Even by the standards of Opera Holland Park, which likes to serve up at least one unfamiliar work each year, this double bill is obscure stuff. Puccini fans may have heard of his first opera, Le Villi, but are unlikely to have seen it staged; Delius’s Margot la Rouge is an opera not even its composer ever got to hear.
In Martin Lloyd-Evans’s stagings, each starts with the same tableau – a father and daughter sitting together, before the daughter walks out of the door. Any link between the two operas is tenuous, but perhaps both are cautionary tales: look what happens, girls, if you leave your daddy’s arms! Both possible eventualities – prostitution; death from a broken heart – are covered, Lloyd-Evans telling the stories straightforwardly in a set by takis that centres on a cabin whizzing round on a slightly overused revolve: a few posters and chairs turn it into Margot’s bar; a few flowers and it’s Anna’s garden in Le Villi.
