LA BOHEME
Longborough
Festival Opera ****
From high-minded, earnest Norse mythology, Gods annihilated
in a wiped-out Valhalla, Longborough has now brought us back to earth with real
people with their feet on the ground in Puccini’s verismo masterpiece, La Boheme.
Puccini did admire Wagner, however, using his Leitmotive
reminiscence techniques at crucial moments, and even referring to the Valkyrie
Magic Fire music as the poet Rodolfo burns a precious manuscript in order to keep
himself and his flatmates warm against the Parisian Christmas Eve chill.
Longborough’s new production of opera’s most-renowned love
story brings us a uniformly brilliant cast of principals, headed by the simply stunning
Mimi of Elin Pritchard. Her body-language as a waif-like consumptive is totally
convincing, but her voice soars above all tribulations, coloured and shaded,
gradually collapsing in tone as her end approaches.
The quartet of aspiring students is brought vibrantly to
life, Jung Soo Yun’s Rodolfo ardent and sonorous, Darwin Prakash bringing the depth
and sensitivity to the painter Marcello that this sometimes pasteboard
character deserves, and the musician Schaunard and philosopher Colline given
lively characterisations by Edward Jowle and Duncan Stenhouse.
To this heartening core we must add the Musetta of Sofia
Kirwan-Baez, no blowsy good-time girl, this, but a passionate, feisty
personification of genuine love (for Marcello) and care (for Mimi). Her Café Momus
waltz song was delivered as a dramatic development rather than as a showpiece.
This was indeed one of the many highlights of Act II, the
two central acts being a triumph, the best stagings of these inner acts I have
ever seen. Sarah Beaton’s gloriously flexible designs throughout the opera allowed
the Café to be created at the flick of a trestle, and there was space for a
wonderful phalanx of 36 assorted children, fussily marshalled by the Quality Street-clad
Maria Jagusz, coveting the wares of the marionette-clad toyseller Parpignol (Tobias
Campos Santinaque), and marvelling at the curfew marchpast (sadly unseen) of the militia.
Then there was all the business of Musetta ditching her
elderly admirer Alcindoro in order to return to the love of her life, Marcello.
Alcindoro here was no crotchety, bumbling old bigwig; Matthew Siveter (earlier a
spirited landlord Benoit) giving him real character, a man who thinks he
carries some influence – but he doesn’t.
Act Three, set at the Paris city confines, was simply
stunning. A silhouette of Musetta taking singing warmup classes set the scene
for this heartbreaking sequence of ensembles, Mimi and Rodolfo deciding they
will not part, for each other’s good until the spring.
Then the summer comes, and we are into Act Four, which will
see the arrival of the dying Mimi surrounded by all her friends. But this
finale, plus what should have been a gripping Act One, had its flaws.
Sarah Fahie;s inventive production worked throughout most of
this staging, but robbed us of the elements of surprise. Where were we at the
opening of Act One? In some kind of sweatshop, the workers, including Mimi
making her artificial flowers, quietly humming “Adeste Fideles” on this
Christmas Eve. The foreman creates some kind of fuss (Italian diction exemplary
throughout the show, by the way), and they all clear away.
Then, for heaven’s sake, at last the orchestra tunes up, and
eventually, eventually, we get the bursting-in of Puccini’s exhilarating
Capriccio Sinfonico, conductor Alice
Farnham’s flexible, willing LFO orchestra, so alert to the singers under her
baton, at last let loose.
We see Mimi in her room, downstairs from Rodolfo’s garret,
long before her entrance seeking a light for her candle. The element of her
surprise entry has gone, as it has in Act Four, when Musetta should bring the
dying Mimi immediately into the garret; instead we have seen them move into
Mimi’s old room minutes earlier. No surprise again.
Another cavil about the last act. One can understand the four
musketeers’ crazed dancing to distract themselves, but was it necessary for
Rodolfo and Marcello to freeze in a potentially homosexual embrace?
This was almost the best Boheme out of the countless I’ve
seen; why spoil the drama with irrelevant add-ons? And how I would love to see
Leoncavallo’s La Boheme, which concentrates on the love-story between Marcello
and Musetta. It lost out to the Puccini, and Leoncavallo wasn’t best pleased.
Christopher Morley