Strong stuff

The strings sweep upwards, the horns surge, and Leoncavallo’s Zaza throws itself into your arms. We don’t know it yet, but we’ve just heard the drama’s focal point: what David Lynch would call its ‘eye of the duck moment’. The same music recurs near the end of Act One, as the fumbling attempts at seduction of the small-time showgirl Zaza finally come good, and she locks lips with Milio Dufresne, the Parisian dandy who she imagines will take her away from the seedy, bustling demi-monde that we see laid out around her. For now though, in Marie Lambert’s production, the entire cast — playboys, pierrots, divas and stagehands — files out as the prelude plays, and lines up across the entire width of Opera Holland Park’s tented auditorium. All the world’s a stage: well, Zaza’s world, anyway.

This new production of Zaza — first heard in the UK in 1909, and not much since — is the latest in OHP’s ongoing project to rehabilitate verismo, the lush, sometimes sentimental genre that rejuvenated opera at the start of the 20th century, but which has left few survivors beyond Puccini, and Leoncavallo’s own Pagliacci.