Katya Kabanova
Opera Holland Park
The Mask of Orpheus, Act II
Proms
I took yet another amazed Londoner to the Opera Holland Park production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova — he was amazed not only by the pleasant comfort of the place, but also by the standard of the performance, which would have been a credit to any opera house in the world. Why are opera-goers so uninquisitive? It’s an inevitable but useless question. It isn’t that one sees empty seats at OHP, but the audience strikes me as being, to a large extent, composed of people who wouldn’t normally go to opera, but rather are having an evening out. ‘Real’ opera-lovers still tend to think that it is a place to condescend to, or to go to for exotic repertoire; and almost no one I’ve taken has gone again under their own steam.
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