Voices of doom

It’s December, and while musical theatre is busy celebrating ‘warm woollen mittens’, opera, as usual, is far more interested in the tiny frozen hands inside them. Because nothing says Christmas quite like consumption, and I’m not talking turkey and mince pies.

London’s opera companies are serving up a heaped sleighful of heartbreak this year. English National Opera is going traditional with La bohème, while the Royal Opera is thinking outside the snow-covered coffin with Carmen. There’s something for everybody, so long as it’s tragedy.

ENO’s Bohème is the safe option, the show you take your granny to. She’ll be enchanted by Jonathan Miller’s production, which makes its young bohemians’ poverty just picturesque enough (their Parisian garret is stark rather than squalid), and might not even notice the rather workaday performances in this fourth revival.

First seen in 2009, Miller’s Bohème nudges the action forward some 100 years to the ‘années folles’ of the 1920s. Café Momus becomes an edgy guinguette where Fitzgerald and André Breton might have traded writing tips with Rodolfo, and a Josephine Baker-esque Musetta (Nadine Benjamin) holds the stage. It’s a neat sleight-of-hand, nicely framed in Isabella Bywater’s revolving sets — an unobtrusive restoring of operatic order after Benedict Andrews’s teenage rebellion of a crack-den Bohème for ENO in 2015.

But if snow dutifully falls and the children’s chorus pipes shrilly and evocatively, it still lacks that closing stab of emotion that should send you out of a Bohème broken as only good opera and bad Victorian novels can. Alexander Joel gets some beautiful sounds from the orchestra, but tends to indulge, overworking a score that shines under the lightest of touches. Jonathan Tetelman’s Rodolfo lacks any sense of Italianate release, but his handsome, dark-toned tenor is a good match for Natalya Romaniw’s dusky Mimi.