The Opera Holland Park season continues with a new production by Martin Lloyd-Evans of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, strikingly prefaced not by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, its traditional companion piece, but with a revival of John Wilkie’s 2019 staging of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna. Both works deal with sexual jealousy, though they’re poles apart in aim and tone. Pagliacci famously deals with an actor losing his grip on reality when confronted with evidence of his wife’s affair. Susanna’s secret (“segreto”), in Wolf-Ferrari’s barbed 1909 comedy, is that she smokes while her husband, Gil, is out at his club. He, however, comes to assume from the smell of tobacco in their flat that she has taken a lover behind his back.
Wilkie’s staging, updating the opera to the early 1930s, has an art deco elegance and wit, and feels at times almost like a Noël Coward play set to music. Clare Presland and Richard Burkhard, both fine singer-actors, play Susanna and Gil with bags of style, though Presland – recently recovered from illness, it was announced – had a couple of moments of strain on opening night. Their spats and reconciliations are overseen with knowing irony by their put upon-servant Sante (John Savournin), while in the pit John Andrews, excellent as always, does wonders with an over eclectic score that nods to everyone from Mozart to Debussy, with Bellini and Verdi in between.
Pagliacci, meanwhile, is for the most part a thing of immense power, helped immeasurably by outstanding central performances from David Butt Philip, in his role debut as Canio, and Alison Langer as Nedda. Lloyd-Evans transposes the opera to the 1940s, but also reminds us, often unsparingly, that the narrative, dealing with a woman’s murder by an abusive partner, is one with which we have become sickeningly familiar. It takes a few moments to establish momentum: Tonio (Robert Hayward) singing the Prologue to an onstage audience rather than to us, strikes a slightly false note. But Lloyd-Evans’s insights eventually become startling and the staging soon exerts a vice-like grip.
Handsome Silvio (Harry Thatcher) is dangerously manipulative rather than sincere, and Tonio, like Canio, is also clearly not always acting in the predatory way he treats Nedda during the play within the opera. The last 20 minutes or so are really uncomfortable to get through, as they should be. Butt Philip, meanwhile, sounds magnificent, his phrasing eloquent, his high notes ringing with glorious ease. Langer, exquisite in Stridono Lassù, confronts him with furious intensity later on when he pushes her beyond breaking point. Hayward is violently sinister, Thatcher attractive if vapid, and conductor Francesco Cilluffo drives the score relentlessly forward. It is played with fiery detail by the City of London Sinfonia, and the choral singing is superb.
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