Opera Holland Park opens this year’s season with a new production of The Flying Dutchman, directed by Julia Burbach and conducted by Peter Selwyn. The company’s first ever Wagner staging, it aims high and doesn’t always succeed, though the best of it, both musically and theatrically, is unquestionably impressive.
Burbach essentially stages it as a psychological horror story (which it is), making Eleanor Dennis’s Senta the central protagonist rather than Paul Carey Jones’s charismatic Dutchman, and heightening the opera’s sense of the uncanny by blurring the lines between reality and illusion as she dreams of escaping the normative confines of the world around her.
Using both auditorium and stage for her setting, Burbach hauls us into Senta’s vivid imagination. Holland Park theatre’s tarpaulin roof has been extended to form the backdrop for the vertiginous platforms of Naomi Dawson’s set, so we seem to be sitting beneath the unfurling sails of some monstrous ship ourselves. Sailors haul ropes through the aisles and doss down on staircases, while ghostly, faceless figures move wraith-like among the audience.
Not all of it works. Burbach is strong on Senta’s increasing disquiet at the erratic behaviour of Neal Cooper’s Erik, whose bristling resentment marks him out as potentially abusive. Yet her relationship with her equally dangerous father Daland (Robert Winslade Anderson), who would gladly sell her to the Dutchman for the latter’s wealth, is under-characterised and doesn’t hit home as much as it should. During the overture, Burbach confusingly and unnecessarily fills both stage and auditorium with women who may be Senta’s predecessors in trying to save the Dutchman’s soul. And the ending, deliberately enigmatic as to what redemption might consist of, or indeed whether it is even possible, is anticlimactic after what has gone before.
A couple of tweaks to the score are odd – a choral refrain from Senta’s ballad transferred to the close of Act I, and Daland’s crew and the Norwegian women are missing from the final scene. But there are some terrific performances. Dennis, radiant in tone, is outstanding and entirely convincing as a restless visionary in the grip of forces beyond reason. Carey Jones captures the Dutchman’s spiritual and moral anguish with singing of great emotional depth and verbal subtlety. Cooper makes a fiercely intense Erik, less lyrical than some, which works well with Burbach’s view of the character. Winslade Anderson, meanwhile, sounds suave, tellingly masking ambition behind glibness. Conducting a reduced orchestration by Tony Burke, Selwyn took time to settle on opening night, though the gathering tensions and hurtling momentum of the final two acts were superbly done. There was fine playing from the City of London Sinfonia, and the Opera Holland Park Chorus, sensational throughout, have done little finer.
• Until 14 June
