A wonderful, restrained, Bohemian
Last night at Glyndebourne to see La bohème, in a stark but very moving production, beautifully sung.
The set is simple a cobbled Parisian street running upstage over a hill, hemmed in by grey walls in which all the scenes are played, actors entering out of pitch black from up the hill (although in the second act doors do open in the grey walls). Although most of the libretto, of course, is actually set indoors, the starkness of the set (and, in the second half, the snow banked up at the road side), gave a real feeling of poverty and despair inherent in the lives of the principals. Very Zola.
The costumes are equally sombre, mainly in greys and blacks with few splashes of colour - a pink beret, red balloons – very Parisian (the 1956 film) but also very Banksy - (and a bank of pink flowers at the end).
But the real colour is in the singing, with strong performances throughout, but particularly Long Long as Rodolfo (in our performance) and Yaritza Véliz as Mimi.
The audience was held spell-bound in their first Act arias and duets - you could feel a tenseness as we both wanted to applaud and didn’t want to break the tension until both singers exited and we could go wild. A nice directorial touch is the inclusion of Death, who is Mimi’s constant (silent) companion, leading her away (spoiler alert) at the end.
This was an incredibly moving, and honest, production. Jordan de Souza, leading the London Philharmonic does Puccini proud. If you can, see it.