Opera Holland Park’s new production of Pagliacci this season is paired, not with its usual partner Cavalleria rusticana, but with a contrastingly comic take on the theme of suspicion and jealousy, Wolf-Ferrari’s Susanna’s Secret (a revival of John Wilkie’s production from 2019). Her guilty pleasure of smoking in this opera – its smell giving cause for her husband’s fears about her fidelity – is all the more a delightfully witty theme in this opening performance, coming on the same day as the King’s speech at the opening of Parliament in which the Government proposed legislation to phase out smoking altogether. Presumably the activity will become as improper again as it was (at least for women, socially) when the opera was premiered in 1909.
The setting presents an air of domestic decorum around the 1920s, where the cigarette smoke may hang indelicately around the furniture or vases of flowers. John Savournin dutifully and resourcefully fusses around in the silent role of Sante the servant, Susanna’s partner in crime. Clare Presland and Richard Burkhard play up the libretto’s drollery so that there is sincere forgiveness and reconciliation at the end. Where he sings with a conversational facility, she has a more sustained lyricism, growing into, perhaps, a reedy defensiveness. John Andrews conducts a light-footed account of the music with the City of London Sinfonia that doesn’t hurry. Indeed, although a lot of subtle orchestral detail comes out in a score that could be compared with one by Richard Strauss, leavened by Italian sunshine and air, there could be more ebullience and sparkle.
Martin Lloyd-Evans brings Pagliacci forwards to the era around the end of World War Two – Silvio sports a corporal’s uniform, and graffiti slogans on the walls appear to reference the choice between monarchy and a republic, that was the question put to the Italian population in a referendum in 1946 (and don’t we just know what simmering strife and social tensions a national referendum causes….). Life continues much the same for Canio’s touring theatre company in the south country, however, putting on their version of the ever-popular harlequinade, and life comes to imitate art.
Long before cultural critics analysed the concept of metatheatre, Pagliacci was one work which grippingly explored the blurring of boundaries between theatre and reality, and framed its principal plot within a surrounding narrative or context. Lloyd-Evans maps that out astutely in his production. The orchestra is already a part of the action in its usual setting at the Holland Park auditorium, in the midst of a stage that comes forwards around the players. But the director extends the idea further as the commedia dell’arte play within Act Two of Leoncavallo’s opera completely reverses our perspective on the drama that unfolds: since the makeshift stage for that is put at the front, before us, we sit as though we are at the back of that stage; but from the perspective of the villagers at the back of the auditorium’s main stage, the whole arrangement is correct for them, viewing the play’s own smaller stage with the orchestra in between, just as in a theatrical performance. Meanwhile, we see Tonio close to us, as though in the wings of the play’s stage, outwardly preparing to take the role of the clown, but inwardly seething with fury at his wife’s betrayal which he will allow to break out in murderous violence during the performance. That draws attention to his increasingly agitated stated of mind, enhanced here by deliberately alluding to the opera’s setting on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, with Canio having a vision of Nedda at the opening of Act Two, when she appears up amongst us, bathed in light, as though transfigured into a pure, idealised woman.
It’s solid, earthy passions that are expressed in the performance however, under Francesco Cilluffo’s alert and galvanising conducting. David Butt Philip brings urgent, uneasy feeling from the start, implying Canio’s troubled, obsessive character, so that his vigorous and hefty delivery of ‘Vesti la giubba’ doesn’t come from nowhere. Alison Langer is a forthright but lustrous Nedda, especially in a brilliant account of her monologue in Act One that praises the freedom of the birds. Zwakele Tshabalala projects a fervent melodiousness as Beppe when performing Arlecchino’s song in the play to Nedda’s Columbina. Robert Hayward imbues the part of Tonio with gravity, especially in the Prologue which provides the framing device for the whole drama that follows, explaining the opera’s dramaturgical procedure with a certain wry humour. Harry Thatcher is enthusiastic as Silvio, Nedda’s real-life paramour, but his enunciation of the words (and consequently the musical notes) is over-emphasised and so sounds laboured.
Just as Leoncavallo skilfully dissects the magic of operatic stagecraft in this work, performance and production come together here to show to new and old audiences alike why the opera remains such a luridly fascinating staple of the repertoire.
Further performances to August 3
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