The Barber of Seville: No fuss, no frills – just a comic masterpiece, staged with heart-warming brio
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Sometimes it is fine for opera to be uncomplicated, sheerly enjoyable fun. Few composers understood that better than Rossini, and no one accomplished it better than him in his 1816 comic masterpiece The Barber of Seville, based on Beaumarchais’s famous play.
What Rossini achieves in his art-that-conceals-art is a piercing wit underpinned by a subtle and sophisticated musical language. It makes great demands on all its singers and players, yet must appear effortless, its dazzling coloratura not just empty display, but a demonstration of the singer’s depth of feeling.
In their first new production of this season, plucky Opera Holland Park have risen to the challenge with a solidly successful and hugely entertaining staging, which admirably brings forwards two graduates of its Young Artists scheme, the conductor Charlotte Corderoy and the director Cecilia Stinton. It is the conducting that most immediately grabs the attention, because Corderoy has an infectious rhythmic sense that lifts Rossini’s music across the barlines and lets it breathe, avoiding clumping downbeats without losing an ounce of spontaneity.
Her energetic leading of the slightly reduced City of London Sinfonia sustains the whole show and supports the singers deftly – even though on the stage platform at the front they cannot see her, and have to rely on a far-off grainy TV monitor for coordination. Still, in this theatre’s layout, with the stage running right round the orchestra, it makes far more sense for the comedy to be staged at the front as here in Act II, as scenes at the back tend to fade away.
Paul Grant makes an imposing, naively scheming Figaro – you would not want to be carelessly shaved by this barber – though he is stronger in the patter than in the decorations of his part. As the Count Almaviva who woos Rosina in his many disguises, and outwits her guardian Doctor Bartolo, Elgan Llŷr Thomas projects a clear, ringing voice rather too forcefully for comfort, but has huge fun especially as the mock singing teacher in act two, even getting to take over the conducting for a few bars.
Holland Park regular Stephen Gadd is an English dyspeptic gent well suited to the outbursts of the overweening Doctor Bartolo whose ambitions to marry his ward Rosina are thwarted, while there is stylish support from Jihoon Kim as a saintly Don Basilio, Jack Holton as Fiorello, and especially welcome here, the splendid Janis Kelly, a long-time feature of our operatic life, as put-upon servant Berta.
However, the undoubted star of the show is another Holland Park graduate, Heather Lowe, as Rosina: her versatile wide range captures both the lows and the highs of the part; she is a determined, dazzling individual who knows clearly what, and who, she wants. In Neil Irish’s effective sets, a bit of Arab-influenced Seville but with a colonial nod to Queen Victoria, Cecilia Stinton’s production has a few quirks (such as a chorus of clumsy policeman handcuffing each other) but no revolutionary new insights – just an effective telling of the taut story, with comedy that will surely tighten during the run.
On a breezy, blowy night in Holland Park’s theatre, which is covered but open to the elements, it all warmed the soul and provided huge enjoyment for the crowd.
Until June 21; operahollandpark.com
