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Charlotte Badham as Hansel and Eleanor Dennis as The Gingerbread Witch | Photo: Ali Wright

It can take an iffy performance to remind you exactly what makes a given piece so special. Opera Holland Park’s new staging of Humperdinck’s 1893 fairy-tale was like that: by no means terrible, and with some engaging singers, but missing the real musical and dramatic magic of the opera.

The danger with H&G is that you find yourself among an ageing audience simply watching a kids’ fairy story with posh music, and no depth or hinterland to things, which can become vaguely embarrassing. What’s actually interesting is how Humperdinck makes depth possible, the way the music is always reaching for something beyond the story, real wonder and emotion, the resonances of fear, loneliness, abandonment, the final explosion of joy – that’s how it becomes a real opera.

But conductor and director need to have a genuine attitude to the piece, which I couldn’t discern. What we got was a hard-working and busy staging by John Wilkie, starting with a somewhat exhausting overture where the children dreamed (or did they?) a host of old-fashioned storybook characters, mediaeval queens, Pulcinella and so on, who whirled about a bit and later on came in handy for scene-changing. This felt like watching a Christmas staging of The Nutcracker, but with less good dancing, though the chorus tasked with it, choreographed by Michael Spenceley, did just fine.

The Opera Holland Park Chorus | Photo: Ali Wright

And there was nothing wrong at all with the two children, boisterously played by Charlotte Badham and Laura Lolita Peresivana, nor with Meeta Raval’s gypsyish (the family home being a painted caravan) Gertrud, whose Wagnerian sorrow after the children’s departure was strong stuff. The always magnetic (and vocally classy) Paul Carey Jones burst on the scene as Peter, laden with drink (internally) and food. These scenes were lively, if rather authentically clumping, but orchestral joviality for a while masked the basic trouble in the pit, which was simply a lack of accuracy, definition and proper musical attitude, with conductor Karin Hendrickson, despite a few properly thought-out passages, seeming to just let the music happen in a rather approximate manner.

That said, the children-in-the-wood was a good, atmospheric scene, starting with Gretel’s uncanny folksong ‘Ein männlein steht im Walde…’, the tone darkening though cuckoo-song to sudden panic ands fear: the closest the evening came to lift-off, with the impressively assured Gretel in very refulgent voice, the orchestra delivering a kind of Beethovenian radiance as she is crowned Queen of the Wood, before the chill descended.

The tricky dream bit was delivered only slightly too cloyingly – food-delivering housemaids with nicely-made woodland animal heads – but Eleanor Dennis was somewhat stymied by the director’s concept of the Witch, a kind of comedy-Fascist Thirties look that I think never goes too well with ovens – I mean, you can go down that path, but you’d better be prepared to bring a bit more genuine threat and jeopardy to the show. This is the thing about Hansel and Gretel: the balance of fear, genuine want, eeriness, enchantment, comedy and lightheartedness needs a really subtle touch to keep it from tipping too far one way or the other. Here, there was a shortage of any of those ingredients.