Zanetto

Synopsis

Zanetto is a sweetly moving, gorgeously scored miniature to open our double bill. It is a long way from the gritty world of Cavalleria rusticana, Mascagni's storming debut in opera; this was a composer who ranged happily across many genres in his musical journey, and Zanetto is another curiosity in his canon. It tells of an encounter between a beautiful courtesan and a young wandering minstrel, which leads to love, sacrifice and pain. The music is gentle and resonant, and there are just two singers.

Our Review:

23 June 2012

The wily old fraud has prospered of late, with Richard Jones’s colourful staging as part of the Royal Opera’s Il trittico currently being televised on BBC4 and with Liam Steel’s blissfully hilarious Commedia production for English Touring Opera still fresh in the memory. Would Opera Holland Park’s new stab at Puccini’s comic one-acter prove to be a Gianni Schicchi too far? Not a bit of it.

Martin Lloyd-Evans directs his strong ensemble cast with good humour and a breeziness that befits OHP’s canopied auditorium. As is customary these days with productions of this opera, we find ourselves not in the13th-century Florence of Dante’s story but in the indeterminate mid-nineteen-hundreds. On the walls of a dilapidated Florentine room the once-lilac paint has worn down to the wattle and the room’s sole ocupant is breathing his last. Cue a silent, pre-opera dumb show during which  the old man’s wailin...

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