Opera Holland Park’s L’Amico Fritz is delicious romantic froth

Best remembered today for his 1890 Cavalleria Rusticana – the one-act opera that packs betrayal, adultery, religion and murder into an hour of music dripping with sweat and blood – Pietro Mascagni was far from a one-trick composer. The following year, keen to break the mould (or at least clean it up a little), Mascagni premiered something totally different: the charming country-comedy L’Amico Fritz.

Rarely staged elsewhere, but a firm favourite at Opera Holland Park, whose new production by Julia Burbach will be the third in recent memory, it’s a work whose score is as toothsome as its cherry orchards – all sharp-sweet dissonance, heavy with some really sumptuous duets and a stirring Intermezzo. Verdi may have had a point when he called it “the worst libretto I’ve ever seen”, but since when has a lack of real conflict been a barrier to success for a romantic comedy?

Fritz Kobus – a landowning bachelor, drifting happily into operatic old-age at all of 36 – declares that he’ll never marry. He’s so sure of it that he’ll even sign a wager to that effect with the local rabbi. Rabbi David has spotted Suzel, the pretty daughter of a tenant-farmer, and is determined to bring the two together. Fritz has spotted her too, and it doesn’t take much engineering before duets are ringing out across the vineyards and cherry orchards of Alsace.

Burbach’s staging follows this season’s uncluttered trend at Holland Park. Designer Alyson Cummins is required to provide little more than some tables and step ladders; all the rest is left to the audience’s imagination. A smartly monochrome 20^th-century crowd provide the shades of grey against which Katie Bird’s Suzel stands apart. Pretty in pink – a hit of warmth and unfussiness among the wedding guests’ elegant hats and pearls – she’s as wholesome as her orchards and just as ripe for the picking.

Keeping largely out of the way, Burbach’s one intervention is to transform Beppe – Fritz’s gyspy-friend, an unexpected trouser-role for a mezzo – into the engineer of the action: part-Cupid, part-ringmaster in a sparkly waistcoat and ever-growing wings. It works well enough in Kezia Bienek’s sparky delivery, adding a fairy-tale gloss to proceedings, but with the rabbi already on the case it’s perhaps one matchmaker too many.

Tenor Matteo Lippi is a nicely avuncular Fritz, whose Italianate sob vibrates through a ravishing “O amore, O bella luce del core”. Both he and Bird’s delightful Suzel come into their own in Act III, where pastoral prettiness finally gives way to something richer and both voices can really open out.

The famous Cherry Duet finds plenty of romantic and musical friction under its chaste text, but is almost outdone by the confusion and tenderness of the encounter between Paul Carey-Jones’s scene-stealing David (not above playing up his age and infirmity to advance his scheme) and Suzel in which they retell the biblical story of Rebecca.

A reduced City of London Sinfonia play sensitively for Beatrice Venezi, celebrating the work’s pastoral lightness. There’s a lovely solo from leader Martin Burgess (who supplies Beppe’s violin-playing), and the group relishes the score’s quick-change atmospherics, casting them as a village brass-band one minute and a church organ the next.

It’s froth, but deliciously served – a musical flummery whipped up from tender string writing and folk-infused melodies. Delivered with a final sprinkle of pink confetti, this is opera without tears, and none the worse for it.

Until July 31; 0300 999 1000, operahollandpark.com