For all its familiarity, Bizet's The Pearl Fishers is one of the most difficult operas to get right in performance. Set in ancient Ceylon, it is more often than not treated as a piece of orientalist hokum, when in fact its theatrical roots lie in the concentration of French classical drama. Essentially it is a tautly woven study of a masculine friendship, threatened then transfigured by the love the two men feel for the same woman. The work's tone - a combination of emotional turmoil and pervasive sadness - and its sparseness of musical gesture steer it closer to Racine's Bérénice than to comparable operatic experiments of its day.
Not surprisingly, its austerity was deemed perplexing in Bizet's lifetime, and after his death in 1875, the score was hacked about to offset severity with sentiment. The most marked change was the replacement of several sections for the two men, Nadir and Zurga, with soupy repetitions of their famous duet Au Fond du Temple Saint. Opera Holland Park, however, has come up with something of a double coup: its production not only gets the piece right dramatically, but presents what is effectively the British premiere of the score as Bizet left it.
The musical differences speak volumes. The restored passages - duets in canon with hesitant melodies - imply that the relationship between Nadir and Zurga, far from being almost homoerotically close, is built on half-truths and mutual evasions. Vernon Mound's production, meanwhile, reroots the opera in classicism, setting it in a decaying marble amphitheatre and employing a drastic simplicity of physical gesture. Au Fond du Temple Saint is tellingly staged as a pair of parallel monologues (which it is) rather than as a unified duet. Nadir and Leila, meanwhile, sing their love scene holding hands rather than writhing all over the place, a quiet reminder that in Bizet's vocabulary, as in Racine's, "lover" means someone who loves you, rather than someone with whom you are sexually involved.
The performance is beautifully (if a trifle slowly) conducted by Brad Cohen, and there is some exquisite singing from Philippe Do as Nadir and Valérie MacCarthy as Leila, though Matthew Hargreaves isn't quite authoritative enough as Zurga. It is well worth putting up with the distractions of the open-air Holland Park Theatre - traffic noise, peacocks squeaking in the gardens - in order to hear it.
· In rep until June 22. Box office: 020-7602 7856.
