Welcome return of a revolutionary masterpiece
SOME operatic performances can fairly be described as a car crash – but even though composer Giacomo Puccini almost died in the first recorded automobile accident in Italy on February 25, 1903, this production of La Boheme is emphatically not one of them.
Now regarded as a fixture of the operatic canon, this Puccini masterpiece was revolutionary when first performed at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1, 1896.
Until then, opera had been almost exclusively concerned with aristocracy, royalty, gods and demi-gods – the great and bad, you might say. Puccini changed that.
The characters of La Boheme were ordinary young people just trying to get by in life. Their lives may have been intertwined with romantic notions but their reality was a relentless struggle to stay on the right side of poverty.
Puccini’s opera is based on Henri Murger’s novel Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, an episodic work about young bohemians in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s. For this Scottish Opera production, director Renaud Doucet and designer Andre Barbe keep the Parisian setting but displace the action forward 80 years, when the city was a vibrant magnet for artists and expats.
Their initial conceit introduces us to a tourist in present-day Paris, visiting one of the city’s famous flea markets. Discovering a stall awash with 1920s objets d’art, she puts a 78 record of La Boheme on a gramophone. As the opening bars crackle out, she begins to daydream of Rodolfo and Marcello in their cold, dark artists’ garret – and to imagine herself as Mimi…
As Mimi, South Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee is exquisitely tragic, her voice alive with hope and hopelessness. She has the great gift of being able to sing with a deliberate, almost cracking, weakness, switching effortlessly to a wondrously soaring strength.
Taking her Mimi in tandem with her Madama Butterfly for Scottish Opera in 2014, she clearly has an impressive affinity with Puccini.
As her poet and writer lover Rodolfo, Luis Gomes, pictured, veers between jaunty and jealous. His performance hints at a complexity of emotion, while never quite reaching Miss Lee’s vocal heights.
Rodolfo’s friends offer sound support. Artist Marcello (David Stout) is a laddish soulmate. Philosopher Colline (Damien Pass) and musician Schaunard (Bozidar Smiljanic) are less raffish, but play their part in a quartet of firm friends. The most charismatic of the supporting cast is Jeanine De Bique as singer and good-time girl Musetta, and the Trinidadian soprano clearly bases her character on 1920s Parisienne singer Josephine Baker. In the pit, Scottish Opera music director Stuart Stratford continues his customary control of the ever-improving orchestra. Puccini was severely hurt in that crash in 1903. It is good to know his La Boheme is still in the best of health.