More than 60% of women murdered in this country die at the hands of a current or former partner, and one in four women in the UK will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. Stark figures that audience members should remember if they are tempted to shrink from Opera Holland Park’s visceral portrayal of male rage in its new production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
Brutal Canio leads a broken-down theatre troupe in struggling postwar southern Italy. While outwardly the jovial clown, he can switch in a second into a violent, controlling brute. He suspects correctly that his wife, Nedda, is having an affair and wants to leave him, something his wild jealousy will not allow. Their desperate situation spills over into the pathetic little comedy that they perform, where fiction and reality collide, leading to a shockingly violent conclusion.
Brilliant tenor David Butt Philip excels as Canio, wild-eyed and desperate, cruel and vindictive, his portrayal leaving no room for sympathy. Even in his magnificently sung, self-pitying Vesti la giubba, we cannot feel sorry for this monster. But it’s such an overwhelming performance, it throws a shadow over the other principals, unbalancing the whole. Alison Langer is a very sympathetic Nedda, Robert Hayward repellent as Tonio, Zwakele Tshabalala sleek as Beppe and Harry Thatcher strong as the lover Silvio – but each seem diminished when alongside Butt Philip.
There’s fine work from the chorus, and the City of London Sinfonia are on top form under the spirited conducting of Francesco Cilluffo. Martin Lloyd-Evans’s admirably clear direction leaves no room for sentiment: violence against women is as much a scourge today as when this piece was first performed in 1892.
The evening opens with a complete contrast, the welcome revival of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s one-act Il segretto di Susanna, first seen at OHP in 2019 in John Wilkie’s hilarious production. Jealousy is also the theme here, but this time it’s ridiculous, as Count Gil (the irrepressible Richard Burkhard) suspects his new wife, Susanna (Clare Presland), of infidelity because he smells cigarette smoke in their luxurious apartment. The exquisite comic timing of John Savournin, in the silent role of the servant Sante, is a joy to behold as he tries to prevent the count discovering that the secret smoker is Susanna herself. There’s equal wit coming from the pit, as Wolf-Ferrari’s score sparkles with references to Mozart, Debussy and Strauss, deftly handled by conductor John Andrews.
Schubert’s wonderfully expressive song cycle Winterreise never ceases to inspire new interpretations and adaptations. Earlier this year, for example, tenor Allan Clayton appeared in a large-scale dramatisation with Aurora Orchestra; last autumn, soprano Juliane Banse both sang and danced it at the Oxford International Song festival, and five years back, bass Matthew Rose sat on a barstool next to a piano and poured his heart out in a dimly lit Pizza Express. Now we have another reimagining: Spring Snow, a striking fusion of Schubert and Japanese kabuki theatre, given its world premiere last week in North Yorkshire at the innovative and ever-expanding Ryedale festival.
A collaboration between the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, pianist Julius Drake, actor-dancer Suleiman Suleiman and shamisen player Hibiki Ichikawa has created a gripping piece of cross-cultural music theatre of astonishing power, drawing on the undoubted parallels between Schubert’s lost wanderer and kabuki’s preoccupation with the trials of love and grief.
Their researches uncovered Yasuna, a kabuki play from 1818 that shares many of the themes of Wilhelm Müller’s poetry of lost love, so evocatively set by Schubert. The drama unfolded on a stage adorned merely with a single red and gold kimono. The plangent strings of Ichikawa’s shamisen cut through the air like a knife, while Suleiman danced in stylised gestures and Barron sang haiku in Japanese. Almost imperceptibly, Ichikawa passed the musical baton to Drake, and the mellow opening bars of Gute Nacht, the first song in the Winterreise cycle, emerged as if in a dream.
At once we were transfixed by Barron’s magnetic desolation. As the (incomplete) cycle progressed, she sang with increasing conviction, tears flowing; her grief, expressed so boldly in song, mirrored by Suleiman in dance. As the hero of Yasuna, he is consumed by the loss of his love Sakaki, driven to suicide by her wicked stepmother.
On an emotional level, this pairing made complete sense. Musically, it was less successful, the tiny similarities in rhythm and melody between the two styles not substantial enough to build a totally convincing cultural bridge. As a display of daring artistic imagination, it could hardly be bettered.
The North Yorkshire church of St Peter and St Paul, Pickering, is home to one of the most dramatic sets of medieval wall paintings in Britain, vividly created in about 1450. In a continuous newsreel, Saint George slays his dragon, Salome dances, Saint Edmund is martyred, Christ is crucified. Dominating one scene is a massive dragon’s mouth, representing the jaws of hell.
Exciting pianist Giorgi Gigashvili drove his audience straight down into those demonic depths in his incandescent reading of Prokofiev’s Sonata No 7 in B flat, an angry, notoriously challenging wartime piece from 1942 requiring technical brilliance, particularly in its frightening last movement, where Gigashvili made the menacing rising minor third figure in the left hand feel like a flaring toothache.
He’s a fascinating performer, starting out as a pop singer and winning The Voice in his native Georgia when only 13. Martha Argerich spotted his promise as a pianist, and now he is a BBC New Generation artist. In his carefully shaped festival programme, he caressed Brahms’s Three Intermezzi Op 117 and Ravel’s ecstatic Sonatine with great finesse, but the moments of sheer violence will linger longest, particularly the tumultuous Postlude by Georgian-Israeli Josef Bardanashvili, a headlong race towards catastrophe. Listen on BBC Sounds from 23 September, but wear a tin hat.
Star ratings (out of five)
Il segreto di Susanna ★★★★★
Pagliacci ★★★★
Spring Snow ★★★★
Giorgi Gigashvili ★★★★★
• Il segreto di Susanna/Pagliacci are at Opera Holland Park, London, until 3 August
