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.