The joy of going to a real concert: OHP’s Heart of Delight reviewed

I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a real audience, and the real sound of Waitrose cava bottles popping open in the late afternoon. In some ways, this open-air gala from Opera Holland Park made it feel as if the summer season were back on. There were floral-print dresses and canary-coloured chinos; I swear I even saw a tartan picnic rug. And here in a corner were the critics, released back into society for the first time since March. When the correspondent of the Mail on Sunday ostentatiously upgraded himself to a better seat mid-show, it was like we’d never been away.

In truth, it only resembled normality if you ignored the total absence of Opera Holland Park’s huge tented theatre. Instead, some 200 concertgoers sat dotted about in socially distanced isolation on the vacant podium. The staff wore masks (few of the audience bothered) and where — in a more enjoyable version of 2020 — OHP’s absent stage should have been carrying productions of The Merry Widow and Eugene Onegin, a group of 12 musicians and the conductor John Andrews sheltered under a temporary gazebo, the only concession to the possibility of bad weather.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an opera crowd (and I’ve certainly never seen an orchestra) looking quite so happy to be there. The English summer opera fantasy is a sort of Rex Whistler fête champêtre with an expensive soundtrack. An element of risk — whether wasp attack or drenching — is the grit in the oyster: the touch of reality that allows us to believe that it’s all delightfully eccentric rather than self-indulgent.