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Evening Standard |
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Puccini: La Rondine, ROH, London November 2004
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BLOWSY and lavish with tunes, Puccini's La Rondine has
returned to Covent Garden with a refreshed staging and largely new cast.
Angela Gheorghiu still sings Magda, the "swallow" of the title, as she did
when Nicolas Joel's production was new two years ago. Now her husband,
Roberto Alagna, has been replaced by the exciting German tenor Jonas
Kaufmann, making his house debut as her young lover, Ruggero.
La Rondine is the closest Puccini came to operetta, full of slow waltzes
and other hinted dance rhythms. The slim plot is uneven and some find the
piece irritatingly saccharine. I would argue the reverse. The poignant
dilemma of a woman torn between loveless money or moneyless love is
feelingly expressed and begins to stray towards the complex emotional
world of Puccini's contemporary Richard Strauss.
The opening night of this Covent Garden production was full of pleasure
without ever quite catching fire. The staging looks sumptuous.
Turn-of the century Paris is beautifully created via a cocktail of Tiffany
glass and Wiener Werkstatte detail in Ezio Frigerio's sets. Franca
Squarciapino's elegant, flapperish costumes suggest a period just after
the opera's wartime premiere in 1917.
Musically, however, something was missing. Emmanual Villaume, conducting,
sounded over-polite, as if unwilling to indulge in the music's schmaltzy
excesses. Kaufmann sings with glorious control and depth, especially in
the charged third act, but his performance as yet is constrained.
A little of Alagna's stage flair and look-at-me panache would give edge to
an already fine performance. The expert Robert Lloyd as the overthrown
Rambaldo, Kurt Streit's smooth Prunier and Annamaria dell'Oste's spirited
Lisette, together with a well-drilled Royal Opera chorus, provide welcome
depth and variety.
The great draw, of course, was Gheorghiu, ice cool and compelling yet
strangely disengaged. She remains technically breathtaking, floating her
lines and holding everything in reserve for the big, impassioned
outbursts. Her pianissimo singing teeters as near the edge of audibility
as it's sensible to get. The role demands her to be brittle and
coquettish, but you can't help thinking the seductive Kaufmann deserves
someone slightly more cuddly. |
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