Opera Holland Park’s association with Mascagni’s oriental fantasy stretches back to 1997, when it produced the first London staging of Iris in over 90 years. Designed by Soutra Gilmour, Olivia Fuchs’s unflinching 2016 production opened the season and ignited debate in the press and online over the grotesque exploitation of the title character, played by Anne Sophie Duprels with “almost terrifying intensity” (Tim Ashley, The Guardian).
Stuart Stratford conducted with “exemplary firmness, never forcing the temperature above boiling point and drawing idiomatic playing from the City of London Sinfonia” (Rupert Christiansen, The Daily Telegraph). In The Times, Neil Fisher wrote that Mascagni’s ‘Hymn to the Sun’ was “a stunning moment and captures the OHP chorus in the best form I’ve heard”.
