’s day, or Don Giovanni to Berlin between the wars, but with the discreet conviction that Mozart’s intentions have been belied by unthinking traditional interpretations. Were Holland Park ever to attempt Der Rosenkavalier, it would not surprise me to find Baron Ochs presented, not as oaf, but as pathetic hero.
This year, faithful to Verdi, Puccini and Mozart, the old war-horses are Il Trovatore, Tosca and The Magic Flute. Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, marginally less familiar, is more a filly of an opera. And the rarities are Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, of 1876, and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, of 1892, the one a tragedy, the other a tale descended from Hans Andersen with the happiest of endings.
Iolanta, the great Piotr Ilyich’s last opera, was not performed in Britain until 1968, at the Camden Festival; but it was not seen again in London until revived by students at the Royal Academy of Music last year. Opera Holland Park now offers a thrilling opportunity for a far wider audience to see and hear this forgotten masterpiece.
Il Trovatore opens tonight. Season ends 9 August (0845 230 9769, www.operahollandpark.com).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
