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Adriana Lecouvreur
Emotion and poise … Adriana Lecouvreur at Opera Holland Park. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Emotion and poise … Adriana Lecouvreur at Opera Holland Park. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Adriana Lecouvreur review – perfumed Mediterranean Romanticism

This article is more than 9 years old
Opera Holland Park, London
There's a lack of on-stage chemistry in this updated retelling of Cilea's opera, but it's the music that merits attention

Francesco Cilea's 1902 opera has become more familiar at the world's glossiest opera houses since Angela Gheorghiu decided that the role of the actress Adriana Lecouvreur, the "humble handmaid of the creator", was a fitting vehicle. But Opera Holland Park, always minded towards Italian rarities, had already dusted off the work in 2002 – and now the company is giving it a second new staging.

It merits the attention, if only for the music: a swath of perfumed Mediterranean Romanticism, here conducted sympathetically by Manlio Benzi and sounding lovely as played by the City of London Sinfonia, even if the string tone is sometimes thin.

The real Adrienne Lecouvreur was an 18th-century stage animal whose greatest fan was Voltaire. The opera fictionalises events towards the end of her life into something bordering on the ridiculous. Martin Lloyd-Evans's production updates her story to the 1940s. Adriana's theatre company is full of wannabe starlets with their hair in victory rolls, and her dressing room is a Hollywood-style trailer. She makes her first entrance stepping out for a cigarette, and the violins' languidly curling music echoes the upward trails of smoke. What on earth Maurizio's political machinations are supposed to be in this timeline is anybody's guess, but Lloyd-Evans wisely doesn't try to delve deep: this opera's paper-thin dramaturgy doesn't leave room.

The diva in the title role is Cheryl Barker, who holds the stage and sings her two big arias with a balance of emotion and poise, though elsewhere she is not always in freshest voice. Peter Auty has all Maurizio's high notes, but his tone sounds constricted, and there is zero chemistry between him and his two lovers, the Princess de Bouillon, sung by a furiously fiery-sounding Tiziana Carraro, and Adriana herself. There is, thank goodness, one genuinely touching character – Michonnet, the loyal impresario whose love for Adriana is unrequited, and whose performance here by baritone Richard Burkhard is richly sung and quite beautifully judged.

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