Opera Holland Park unveils its 2015 season

The last of the major festivals to declare its 2015 programme has finally shown its hand. Opera Holland Park today announced a line-up that balances audience bait with risky rarities, novelties with revivals, and its familiar Italian staple repertoire with, for the second year in a row, something home-grown.

Since its commission by the Glyndebourne Festival in 1998, Jonathan Dove‘s Flight, set in an airport departure lounge, has become perhaps most performed of modern British operas, although this will be its first high-profile London production since British Youth Opera‘s 2008 staging.

A new production of Lakmé by Delibes is the other non-Italian offering (apart from the return of Will Todd’s children’s opera Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

The company’s critically celebrated 2007 production of Montemezzi’s rarity, L’amore dei tre re, returns, as does a more recent slice of Puccini, 2012's Gianni Schicchi, although this time round the latter will be joined by the two other operas that make up Il trittico, Il tabarro and Suor Angelica.

The season’s cast-iron audience-pleaser is Verdi's Aida. However, audiences with a even a ha’porth of curiosity are likely to see the whole package as the most hotly anticipated OHP season in years.