Zazà review – Leoncavallo's tale of deceit saddens, startles and stirs

The final offering in Opera Holland Park’s current season is a new staging by Marie Lambert of Zazà, Ruggero Leoncavallo’s bittersweet 1900 exploration of the affair between a chanteuse in a provincial French music hall and an attractive if hypocritical Parisian businessman, who conceals his marriage from her. Leoncavallo thought it a finer score than his more familiar Pagliacci, and it does reveal a subtler range of psychological insight. Yet there are flaws of structure and shape. There is a brilliant exposition, worthy of Zola, in which the protagonists gradually emerge from an exactingly detailed depiction of music hall life. The second of the opera’s four acts, however, lacks the tautness of the rest and it’s not until we’re past the halfway mark that the opera exerts a consistent grip.

A similar sense of slow burn characterises Lambert’s production. Using the whole width of the Holland Park stage, her treatment of the opening scene – in which the relationship between Anne Sophie Duprels’s Zazà and Joel Montero’s Milio is but one of several erotic backstage encounters – occasionally lacks focus. But as Milio’s duplicitous nature is gradually revealed, the drama is subjected to a process of increasingly drastic simplification until the lovers’ painful final meeting takes place on a bare stage, where neither can hide anything from the other.

Lambert adds a gloss about the relationship between artistry and experience. With her frizzy mane of hair, Duprels resembles the young Colette, whose writing was informed by her own work in music halls. When Milio has finally gone, stage hands arrive to dress her as Puccini’s tragic Madame Butterfly – another woman trapped in a relationship with an indefensible man, and a role originally written for the soprano Rosina Storchio, who had created Zazà four years previously.

Though her voice can turn shrill in its upper registers, Duprels gives a performance of such emotional honesty and dramatic integrity that it tears you in two. Montero sounds good, if a bit too insistently full throttle: he’s very scary at the close, as moral cowardice turns horribly to abuse. Richard Burkhard makes an outstanding Cascart, Zazà’s worldly wise if occasionally jealous ex, to whom Leoncavallo allots some of the best music in the score. Conductor Peter Robinson gets the tricky mix of glitz, sadness and sensuality exactly right.

• At Opera Holland Park, London, until 29 July. Box office: 0300-999 1000.