Modest means, but striking results: Opera North’s La rondine reviewed

Opera North is ending its autumn season with a big-hearted production of a lopsided opera. There’s much to love about Puccini’s La rondine, and much to drive you up the wall. This bittersweet love story about an older woman and a younger man, set in Paris and Nice and channelling the operetta sweetness and sparkle of Puccini’s great friend Lehar, ought to sweep you off your feet. Instead, it tempts critics into that most shameless form of condescension, the armchair rewrite. Giacomo, old chap, isn’t five minutes into Act One a bit soon to be introducing your big hit aria? We’re halfway through Act Two: shouldn’t the lovers be together by now? And isn’t this basically just La traviata played for lower emotional stakes? Come on, man, you wrote Bohème. Why am I having to tell you this? 

One way or another, though, there’s still something vital at the heart of La rondine and James Hurley’s production went all out to make it sing. This is Opera North’s Green Season, so the sets were recycled. In truth it looked like a fairly standard ON touring show: not much budget but plenty of imagination, with skilful lighting (by Paule Constable and Ben Pickersgill) to suggest a Paris sunset or a Riviera morning. There’s energetic dancing in the Paris nightclub. Crowds adopt languid poses in tailcoats and flapper dresses, and Magda (Galina Averina) and Ruggero (Sébastien Guèze) share their much-delayed first kiss beneath a cascade of flowers. Again: modest means, but striking results. 

Averina makes a tender but spirited Magda, etching sweet arcs of melody on the evening sky. She’s vulnerable, but not brittle; and as often happens in this opera, she made an altogether more engaging impression than her underwritten toy boy Ruggero.