THE BEST SHOW THIS SUMMER OPERA SEASON – AND ONE TO AVOID

Every May, opera swaps city shoes and a no-nonsense attitude for sundresses and off-duty frolics in gardens, marquees, theatres and fields across the country.

But don’t let the champagne and picnics fool you: this is seriously good music, created by small opera companies who punch well above their weight.

Come for the fun, stay for the singing, the sets, the sense of an art form fizzing with talent and creative energy.

Garsington Opera’s L’elisir d’amore (★★★★) is a great place to start this summer. Director Christopher Luscombe and designer Simon Higlett paint a postcard-pretty scene of post-war, small-town Italy.

The town square teems with life: a mechanic fails to work very hard on a vespa; a café serves up coffee and gossip piping hot; neighbours idle and chat on balconies.

It’s a slightly-too-tidy world where stakes are low and we know it’ll all come right in the end.

This could puncture the wheels of Donizetti’s classic boy-takes-love-potion-to-woo-girl comedy, but actually just amps up the fun.

Travelling quack Dr Dulcamara (an irrepressible Richard Burkhard, oozing charisma and eau de cologne) rolls up in a red sports car; Nemorino’s love-rival, GI Belcore (Carles Pachon), sports cowboy boots with his uniform, passing out Hershey bars instead of business cards; leading lady Adina (Madison Leonard) conducts the villagers in Von Trapp Family-style sing-alongs.

Everyone’s had the Disney memo except for Oleksiy Palchykov’s nervy, neurotic Nemorino, who has wandered in from a Beckett play.

With some classy help from the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Chloe Rooke, the plot tangles and untangles with charm to spare.

Voices do the business across the board, though both Leonard and Palchykov could trade some power for a little more light and shade.

It’s a different story over in Surrey for Grange Park Opera’s Madama Butterfly (★★). Puccini’s cruellest tragedy comes wrapped in one of the composer’s most seductive scores – a friction that can excite or sicken.

With enough chemistry, the sham-marriage brokered between the cynical Lieutenant Pinkerton and the teenage geisha Butterfly can generate troubling eroticism; take that away, and you’re left with an ugly story dressed in musical diamonds and pearls.

That’s what we get here in a staging by John Doyle that reaches for romance but grasps something colder and clammier.

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Tatami screens rise and fall, revealing and concealing Doyle’s handsome black and gold sets: a Japanese screen-print brought to life.

It’s the most activity we see all night. Hye-Young Lee’s Butterfly and Luis Gomes’s Pinkerton are the centrepieces of a fatally static production that maroons unlikeable figures in dramatic isolation.

The Gascoigne Orchestra under Stephen Barlow do little to propel the action, and neither voice has the silken suppleness to soften the story’s brutal outline.

Kitty Whately’s faithful maid Suzuki packs a world of emotion into her watchful presence, but it’s not enough to warm this chilly show.

‘L’elisir d’amore’ is at Garsington Opera until 21 July. ‘Madama Butterfly’ is at Grange Park Opera until 5 July

2025-06-09T12:02:05Z