La Fanciulla del West, Opera Holland Park

★★★★☆

Opera Holland Park opens its 30th season with Puccini’s ‘La fanciulla del West’, a work that still feels like the composer’s great outsider. First performed in New York in 1910, it swaps Paris garrets and Roman churches for the California gold rush, giving us miners, outlaws, saloon life and a heroine who survives in a world almost entirely ruled by men. It is part Western, part melodrama, part psychological study, and this new production makes a persuasive case for it as one of Puccini’s most fascinating mature scores.

Martin Lloyd-Evans gives the opera a clear, credible world. Rather than treating the Wild West as postcard fantasy, he roots it in hardship, loneliness and rough community life. Anna Reid’s set is practical and convincing: the saloon feels lived in, Minnie’s cabin has a stark intimacy, and the final act transforms efficiently into a gallows space. The period costumes, hair and make-up add authenticity without becoming fussy. Jamie Platt’s lighting brings atmosphere, moving from the smoky warmth of the bar to the colder danger of the final manhunt.

What impresses most is the sense of community. The miners are not just a chorus standing behind the principals; they feel like individual men with pasts, habits, grudges and homes they miss. Lloyd-Evans directs them with detail and care, and the Opera Holland Park Chorus respond superbly. Their scenes of homesickness are deeply touching, while their later appetite for punishment shows how quickly camaraderie can turn into mob justice. That shift gives the production real dramatic weight.

Musically, the evening is very strong. Matthew Kofi Waldren draws colour, urgency and tenderness from the City of London Sinfonia, working with a reduced orchestration that rarely feels small. The playing has bite in the dramatic passages and a beautiful transparency in the more reflective moments. Puccini’s score, with its hints of modernism, American colour and lush Italian lyricism, is shaped with both confidence and sensitivity.

Amanda Echalaz gives Minnie warmth, dignity and emotional truth. She is not played as a girlish dreamer, but as a woman who has had to become strong in order to survive. Some of the highest vocal moments are not entirely secure, but her performance is rich, committed and touching. José de Eça makes Dick Johnson refreshingly human, avoiding empty swagger and finding sincerity in the role. His ‘Ch’ella mi creda’ is one of the evening’s magic moments, sung with real feeling. Robert Hayward’s Jack Rance grows in menace and complexity as the evening progresses, revealing not only cruelty but loneliness and frustrated desire.

There are small reservations. The opera’s melodrama still occasionally strains credibility, and one or two staging choices distract from key emotional beats. But overall this is a highly accomplished production: clear in storytelling, visually compelling, musically persuasive and dramatically alive.

Image credit: Craig Fuller

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