Each encounter with Puccini’s La bohème – assuming the performance is up to scratch, which the Royal Opera’s latest revival is – makes you rethink the elements that make this work a masterpiece: time-proof and foolproof, as a blunt critic early last century put it, bemoaning the grandmotherly Mimìs, screeching Musettas and overweight Rodolfos he’d endured over the years (he’d have to watch his adjectives today). The plot jumps awkwardly between its four “tableaux” acts. Aspects of the story don’t quite make sense. Yet Puccini spins his material into a perfect mesh of mirth and tears. His theatrical instinct is faultless, and no other composer teases out strands of melody so apparently effortlessly and rhapsodically.
In the case of Bohème this means, famously, from first encounter to full-blown love in a matter of minutes for the seamstress Mimì and the poet Rodolfo. Their big Act 1 duet, O soave fanciulla, is a reliable test, early on, of the evening’s emotional temperature. The Romanian-born British soprano Simona Mihai (a late replacement, who sang the role for the ROH last year and plays Musetta later in the run) and the American tenor Charles Castronovo scored highly, with the conductor, Emmanuel Villaume, pacing this slowly unfurling music with well-judged control. In this score, the woodwind weaves and soars, now buried in the texture (the exuberant oboe tune is near the start), now singing its own melody, so often voiced by solo clarinet. Though the ROH players must know this music inside out, it sounded fresh and alive.
The bustling opening between the four young bohemians was slightly chaotic in this return (the second) of Richard Jones’s 2017 production, but singing was strong: Andrzej Filończyk (Marcello), Peter Kellner (Colline), Gyula Nagy (Schaunard) were zestful students, the veteran Jeremy White lovable and tiresome as the landlord, Benoît. Aida Garifullina, saucy and sexy as Musetta, knows exactly how to hold the stage without stealing the show. Gradually this production is putting down roots. This was never going to happen instantly, given that the ROH’s previous old oak of a production had run for 41 years. Yet Jones’s production, too, has its charms, in the handsome if stiff embrace of Stewart Laing’s designs, with its magnificent Parisian arcades, Cafe Momus, and bewitching falling snow. See the show live in cinemas on 29 January.
Weather is one of many aspects that come under the heading Nature Unwrapped, the new series at Kings Place, which began last weekend. These year-long projects (Venus Unwrapped – focusing on female composers – has just ended) offer a form of integrated programming that other venues might achieve for a weekend or a short festival but, on the whole, are not mad or brave enough to attempt for an entire season. Somehow Kings Place succeeds, mixing musical genres, film and spoken word as if concert life had always been this way. Whether you want poetry, folk or Monteverdi, it’s here. An artist in residence, the sound recordist and composer Chris Watson, will provide an aural calendar of the natural world, which started with winter on the Wash. Hearing, as you enter this auditorium in London’s King’s Cross, the teeming cries of wading birds and wildfowl in north-west Norfolk, could grow addictive.
It was a welcome prelude, last Saturday, to the spare, mostly unaccompanied choral music of Arvo Pärt, sung by Theatre of Voices to Phie Ambo’s meditative film on the passing seasons, Songs from the Soil. These six agile singers, directed by Paul Hillier, also gave the UK premiere of A Western by Michael Gordon (a founder of Bang on a Can, the New York-based rock-jazz-minimalist ensemble). Witty and, in the right sense, slick, it borrows the storyline of the cowboy film High Noon (1952), and confronts the perils of consumerism at the expense of nature.
On Tuesday, continuing Nature Unwrapped, the violinist Jack Liebeck “and friends” – an elite ensemble of five string players and harpsichordist – were joined by Brian Cox, physicist and media star. In between a crisp, rhythmically taut performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Cox explained – brilliantly and fluently if not entirely comprehensibly – the theory of relativity, the evolution of the universe, cosmology, quantum entanglement: the lot. With some ticket prices as low as £8.50 this was quite a bargain. I’d tell you more if I had time. Or spacetime…
Star ratings (out of five)
La bohème ★★★★
Nature Unwrapped ★★★★
• La bohème is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 27 May
• Nature Unwrapped runs at Kings Place, London, throughout 2020
