*****"Rodula Gaitanou’s production is a winner”: Un Ballo in Maschera at Opera Holland Park

*****“Holland Park’s mini-Glyndebourne is now open for business, and in Rodula Gaitanou’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera it has a winner. The big directorial decisions have been spot-on…” Michael Church, The Independent, 9 June, 2019

****“Rodula Gaitanou’s thoughtful new production for Opera Holland Park treads a delicate line between heart and horror, keeping its feet even as the story and its protagonists start their dizzy whirl into the climactic final dance-to-the-death… Gaitanou’s direction is sensitive and sympathetic, capturing the opera's widescreen spectacle and its intimate awfulness.” Alexandra Coghlan, The Arts Desk, 10 June, 2019

*****“The Greek director Rodula Gaitanou has made OHP’s intractably wide stage seem like a walk in the park. Her staging of Un ballo in maschera is one of the company’s finest, so much so that last year’s memorable La traviata now seems like a dress rehearsal for the main event. This is a director who understands how to use three dimensions, how to energise characters, how to create convincing stage logic from improbable situations and how to guide the eye of her audience through a busy expanse of space. None of these things happen by chance…They require an eye that’s steeped in operatic stagecraft and the kind of aesthetic sensibility that enables her, for example, to think of masks as recurring symbols of human secretiveness, from fencing helmets to travelling disguises to the faces at a masked ball.” Mark Valencia, Bachtrack, 10 June 2019