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Opera Holland Park give us a broad span of human joys and tragedies in an excellently staged and acted rendering of Puccini's Il trittico.

Martin Lloyd-Evan's highly sensitive production features a show-stealing performance by Richard Burkhard but is marred by problems of orchestral balance.

Whatever Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has going for it, it isn’t suspense – everything that’s going to happen is spelled out the first few pages of the score, as Pinkerton chuckles that the marriage contracts in Japan are as flexible as the property leases, renegotiable on a monthly basis, and toasts the day he gets married “for real” to an American bride.