Royal treatment

Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out metronomically on a pub piano, or dispersed underneath the arches at Waterloo, or most absurdly of all made into a DVD and set in ‘real’ locations, with actual snow falling, it remains inviolate, though that isn’t perhaps the first word to use in connection with anything Puccinian.

Yet every now and then it gets the royal treatment, and how much more satisfying it is when it does. There wasn’t a bar that Rizzi hadn’t considered, not in order to do something different, but to reveal his love of the work. After one has been to a fair number of performances of Bohème, it’s easy to feel that the opening 20 minutes of banter, the arrival and enforced departure of the landlord Benoit in particular, is little more than the upbeat to what really matters, Puccini’s first earth-shifting love scene — the one in Manon Lescaut is fine, but not in this class. The richness of orchestral detail and the rhythmic and melodic vitality of the score came into new focus with Rizzi. A few weeks ago at the Royal Opera, Semyon Bychkov presented the work to us in great symphonic arches, but Rizzi moved it closer to Verdian drama, where he is most at home.

The settings are odd, neither quite inside nor outside, and with large silvery-mirror slats at the sides. There are lots of projections, some of them surprisingly cosmic for Bohème.