What a beautiful night of singing from a wonderful cast including Alex Vicens and Anita Hartig making glorious UK debuts as ‘the can’t live with/can’t live without’ lovers.
The company’s former musical director Carlo Rizzi conducts this best-known of all operas with characteristic passion and holds the whole evening together.
That is despite Rizzi and singers having to work with a flawed production from Annabel Arden and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis who just try too hard.
It all starts okay with a Paris rooftop skyline with wisps of chimney smoke. Think Mary Poppins meets Moulin Rouge.
The garret is fine (a platform on the stage) but once the action starts our cast either use the free-standing door, or ignore it, sploshes of something are thrown up the window (maybe it is Marcello’s canvas?) and then we have an awkward transformation into Café Momus. The diamond-shaped, scene-change apertures are like a poor Power Point presentation.
We had what looked like metal ripped off the WMC roof used as side panels on the stage (one of which infuriatingly rotated throughout the scene as a revolving door). What is usually the most charming and funny scene is reduced to a hotchpotch of confusing costumes, transvestites, ape-masked Parpignol and eye-annoying confusion.
Things settled down a bit in the second half and the technical gimmicks of snow fall and fireworks were pretty enough and fortunately for the death scene we could just concentrate on a very conventional approach.
Thank goodness for the cast. The players rose to their roles with great skill and conviction. Romanian soprano Hartig’s Mimi came over as a manipulative young woman rather than a sickly victim, Spaniard Vicens' Rodolfo as a clearly drawn destructive personality while the constant fighting between Musetta, sung by Kate Valentine, and Marcello, sung by David Kempster, was perfect. Welshman Kempster gave the best dramatic performance of the evening, helping raise the second relationship of the opera to its proper status.
When our four central characters sing together at the end of Act Three the opera reaches its zenith, true personalities are revealed as is the absolute magic of Puccini’s dramatic writing.
Our other Bohemians, David Soar’s Colline and Gary Griffiths’ Schaunard, are just right for their roles, fresh faced and nicely drawn to contrast their youthful pomposity and their then laddish games.
WMC: June 6, 8, 9, 15, 23, 29
The show returns to Cardiff and tours in the autumn. |
