Opera House Pub, Tunbridge Wells
21 February 2016
Half the audience has not seen La Boheme before and a handful are opera virgins. We know this because musical director Harry Sever asks for a show of hands during his brief spoken introduction which includes a demonstration of Puccini’s signature music for each of the four main characters.
Kent-based Merry Opera Company has made a specialism of presenting opera accessibly for new audiences to enjoy, alongside the cognoscenti. This concise (two hours) bijoux account of La Boheme sung in English with a cast of eleven does that pretty effectively.
Lawrence Thackeray as Rudolfo brings pleasing tonal and dynamic range and makes young love seem fresh and interesting as he is gradually captivated by Andrea Tweedale’s excellent Mimi. Then he finds all the requisite powerful and moving lyricism in Act 4 as Mimi inevitably succumbs to her illness. Several audience members around me – taken aback by the plot itself maybe – were weeping at the end, exactly as Puccini intended. Andrea Tweedale is deeply convincing, soaring the high notes in the famous Act 1 love duet and letting her voice, on lower notes, fade away almost to nothing in her prostrate death scene. All the quartet and sextet work was musically well balanced and realistically acted too – this is, after all, a pretty ordinary tale of nineteenth century life of artists (or would be artists) and their circle in Paris. It has to be naturalistic to work and director Christopher Cowell gets that absolutely right.
Sever is a very unusual musical director because, accompanying from digital piano, positioned stage right, he plays the entire opera from memory without music. That means that his eyes never leave the singers and action. It makes for striking focused and sensitive musical coherence. It is one of the factors which make this production so very watchable.
On the other hand, much as I applaud the decision to use language which the audience understands there are always problems with translation. In Chris Cowell’s libretto banal lines such as “no more waking up together” and “anxious on the landing” do not sit within the texture of the music as the original mellifluous long-vowelled Italian does. SE