Not for a long time has WNO unveiled a new production in the summer and opened with it the following autumn to extend its momentum.
The holiday break has allowed director Annabel Arden’s team to refine her hyper-realistic account of Puccini’s La Boheme, the story of love, death and penury in the Latin Quarter of Paris, which she updates to the years just before the start of the Great War.
When Mimi expires at the end among her companions-in-wretchedness the scene is now truly desolate, the garret occupied by Rodolfo, Marcello, Colline and Schaunard an abandoned shell, symbolic of how a madcap era of gaiety and creativity is about to be crushed by ‘the war to end all wars’. That fortifying RSJ outside the Customs post in act three now does duty to prop up the bohemians' former redoubt.
Also subsumed is the original scene in act two where a video-ed flock of pigeons flies across the set, causing the Yuletide revellers to assume a tableau vivant. Why they should have done this in Paris, whatever the forebodings, was a mystery. The event has now been lost in the general pyrotechnic jingoism. (And the thing about portents, of course, is that they are rendered more powerful by being ill-defined.)
Newcomers Piotr Lempa (Colline) and Daniel Grice (Schaunard) maintain the liveliness of the original casting. Giselle Allen, who sang two performances of Mimi in the summer, returns as the principal with authority and restrained pathos. The company's Simon Phillippo takes over as conductor and gives way in November to Andrew Greenwood. The production’s overlaid visuals, however, remain a bit cheesy.
Alex Vicens continues as a hand-wringing Rodolfo, while Kate Valentine (Musetta) and David Kempster (Marcello) stand tall - literally and musically. Martin Lloyd (Alcindoro) and Howard Kirk (Benoit) offer stylish character studies. Michael Clifton-Thompson as Parpignol the pedlar is still milking the part at the curtain-call.
September's opening performance was dedicated to the memory of Alan Parr, WNO technical administrator, who died suddenly after forty years with the company. WNO's new boss, David Pountney, said Mr Parr's commitment was the kind that made an opera company great. |
