With everything working properly, this would have been a lot of fun: Grange Park’s La Gioconda reviewed

There are composers who are known for a single opera, and there are operas that are known for only a single aria. But to be a 19th-century Italian opera composer and to be remembered solely for your ballet music – well, that’s a bit special. As the orchestra tiptoed into the ‘Dance of the Hours’, in Act Three of Grange Park Opera’s production of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, the audience sighed with recognition. There were a few giggles, too. Ten minutes later, as the ballet slammed to its finish (without a note of actual – y’know – singing), they exploded into the loudest ovation we’d heard all night.

It was probably always going to happen. The choreography (Sarah Fahie was credited with ‘Movement’) was amusing: two gender-bending dancers in floaty orange frocks played out a larky courtship. It climaxed with a pillow fight and, like I say, the audience went mad for it; or at least they went mad for the only really indelible melody in the whole three-hour drama. Nothing wrong with a knockout tune, of course, and perhaps it’s just Ponchielli’s misfortune that the solitary take-home banger in La Gioconda – and arguably his whole career – is an atypical bit of decorative sparkle in what is actually a pumping, lust-driven gothic thriller set in a death-haunted Venice.

That wasn’t the only thing working against Stephen Medcalf’s production – though the most serious problem on the night that I saw it was beyond anyone’s control. La Gioconda demands charismatic singers in each of six principal roles, and it got them at Grange Park – Ruxandra Donose quivering with ardour as Laura, Elisabetta Fiorillo generating an unnerving aura around the blind, hunched figure of La Cieca, and above all, Amanda Echalaz burning up the stage as La Gioconda, a Venetian street-singer with an indomitable heart.