Trusting to instinct

This year is Opera Holland Park’s tenth anniversary season, and to my great shame I have never attended a performance, despite having had the best intentions of doing so for roughly the past ten years. If I don’t turn up this summer, I get the feeling I’ll be in serious trouble with the two men who were sitting on the other side of the lunch table from me a few days ago, Michael Volpe and James Clutton. At least I will be if I survive the fusillade of their rattle-attack enthusiasm without slumping into my salad, lethally punctured by a hail of conversational bullets.

They give seriously good schtick, this double act, so much so that there’s a danger of them coming over as almost too practised, with their feed-a-line, pick-up-a-line vaudeville style of overlapping delivery. But when you get a word in edgeways the response is fast, intuitive and to the point. Their genuine passion for opera is unmistakable, and that passion is highly discriminating. Roughly speaking, Volpe is admin and PR front man, while Clutton is the producer. Their tastes seem to be highly compatible and run very much to the Italian 19th-century repertory, the more full-blooded the better, with ambitious and highly successful forays into the German, with Fidelio a couple of years ago, and the Russian, with Eugene Onegin last year and a new Queen of Spades for 2006.

The setting for the opera performances has the 17th-century stone façade of Holland House as a backdrop, and a tented-over stage and seating area with no pit for the orchestra and almost non-existent backstage facilities. Designers and directors have to contend with the fact that the first act will take place in natural but fading light, with no real darkness and therefore little scope for lighting effects until acts two and three.