Tag Archives: Matthew Waldren
Posted on 2 June 2017
Opera Holland Park aims to make opera more accessible, and by launching their 2017 season with Puccini’s light and fizzing Rondine they help do just that. Its lively melodies and Parisian sentimentality may lack the tragic depth of La Traviata or the drama of La Bohème, but if it’s dramatic punch you need, Katya Kabanova …
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Posted on 16 July 2015
This Delibes opera about the days of the Raj, when a British officer falls in love with the daughter of a Brahmin priest, expresses a late nineteenth and early twentieth century fascination with exotic locales — think Pearl Fishers and Madama Butterfly — and like Butterfly is based on a work by French novelist and …
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Posted on 15 June 2014
Rossini’s Barber is always fun, and Oliver Platt’s new production for Opera Holland Park gives it a nineteenth century London touch, complete with lamplighters, Bow Street Runners and a drunken sot who claims his shilling as if he were one of the street musicians. The designs by Neil Irish work very well in this context and I …
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Posted on 7 July 2012
Mascagni, friend of Puccini and composer of the hugely successful Cavalleria Rusticana, produced more than a dozen other operas. Cav was his second, and L’amico Fritz (OHP last year) the third. Now Opera Holland Park have produced a later one, Zanetto which, like Fritz, suffers from a very weak libretto. But it was gloriously sung by Janice Watson as the wealthy, celebrated, but lovelorn Silvia, and Patricia …
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