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Tales of la Cité London Coliseum 11/02/2000 - and 4, 8, 11, 14, 16, 21, 24, 28 November, 1 December Ruggero Leoncavallo: La Bohème Ryland Davies (Gaudenzio), Paul Whelan (Schaunard), Geraint Hylton (Stranger), Rhys Meirion (Marcello), Leigh Melrose (Rodolfo), Rebecca de Pont Davies (Eufemia), Leslie John Flanagan (Colline), Sandra Ford (Mimi), Christine Rice (Musetta), Graeme Danby (Barbemuche), Mark Le Brocq (Durand), Peter Kerr (Old man), Adrian Clarke (Viscount Paolo) ENO Chorus, ENO Orchestra Mark Shanahan (conductor) Tim Albery (director)
Leoncavallo wrote his La Bohème as a follow-up to the verismo success of I Pagliacci. Based on a novel Scènes de la vie Bohème based on a play based on a series of fictional journalistic pieces by Henry Murger, it is precisely a series of scenes. Each scene has a small crisis, but there is no overall dramatic impetus, except perhaps a general movement towards misery. The music is similarly a matter of shreds and patches, with French bits, a couple of arty show-songs, Wagnerian bits and full-blown Italian tenor arias in the heavier scenes of the last act. It is easy to see why punters (and probably producers and performers) preferred Puccini’s alternative, written at about the same time. Puccini and his librettist have Rodolfo and Mimi meet, think about parting, part and meet again when she dies, and slip in the other characters as colour. Their opera has a shape and focus that Leoncavallo‘s parade of transient affairs and domestic violence -- Mimi is already with Rodolfo at the start, Schaunard fights with Eufemia, Marcello and Musetta meet, fight and part -- does not provide.
The ENO‘s production (seen on 8 November) is part of the autumn Italian season and is performed on the same set as all the other operas in the season. This means that it has the challenge of differentiating itself not so much from Puccini’s La Bohème as from the La Bohème-like Manon Lescaut, also in the season. Tim Albery, the director, takes his cue from Murger’s genre and emphasises the class of the bohemians rather than the individual characters. Each act begins with a group of drab wage slaves clocking off and presumably going to their polite homes, in contrast to the colourful bohemians. It’s probably a bit of a problem that Marcello and Rodolfo are almost indistinguishable; but the dominant image of Schaunard as the ringmaster of an endless circus of urban misfits is striking. It’s also not the only link this production seems to make with Lulu -- the dreary attic where Mimi dies the final act is expressionist grey --, though the visual style and costumes are more Hoxton than Vienna. There are also bits of the sets of other operas lurking about the scaffolding, films from The Turk in Italy and a masker from the Venetian set of Manon, perhaps pointing to other links.
The young cast all looked like modern students, as close as you‘ll get to bohemians these days. Sandra Ford was gamine (in a Lulu haircut) as Mimi, but sounded dry at times. Rebecca de Pont Davies as Eufemia, Schaunard’s abused girlfriend, dealt classily with a couple of bizarre costumes. Christine Rice had great style, vocal and personal, as Musetta. She is at the contraltoid end of the mezzo range and came over as a kind of earth mother in thrift shop couture, endearing though perhaps not how you imagine Musetta.
Paul Whelan was an extroverted, extremely student-like Schaunard. Rhys Meirion as Marcello and Leigh Melrose as Rodolfo both put a lot into their last act arias but were otherwise a bit colourless. The rest of the cast, and the chorus, were a disparate lot visually but musically cohesive.
H.E. Elsom
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