Opera Holland Park brings its current season to a close with a new production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, directed by Rodula Gaitanou and conducted by Peter Robinson. Musically, it’s exceptionally strong, though there are moments of theatrical unevenness.
Gaitanou updates the work to the 1870s. The haunted rococo St Petersburg of Tchaikovsky’s imaginings has become the morally hypocritical city of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, where we first see high society assembling in a posh-looking cafe, as Peter Wedd’s Herman and his army cronies look on and gossip. Rosalind Plowright’s decrepit Countess, surrounded by obsequious religious types, has buried her past and her conscience beneath an assumed veneer of sanctimony. Dostoevskyan riff-raff, meanwhile, lurk on the banks of the Winter canal, where Natalya Romaniw’s Liza meets Herman for their last, tragic encounter.
Gaitanou’s treatment of the supernatural elements, real or imagined, is at times less assured. There are some wonderful moments early on, where sudden tricks of light make Herman’s social world look sinister and grotesque, and we become acutely aware of the proximity of reality and nightmare in his mind. His scene with the Countess is deeply unnerving, as she embraces and paws him, briefly imagining him to be a former lover who has returned. When we reach act three, however, things tip towards melodrama. Gaitanou unwisely brings the Countess’s funeral on stage, and the sight of Plowright, rising vampire-like from her coffin, seriously blunts the impact of the appearance of her ghost in Herman’s barracks, minutes later.
It’s all superbly sung and acted. Despite a couple of effortful high notes, Wedd is entirely convincing as a man whose mind is slowly coming apart in the grip of obsession. He looks good, too, and we fully understand why Romaniw’s shy, lonely Liza is so fatally attracted to this “fallen angel”, as she puts it, who has strayed into her orbit. The role pushes her to her limits, but her tone is beautiful and her singing blazingly intense.
Plowright, meanwhile, makes a very fine Countess. We sense the woman’s former beauty beneath the effects of time and age, her implacable will and terror of mortality. It’s a compelling performance.
The smaller roles are cast from strength. Grant Doyle is the stiff-backed Yeletsky, quietly sincere in his expressions of affection for Liza. Richard Burkhard’s Tomsky is witty, impish and snide, while Simon Wilding and Aled Hall make a fine double act as Surin and Chekalinsky, egging Herman on with indecent relish, and going in for a bravado display of Cossack dancing in the gambling-house scene. Robinson conducts with considerable drive and energy, nicely judging the score’s neurotic edge, though he could hold back a bit in places – the start of the second scene of act one, for instance. It’s finely played by the City of London Sinfonia, though the work ideally needs a larger body of strings than the Holland Park pit can accommodate. The choral singing is outstanding.
Opera Holland Park, London, until 13 August. Box office: 0300 999 1000.
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