The Opera Holland Park season continues with a new production by Martin Lloyd-Evans of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, strikingly prefaced not by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, its traditional companion piece, but with a revival of John Wilkie’s 2019 staging of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna. Both works deal with sexual jealousy, though they’re poles apart in aim and tone. Pagliacci famously deals with an actor losing his grip on reality when confronted with evidence of his wife’s affair. Susanna’s secret (“segreto”), in Wolf-Ferrari’s barbed 1909 comedy, is that she smokes while her husband, Gil, is out at his club. He, however, comes to assume from the smell of tobacco in their flat that she has taken a lover behind his back.
Wilkie’s staging, updating the opera to the early 1930s, has an art deco elegance and wit, and feels at times almost like a Noël Coward play set to music. Clare Presland and Richard Burkhard, both fine singer-actors, play Susanna and Gil with bags of style, though Presland – recently recovered from illness, it was announced – had a couple of moments of strain on opening night. Their spats and reconciliations are overseen with knowing irony by their put upon-servant Sante (John Savournin), while in the pit John Andrews, excellent as always, does wonders with an over eclectic score that nods to everyone from Mozart to Debussy, with Bellini and Verdi in between.
