Passion and pain

Although she is much talked about in the opera, the Woman from Arles who gives Cilea's L'Arlesiana its title never actually appears. Neverthless, we know her as a type: emotionally if not physically, she has seduced poor Federico, while simultaneously dallying with Metifio. Clearly she and Bizet's Carmen are kindred spirits.

Her absence from the opera leaves a gaping hole, which may explain the work's rarity. For much of the time, Cilea fills that hole with the kind of prettified incidentals he thought appropriate to the Provençal setting.

Jamie Hayes's Opera Holland Park production too often falls into the same trap, elaborating crowd scenes in such detail that he sometimes leaves the principals to rely on conventional operatics.

Yet as the plot unravels and Federico's mind follows suit, we eventually get the emotional blast that the composer intended. Peter Rice's sets and Manuela Harding's costumes, as decorously neutral as we expect at Holland Park, update the opera to some time around the 1930s, perhaps taking a lead from the fact that Cilea wrote it in 1896 but continued tinkering with it until

1937. But melodically and dramatically the opera's heart lies in the 19th century, and Hayes's cast proves equally at home there, although Holland Park's "sound enhancement" sometimes throws up odd balances.

As Rosa, Federico's mother, Rosalind Plowright is in fine form, even if she cuts a rather stiff figure on stage. Once a dramatic soprano, she is now a super-dramatic mezzo, her chest register filled with pain, her top notes suffused with melancholy. A prominent beat in the voice only amplifies the impression of a woman near the edge: "To be a mother is to be an inferno," she sings, and we feel the heat. Indeed, so keen is she to advise the young, innocent Vivetta on how to seduce her son that one wonders what her relationship with him is.

No wonder Federico topples over into suicide. Sean Ruane shapes his great Act Two lament with persuasive ardour (this was the aria that set Caruso's career in motion), and if the voice tightens under pressure, it is always idiomatic. With smaller parts well taken, and Charles Peebles coaxing full-blooded commitment from the somewhat reduced Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, L'Arlesiana proves that, while it may be no neglected masterpiece, it earns this outing.

Until July 18. Box office: 020 7602 7856.

L'Arlesiana