La Bohème
English National Opera
The Demon
Barbican
Of all the most popular operas of Puccini, La Bohème is the one that has attracted least critical fire, and that, even during the long period when highbrows were required to despise him, was exempted from the general interdict. Even though the heroine dies a harrowing death, at least it is from natural causes, she is surrounded by people who love her, and her brief happiness earlier in the opera is set to the most gorgeous, and two of the lengthiest, arias that Puccini ever wrote. So the element of sadism that is so disturbing in several of the other operas is wholly absent here, and for all the cold and hunger and illness the drama and the music conjure a prelapsarian world.
Not only has Bohème proved producer-proof, on the whole producers have contented themselves with mild adjustments to the period in which it is set, and haven’t found ways to ‘deconstruct’ it. Jonathan Miller is, in any case, opposed to deconstructive productions, and that may have some connection to his otherwise inexplicable absence in the UK as an operatic director in the past 20 years, about which he has been justifiably outspoken. His new production of Bohème has been much speculated about but, now that we have witnessed it, it turns out to be extraordinarily inconspicuous. He is quoted in the programme as saying, ‘I want to make it as much like a movie as it could possibly be. I’m basing the artists’ relationship on the movie Withnail and I — shabby, upper-class boys who think squalor is very romantic.’ If he hadn’t said it you would never have guessed. The sets, uniformly colourless and depressing, move with admirable speed to ensure there’s no break at all between the first two acts, and between the last two. But you see upstairs and down, outside and in, in a way that is not like any movie I recall, and I have never seen one, either, in which the acting is so obviously that of opera singers rather than movie stars. Nor, apart from some of the clothes and hairstyles, would I have identified the Bohemians as ‘shabby, upper-class boys’, and it’s hard to see how thinking squalor is romantic could be conveyed anyway, especially when they are clearly not enjoying their impoverished condition.
So what we get is a surprisingly anonymous production, which will no doubt last for many years, and accommodate many different performers. What we don’t get, with this first team of performers, is any sharp characterisation, apart from the Musetta of Hanan Alattar, whose warm-heartedness enlivens each scene she appears in; unfortunately she has a rasping, raucous voice which turns the Waltz Song into a brief ordeal. I wished that the Mimi, Melody Moore, had been singing the part, since she has the voice of a soubrette and is quite incapable of opening out at the magical moments in the First and Third Acts. Asked what a Puccini soprano needs, Angela Gheorghiu recently said, ‘Tears in the voice,’ and Moore’s voice is devoid of any form of liquidity. Odd-looking, too, in the costumes and make-up she is allotted: a frump, a hard-pressed mother out of a Depression-era movie. Her Rodolfo is slightly more romantic in appearance, but Alfie Boe’s voice, at any rate on the second night, was so tight and small that he was swamped by the orchestra at all his key moments. Is he enduring the vocal crisis that seems to be part of the tenor’s rite of passage? Roland Wood’s Marcello is a more plausible figure, and what dramatic animation there was was between him and Musetta. Why were the two old men, who have repetitious ageist fun poked at them in the first two acts, allowed to ham it up so atrociously? The young Peruvian Miguel Harth-Bedoya got some rich playing from the orchestra, but impetus was lacking in the long first halves of the outer acts. What an odd translation Amanda Holden’s is — full of mis-stressed words, ‘millionaire’ accented on the second syllable for instance; and with clumsy grammatical constructions. This opera can withstand anything, though, and the genius of every note of Act 3 and the final scene remained intact, moving as only this work is, sentimental but with no hint of falsity, the Puccinian paradox.
The Mariinsky’s residency at the Barbican moved on from the splendours of The Queen of Spades to the mediocrity of Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon. But it was performed as if it were a masterpiece, the only way, so one would dread a less committed account. Yevgeny Nikitin, elaborately tattooed, managed to impart an incredible legato to his reams of declamatory denunciation of the world and its creator. The object of his lust, Tamara, was just as impressively sung by Irma Gigolaty. Rubinstein, a most copious composer, gives the impression, for any ten-minute stretch, that he is well worth listening to. Listen to much more than that, though, and you, or he, are in trouble with his insipid and Gounod-influenced idiom. I hope this superlative account didn’t give anyone any ideas of staging The Demon.
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