A mix of melodrama & sentiment, yet unashamedly enjoyable: Opera Holland Park open the season in terrific form with Puccini’s La fancuilla del West

Puccini: La fanciulla de West – José de Eça, Robert Hayward – Opera Holland Park, 2026 (Photo: Craig Fuller)

Puccini: La fanciulla del West; Amanda Echalaz, José de Eça, Robert Hayward, Zwakele Tshabalala, Alaric Green, Aidan Edwards, Blaise Malaba, director: Martin Lloyd Duncan, City of London Sinfonia, conductor: Matthew Kofi Waldren; Opera Holland Park
Reviewed 26 May 2026

With two leads who soar and vivid sense of ensemble, Opera Holland Park launches its 30th season with a production that should win plenty of hearts and minds for Puccini’s surprisingly sophisticated Wild West opera

Puccini’s 1910 opera La fanciulla del West premiered at the Met in New York to great acclaim but failed to make a regular place for itself in the opera house. When the Met mounted a new production in 1961 it was the first time the company had performed the work in 30 years. Covent Garden’s 1977 production, originally intended for the 1976 American Centennial celebrations, featured Carol Neblett and Placido Domingo and the production’s subsequent filming made its very influential. This production was a regular at Covent Garden until 2008. Since then both Opera North and English National Opera have produced the work (both in 2014). Opera North revived their production in 2021, but the work has never returned to the London Coliseum alas. 

Opera Holland Park had productions in 2004 and 2014, with Grange Park Opera producing it in 2008 and 2016 [see my review]. When I attended Opera Holland Park’s 2014 performance I commented on how many people had not seen the opera before, and the situation has hardly changed.

It remains a challenging work to produce because the basic premise is so specific, yet somewhat resistant to naturalism. When Richard Jones directed it for English National Opera in 2014 [see my review] he talked about not tinkering with the opera’s complex mechanism. It is not a piece that responds well to creative dissonance, so the 1950s Las Vegas casino setting for Stephen Barlow’s production at Opera Holland Park 2014 was less successful [see my review].

Puccini: La fanciulla de West – Amanda Echalaz, José de Eça – Opera Holland Park, 2026 (Photo: Craig Fuller)

Yet the opera has oddities which mitigate against complete naturalism. The work opens with the men rushing into the Polka saloon, the language is Italian, yet there are odd awkward English phrases and the card game that the men are playing is Faro! It requires you to surrender to this world. For all their rough exterior, these characters have a strong vein of sentimentality and early on in Act One, Jake Wallace’s aria keys into this as well as providing the source material and connective tissue for a lot of the opera.

Watching Opera Holland Park’s new production where director Martin Lloyd-Evans and designer Anna Reid have chosen to set the work in 1849 as intended, I was struck by how much Puccini and his librettists, Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini, prefigure that combination of the projection of robust manhood with melodrama and sentimentality that characterises many of the mid-20th Westerns from Hollywood. And the ending with Minnie and Dick walking off into the distance is pure Hollywood too. Except, of course, Puccini and his librettists took this from Belasco’s original play where the stage pictures conjured much. [Incidentally there is a 1938 film based on Belasco’s play with songs by Sigmund Romberg!]

Opera Holland Park opened its 2026 season with Puccini’s La fanciulla del West on Tuesday 26 May 2026 directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans and conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren with City of London Sinfonia in the pit. Designs were by Anna Reid, lighting by Jamie Platt, choreography by Roisin Whelan. Amanda Echalaz was Minnie, Robert Hayward was Jack Rance, José de Eça was Dick Johnson, Zwakele Tshabalala was Nick, Alaric Green was Ashby, Aidan Edwards was Sonora. Freddie Tong and Kezia Bienek were Billy Jackrabbit and Wowkle, Blaise Malaba was Jake Wallace, Ronald Nairne was Jose Castro.

Puccini: La fanciulla de West – Opera Holland Park, 2026 (Photo: Craig Fuller)

The seven other named miners were played by members of the Opera Holland Park Chorus – Jamie Formoy, Joe Ashmore, Michael Temporal Darell, Dominick Felix, Hugh Beckwith, Matthew Duncan, Samuel Snowden – whilst another chorus member, Robert Jenkins play the Pony Express rider.

The production made admirable use of the whole Opera Holland Park stage whilst Anna Reid’s sets had an admirable stripped back quality to them. The backdrop was simple wood, hung with adverts in Act One, and the bar inhabited the fore-stage (so that the 24-strong chorus were crammed in). Minnie’ cabin was exactly that, sitting at the centre of the main stage. Then for the scene change to Act Three, a white sheet was thrown over the cabin and the action moved to the fore-stage until the hanging when the outer wall of Minnie’s cabin was recycled for the hanging. A rather imaginative move.

The staging leaned into the work’s theatricality. Yes, the miners all looked shabby and careworn with slightly theatrical ‘dirt’ on their faces but José de Eça’s dapper Dick Johnson was band-box trim and fresh, clearly wherever he had been hiding had good bathing facilities. And the group scenes in Act One had moments where the action froze giving one person the focus.

Amanda Echalaz made a captivating and commanding Minnie, creating a believable yet charismatic character. This was a woman who was definitely capable of wielding a gun, yet had an innate belief in the Bible too. There was a touching unworldliness allied to the way she managed the unruly miners. Echalaz gave her a slightly edgy quality, you sensed that underneath the striking exterior something worked away. And there were times when she reminded me more of Eileen Atkins than the gun-toting heroine of a Western. Yet Echalaz has the spinto edge to make the role work. It is a big, tiring role yet her duet with de Eça at the very end as the two walk off into the sunset was glorious. The voice does have something of an edge to it, and impassioned climaxes could be somewhat strident but this rarely felt out of character and Echalaz made Minnie’s more intimate moments rather touching.

It helped that in José de Eça you had a leading man who had the right combination of swagger and charm. De Eça made a youthful Dick Johnson, still believably passionate. Yet there was a thrilling edge to his voice, so that he captured the sound quality of this character. Neither Minnie nor Dick Johnson have excerptable arias as such, instead they need to be able to soar over Puccini’s richly inventive, busy and often loud score. De Eça did this magnificently, and captured our attention without ever seeming to scream ‘famous tenor’. Dick Johnson is the least active of heroes, we see him charming Minnie at the end of Act One and in Act Two, but all his heroics take place off-stage. Here de Eça and Echalaz created a believable intimacy on the Opera Holland Park stage so that the swift progress of their relationship was believable and captivating.

Puccini: La fanciulla de West – Amanda Echalaz, Robert Hayward, José de Eça – Opera Holland Park, 2026 (Photo: Craig Fuller)

By contrast Robert Hayward’s Jack Rance was older and world-weary, you felt his approach to Minnie was very much the last throw of the dice. Hayward brought a slightly raddled quality to the character, wary and weary. He was the first on stage at the very beginning but by Act Three he was deep in a bottle. Yet when roused, Hayward made this Jack Rance a thing of fury. You believed his rough wooing of Minnie in Act One and understood that in the absence of Dick Johnson, Minnie might have settled for him. Their card game in Act Two was a thing of wonder with both Hayward and Echalaz bringing out the characters’ fury and desperation, and Minnie’s cheating was a gloriously hammy moment.

The challenge of the opera, and perhaps one of the reasons for its absence from regular performance, is the reliance on a raft of smaller roles, some effectively cameos. There are 18 named roles and all are important.

Zwakele Tschabalala made a sparky Nick. This is a role I very much associate with Francis Egerton who was Nick in Piero Faggioni’s production at Covent Garden in 1977 and still behind the same bar in 2005! Tschabalala did not perhaps make Nick quite as central to the opera as he can be, but Tschabalala brought an engagingly youthful element to the role. Aidan Edwards made an imposing Sonora. He was very much the linchpin of the miners, and essential to the manoeuvres in Act Three. Edwards had the physical presence and swagger for the role yet also made Sonora one of the boys. Alaric Green’s Ashby the Wells Fargo agent had a rather rubicund quality to him, making the character less forbidding than some. Jake Wallace is a tiny role, a minstrel who sings then disappears. Yet Wallace’s aria of longing ‘Che faranno i vecchi miei’ is one of the opera’s most excerptable moments and provides material for much of the rest of the piece’s connective tissue. The remaining miners, seven named roles, were all well taken, each making the most of their moment yet remaining part of the whole.

Kezia Bienek and Freddie Tong made strong cameos as Minnie’s servants. These are presumed Native Americans, but wisely the production played this down. Both came over as fierce and angry. Ronald Nairne was the captured bandit and Robert Jenkins the Pony Express Rider.

The chorus plays a big role in Acts One and Three, creating a character in its own right. The Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master Dominic Ellis-Peckham) was on terrific form. You sensed the amount of detailed work that had gone into the staging, this is the chorus as a group of characters rather than a monolithic block. The moment in Act One, when the chorus takes up Jake Wallace’s aria was moving indeed as was their Act Three reprise of this material bidding farewell to Minnie. Such moments have to be embraced, they are part of the vein of sentimentality running through the piece. There as no irony here, just gorgeous choral tone.

Puccini writes for a substantial orchestra (triple woodwind and plenty of brass). Here City of London Sinfonia played a reduced orchestration which used double woodwind and brass with four percussion and timpani, harp, guitar and celeste. In Matthew Kofi Waldren’s hands the results were vivid and impassioned. He brought out the rich detail of Puccini’s score allied to a lovely flexibility of phrasing. As in much of Puccini, the use of thematic material told us what to think and in many places the orchestral playing created mini-tone poems. Never once did you feel the lack of the full orchestration and whilst Waldren ensured that the orchestra was a dominant partner in proceedings they never overwhelmed.

Puccini: La fanciulla de West – José de Eça, Amanda Echalaz – Opera Holland Park, 2026 (Photo: Craig Fuller)

This was one of those performances that drew you in and had you hooked. Martin Lloyd Duncan, Matthew Kofi Waldren and their cast all believed in the opera and gave it to us, with its mix of melodrama and sentiment in a way that was unashamedly spellbinding yet also paid homage to the way Puccini was deliberately setting out on pastures new in the opera.