Tuesday evening was the first night of Opera Holland Park’s season. They put on Iris, a rarely performed opera by Pietro Mascagni – who is better known for Cavalleria Rusticana.
No royalty that I could see but Mascagni’s grand-daughter and great-grand-daughters were present. They were not acknowledged by the audience, unlike Joan Sutherland who came to see her husband conduct some years ago and received a standing ovation when she returned to her seat after the interval.
The eponymous Iris is an under-age Japanese girl who lives quietly at home with her blind father. She is abducted to a brothel but rebuffs the blandishments of her rich seducer. Spoiler alert; her father mistakenly thinks she went willingly and disowns her. She commits suicide. A pretty awful tale but Mascagni’s music makes it less sordid than it really is.
A feature of Opera Holland Park is that the orchestra ( the excellent City of London Sinfonia) are clearly visible in front of the stage. The score for Iris demands what looked to me like fourteen dinner gongs of varying sizes. The correct name for them is tam-tams but they look as near as damn it like gongs. If you need to adjust the timbre of your tam-tam, just apply plasticine – at least that’s what the percussionist told us on Tuesday.
A few other operas require special instruments. Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has a glass harmonica in the mad scene and Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites has the sound of the guillotine’s descending blade written into the score. You may be interested in how this effect is achieved.
The Holland Park season continues until mid-August. It really is a good night out and significantly cheaper and easier to get to than the three Gs: Glyndebourne, Garsington and Grange Park.