Opera reviews: Iris, Eugene Onegin and L’Italiana In Algeri
IT seems that opera composers like their sopranos to suffer.
None is more abused than the heroine of Iris, Pietro Mascagni’s rarely performed tragedy about an innocent Japanese girl abducted into a brothel and driven to commit suicide. Premiered in 1898, six years before Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, it has no love interest to disguise the repellent tale of sex trafficking.
Iris is taken from the home of her blind father, imprisoned in a brothel in the red light district of Tokyo and drugged with opium. She spurns the rich young man who had arranged for her kidnapping. When he tires of being rejected, he leaves her to be sold to the highest bidder. Her father, assuming she had willingly deserted him to work as a prostitute, curses her, and she kills herself from shame. The dying girl is left in an open sewer, where rag pickers loot the jewellery from her body.
Mascagni wrote 15 operas, of which his Cavalleria Rusticana is the best known. The subjects were all highly dramatic, even lurid, accompanied by a luscious score. This is what makes Iris so disturbing, as Mascagni’s sensual music and librettist Luigi Illica’s flowery libretto seem to gloat on the subject matter.
Director Olivia Fuchs emphasises Iris’s youth in the rag doll that she clutches to her chest and the entrapment is underlined by Sutra Gilmour’s design of lotus blossoms and cages. Mark Jonathan’s lighting conjures up the gaudy theatricals that entice Iris into danger. Anne Sophie Duprels gives a searing performance in the title role, and American tenor Noah Stewart is in terrific voice as the predatory Osaka, aided by James Cleverton’s sinister pimp Kyoto.
The City of London Sinfonia under Stuart Stratford brings out the richness of the score, and Opera Holland Park Chorus give their all in the glorious hymn to the sun, life, and love – supposedly a consolation to the dying Iris.
Garsington Opera opened its sixth season at the Wormsley Estate to a production of Eugene Onegin by Douglas Boyd as conductor and Michael Boyd as director. Roderick Williams’s Onegin is seen as a socially awkward outsider rather than a cold-hearted snob. He is embarrassed rather than scornful of Tatyana’s passionate love letter as he tries to explain gently he is not the man for her.
Natalya Romaniw is ideally cast as Tatyana. Winner of the 2012 Kathleen Ferrier Awards, she has a rich warm soprano, bringing depths of emotion to the letter scene when she ill-advisedly pours out her heart on paper. This contrasts with her calm assurance when she encounters Onegin at a St Petersburg ball after her marriage to Prince Gremin (Brindley Sherratt).
Ukrainian Oleksiy Palchykov, making his British operatic debut as Lensky, the friend Onegin kills in a duel after a drunken quarrel, is a strikingly fine tenor. Tom Piper’s designs are spare but effective, and the St Petersburg ballroom scene of mirrored walls is stunning. Garsington builds on its successful first year working with Opera For All by scheduling free screenings of Eugene Onegin in rural coastal areas including Skegness, Ramsgate, Burnham-on-sea, and Grimsby. Log on to garsingtonopera.org/operaforall.
VERDICT: 4/5
Rossini was 21 when he wrote L’Italiana In Algeri (The Italian Girl In Algiers). It was an instant success, in its reverse escape plot that has the heroine Isabella rescuing her man, Lindoro, from slavery to the Bey of Algiers.
As feisty Isabella, Ezgi Kutlu attacks her coloratura arias with relish, and bass Quirijn de Lang’s Bey Mustafa deals adeptly with the patter songs. Mary Bevan as the Bey’s mistreated wife Elvira receives sisterly encouragement from Isabella to stand up to her despotic husband. By the second act, though, Rossini has run out of steam, and the opera lapses into frantic farce.
VERDICT: 3/5
Mascagni’s Iris at Opera Holland Park (Tickets: 0300 999 1000/operahollandpark.com; £45-£70)
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin
Rossini’s L’Italiana In Algeri by Garsington Opera at Wormsley(Tickets: 01865 361636/garsingtonopera.org; £135-£165)
