The Royal Opera’s new season gets off to a splendid start
Replacing John Copley’s muchloved production of Puccini’s perennial after its 41 years of sterling service was a significant challenge, but it’s one that Richard Jones has successfully met. His new staging is fresh, beautiful and intelligent – never putting too much weight on what is essentially a romantic comedy with a sad ending and always warmly responsive to its uncomplicated charm and vivid characterisation. I doubt it will have the longevity of Copley’s version, but it will surely do audiences very nicely for the next decade.
Jones and his designer Stewart Laing haven’t muddled the period – costuming is squarely drawn from the modes of the 1830s, even if the sets take a rather freer view than their predecessor of the architecture. The Bohemians live up in the eaves with a tiny ineffectual stove and no furniture except a tea chest, while out in the bleak no-man’s-land of the Barrière d’enfer, the snow falls constantly. But the show-stopper is a magnificent recreation of the Christmas bustle in the passages of Paris, in which the Café Momus is (harmlessly if inaccurately) presented as a grand luxe establishment where the prices would be sky-high – no wonder Alcindoro has a fit when he is landed with the bill.
Jones nicely suggests that poverty is something that these middle-class boys are essentially playing at, though as with all productions of Bohème, I wish that someone had remembered that in freezing wintry weather, even the most indigent resort to hats, coats, gloves and scarves – this lot never look really cold, let alone needy. More importantly, however, the way that youthful optimism is dented by experience registers clearly: here are young people who have been forced to become adults very quickly, a painful process that the cast acts out with a sensitivity you don’t often see in shows at this address.
Michael Fabiano, the American tenor, justly earned the loudest applause. He sings Rodolfo with open ardour – perhaps giving out a little too much in the first act where his naivety is key, but marvellously confident and expressive in the later acts. Although he has previously radiated a rather tense personality on stage, Fabiano seemed relaxed here, displaying an unsuspected gift for what Gilbert and Sullivan’s Reginald Bunthorne called touch-and-go jocularity.
Nicole Car, the Australian soprano, was his beloved Mimì. Slender and plainly pretty, she looked the part to perfection. There’s no angelic shine to the sounds she makes above the stave and (like so many others) she made a hash of the end of act one, but she came into her own voicing the girl’s miseries in act three. She contrasted well with Simona Mihai’s fierce little spitfire of a Musetta, who saucily removes a pair of silk knickers in Momus and wanders off in touching desolation after her terminal quarrel with Marcello.
The first-rate Mariusz Kwiecien was properly virile in that role, complemented by Florian Sempey and Luca Tittoto as a fruity Schaunard and Colline. A nice cameo from Jeremy White as the landlord Benoît also deserves mention.
Antonio Pappano conducted a score he knows like the back of his hand. There were moments in the first two acts where I felt that he was driving it with something like impatience, but the orchestral playing was splendid. The reception was ecstatic, sending Covent Garden’s new season off to a flying start.