Rare Puccini at Holland Park Opera

Holland Park Opera – a useful venue for preparing one for the dramatic westward shift required by the Proms later in the month – has become a must-visit destination for lovers of obscurish verismo opera (previous confections have include Ponchielli's La Gioconda, Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre Re, Cilea's L'arlesiana and Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini – all done to a very high standard. And bravo to Investec for supporting this terrific venture in these straitened times). This year, the body count was reduced somewhat with a welcome airing for Puccini's "Viennese operetta" La Rondine – it falls between La fanciulla del West and Il trittico, his last completed opera(s) before the unfinished Turandot. Despite a handful of fine recordings (including the wonderful Gramophone Recording of the Year conducted by Antonio Pappano), it's never taken much of a hold on the repertoire. And charming though the Holland Part production is, it's not hard to understand why.

La Rondine suffers from Will and Grace syndrome – in other words, the secondary couple are just so much more interesting/better written for than the main pair. So despite a Magda with a strong voice complete with a lovely top, in the Australian Kate Ladner, once again it was the Prunier (Hal Cazalet) and Lisette (the delightful Hye Youn Lee) who engaged the interest and sympathy – and provided the most musical singing of the evening. And no opera with two important parts for tenors is likely to work – it's just too much for your average opera-going audience to get its head around. Seán Ruane was an ardent though not particularly interesting Ruggero.

Dramatically La Rondine is not especially engaging: basically it's La traviata in the age of penicillin with a splash of Die Fledermaus and La bohème thrown in for good measure in Act 2. A courtesan rekindles a youthful love, leaves her urbane 'keeper' but later decides to ditch her young lover and return to the man who made her life luxurious rather than just fun. All rather everyday and hardly enough to tear at the heart-strings. Against this the poet Prunier enjoys a dalliance with Magda's maid, the bubbly Lisette – and how much fun those two have!

Of course, being Puccini, there are some great numbers – the Prunier/Magda duet in Act 1, “Chi il bel sogno Doretta”, and the glorious Act 2 quartet with chorus which should really bring the curtain down, rather than being swiftly recycled for a close-of-act duet when the melody has lost all its novelty (though what a gorgeous number it is!). And here it was done well but the pacing of the act is all wrong...

Puccini makes extensive use of little motifs throughout the score, but the effect tends to give the impression of melodic paucity – which is actually unjust, because he could always spin out a glorious tune. And even the big numbers lack the built-in energy that drives the drama forward, as any number of great Puccini arias do elsewhere – just think of “Vissi d’arte” or “Nessun dorma” and how they simply crackle with life.

Tom Hawkes’s production, in sets by Peter Rice, updates it to Art Deco Paris (so a shift of about 80 years) and, cleverly, a Deco-esque metal screen is the constant throughout the three acts – it works as the wall of Magda’s house, part of the al fresco setting at Bullier’s restaurant in the middle act and as a seaside espanade in the last. The updating also helped explain the maid Lisette’s rather forward attitude to her boss and her friends. (I’m not sure though that champagne was drunk from flutes back in the 1930s, surely a coupe was the norm.) The costumes were attractive though poor Magda seemed to draw the short straw in the outer acts with a slightly medieval-looking velvet number in Act 1 and a very nun-like white creation at the end.

Despite the rain thundering down on the semi-permanent tent that houses both stage and audience, the City of London Sinfonia projected well for Peter Selwyn though these verismo scores do need a bit more body to the sound – and I always love the doleful sound of the peacocks that punctuates these evenings in the park.