Puccini's California gold-rush opera is a terrific score, a pivotal work in his career, and seems at last to be getting the attention it deserves. This season-opening new production in Holland Park is the second of three in the UK this year. No lover of Puccini's music should miss seeing at least one of them.
The chief satisfaction of this Fanciulla is the conducting of Stuart Stratford and the increasingly confident playing of the City of London Sinfonia in the pit. Stratford had taken a rather cautious view of the opening act, but in the second and third acts he gripped the score with enormous dramatic confidence, letting the phrasing ebb and flow before ratcheting up the musical tension for the climaxes of one of Puccini's most through-composed operas. This was a really impressive effort.
With the orchestra on a roll, the response on stage was palpable. Both Susannah Glanville as the glamorous good girl, Minnie, and Jeff Gwaltney as the salvation-seeking outlaw, Dick Johnson, grew into their roles, opening up vocally in the second half after unexceptional starts – though Glanville's first entrance is a cracker and Gwaltney is a tenor talent to take note of. It helped that both have fine stage presence, a quality that the more enigmatic and psychologically interesting Sheriff Rance lacked in Simon Thorpe's smoothly sung characterisation.
There is no obvious gain, other than novelty, from Stephen Barlow's decision to update the opera by a century from its wild-west setting to the atomic testing grounds of the Nevada desert in the Eisenhower era. The blinding explosion at the start certainly echoes the violence of Puccini's opening bars, while Minnie's arrival on a motorbike to rescue Johnson before boarding a TWA flight into the happily ever after, adds wit to the opera's sentimental ending. But the updating is not followed through with conviction, and in the erotically charged second act, Barlow just lets Puccini get on with it, which is probably why it works so well.
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