To the accompaniment of storm, tempest and icy blast, Opera Holland Park’s 2008 season opened in roaring style.

Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the one about the gipsy who carelessly throws a baby on the fire and causes a good deal of operatic trouble, is a long evening with your feet wet. It’s a tribute to all involved that it felt shorter than this most convoluted of tales sometimes can, even in lavish circumstances.

Not all the components were right, but the four chief characters — famously difficult to cast — each held their own and the atmosphere, as ever at Holland Park, managed to be warm and enthusiastic while also being freezing and sodden.

Pulling wildly ambitious operas out of a minuscule hat has become one of OHP’s best annual conjuring tricks. No opera seems to defeat this burgeoning enterprise, nicknamed the People’s Opera, which functions cheerfully from within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Waste Department (true). Budgets are tiny, tickets moderately priced, aspirations large.

That said, director and designer John Lloyd Davies has not won the tricky battle with Holland Park’s wide, shallow stage. Whereas a unified vision might be safest, he has concocted a bitty post-modern stew, the stage fringed with barbed-wire and split down the middle by a red lit-up totem pole cum stake.

One side is in Fascist Rome, with Latin fragments of Horace on the crimson wrapping-paper backdrop, the other has a row of white triangles representing, I think, the gipsy encampment. As George Bernard Shaw said of this opera, if you stop and think about it too hard, it crumbles into absurdity.

Open air opera tends to settle down once darkness falls. So here, the first act felt creaky but then matters improved. Soprano Katarina Jovanovic (Leonora) has a propensity to belt but she can certainly scale the necessary vocal heights. So too can Rafael Rojas, impressive as Manrico.

Anne Mason’s Azucena, though powerfully sung, could have even more madness as the weird gipsy. Stephen Gadd as Conte di Luna nicely combined eloquence and anger. The Anvil Chorus was stirring, as were all the big ensembles.

Conductor Brad Cohen drew sturdy playing from the City of London Sinfonia, but the music will thrill more when not competing with the elements.

Tonight, Donizetti’s La fille du regiment: top Cs and tarpaulins here we come.

Until 20 June, 0845 230 9769, box office@operahollandpark.com