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Olivia Boen and Tom Mole in Susanna’s Secret, part of Guildhall School’s Opera Triple Bill.
Olivia Boen and Tom Mole in Susanna’s Secret, part of Guildhall School’s Opera Triple Bill. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic
Olivia Boen and Tom Mole in Susanna’s Secret, part of Guildhall School’s Opera Triple Bill. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic

Opera Triple Bill: Wolf-Ferrari, Mascagni, Donizetti review – sex, violence and serious talent

This article is more than 3 years old

Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, live stream
Three Florentine women have their moment in this stylish showcase of future opera stars

Three one-act operas, three women: one who beats up her docile husband; one a prostitute who dreams of unsullied love; one whose secret, how bad can it get, is that she smokes. The art form has never shied from taxing subjects. In a stylish triple bill, Guildhall School of Music and Drama has made Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna (Susanna’s Secret), Mascagni’s Zanetto and Donizetti’s Rita (Two Men and a Woman), each set in Florence, speak to a contemporary audience.

Conducted by Dominic Wheeler, directed by Stephen Medcalf and involving small casts, a sizable orchestra and a full production team – I counted nearly a hundred names – this classy evening of sex and violence ingeniously negotiates the limits of social distancing. A double cast shares the four livestreamed performances (last one 9 November, 7pm, free).

In Susanna’s Secret, two promising performers – soprano Olivia Boen and baritone Tom Mole, both full of stage courage – played up the folly of a jealous husband presuming his innocent but bored wife has a lover. Soprano Ella de Jongh and, in the title role, mezzo-soprano Jessica Ouston captured the yearning fantasy of Zanetto, a mournful and unsatisfactory piece that nonetheless touches the heart. It also makes immense vocal demands, well met by both.

Thando Mjandana and Laura Lolita Perešivana in Rita. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic

Donizetti’s Rita is a woman with two husbands: the former, violent, the current downtrodden. Annoyingly Husband No 1, assumed dead, turns out to be alive. This always insightful composer manages to make humour out of complex, uneasy human truths. Soprano Laura Lolita Perešivana showed pizzazz as the confused wife, with tenor Thando Mjandana and baritone Chuma Sijeqa beguiling as her decidedly unbeguiling menfolk.

A few ensemble problems in the Donizetti aside, the orchestra played with energy and dedication; so much talent, and so much hope for opera in its ever darkening hour.

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