La Bohème
February 2024 in Reviews
Royal Opera at Covent Garden, February 1 2024
Review by Mark Valencia – Opera with Opera News April 2024
Photo: Camilla Greenwell
Mimì died with pain-free elegance in this revival of the Royal Opera’s La Bohème. Angela Gheorghiu languished gracefully until, on cue, the muff fell from her fingers and she was gone. The entire finale had been the Romanian soprano’s best act of Puccini’s four, for the uncomfortable reason that the fictional character’s decline had found common ground with her own vocal resources, which on this showing are not what they were. Upper registers sounded flaky, forced high notes hard on the ear and intonation hit and miss. For one who admired Gheorghiu in her prime, her current vocal condition was a disappointment.
The company fielded no fewer than three casts for this 13-date run of Richard Jones’s production. Simona Mihai embodied Musetta’s heart-on-sleeve extravagance with a wild display of physical magnetism and vocal splendour. The revival director Simon Iorio rewarded her dynamic first appearance at the Café Momus with an even greater sense of mischievous erotic fun than I recall from previous incarnations.
As for the four starving men whose flimsy garret home contravenes every building regulation in the manual, the Cast B crew were motley but magnificent. Andrey Zhilikhovsky (Marcello), Michael Mofidian (Colline) and Zoltan Nagy (Schaunard) were energized, three-dimensional and convincingly youthful; furthermore, and crucially, they interacted like a genuine group of friends. Vocally, each man seized his individual moments with a generosity that elevated the collective realism. Stefan Pop as Rodolfo had to juggle laddish camaraderie with loving Mimì, so he was kept busy disentangling his character’s emotions. His powerful presence and steadfast tenor timbre ensured he was the ideal hero to anchor Puccini’s opera against the waywardness around him. He made it look easy.
Evelino Pidò was conducting the third of his four scheduled performances (Keri-Lynn Wilson looked after the others), yet he seemed not to own the interpretation. The ROH orchestra played as though on autopilot—understandably, perhaps, since they came to this over-familiar score on the back of an orchestrally stupendous Elektra—and the low voltage of the reading was exacerbated by incidental problems of stage-pit balance. At times it felt as though conductor, cast and orchestra were meeting for the first time.
Jones’s production didn’t ring many bells in its initial run (2017) but over time the glitches in Stewart Laing’s designs have been smoothed out and the show has bedded in. The excruciating moment in Act 3 when a brazier and a wooden cabin trundle comically upstage has been attenuated by starting the peregrination earlier and effecting it more slowly. Act 2, in which spectacle predominates, remains a triumph of scale over clarity but when achieved as tightly as here, and with the Royal Opera chorus on grand form, it is still a thrilling ride. Mark Valencia
