A lot happens before anyone sings a note in Opera Holland Park’s season-opening production of Rigoletto. Bicycles, bells and birdsong set the scene, then a man working quietly at a desk is grabbed by a smartly dressed gang and half drowned. Are we watching a murder? His assailants let him go, laugh as he shakes with fear, and throw him a towel. It’s an initiation rite. The fear that runs through Verdi’s opera is immediately evoked; the life-or-death high stakes, not so much.
This new production is directed by Cecilia Stinton and conducted by Lee Reynolds, who together brought Holland Park audiences a refreshingly unhackneyed, quietly feminist Carmen last year. The corrupt and licentious ducal court in Renaissance Mantua has been transferred to Oxford in the Charleston era, with the party music that Verdi wrote for a small onstage group of players turned into a scratchy old gramophone recording of a 1920s-style dance band, a detail that Reynolds makes work surprisingly convincingly.
