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Love affair (continued)


Too bad there was only one performance. For the next three days, Teatro Lirico presented Puccini’s evergeen La bohème, casting two different pairs of lovers. My night, the Saturday of the blizzard (the Majestic was sold out but only about half the audience showed up), the Mimi was the attractive Bulgarian soprano Veselina Vasileva, who impressed me last season with her touching and delicately sung Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata — opera lovers’ other favorite tubercular heroine. Here, she was less convincing as an innocent seamstress than she’d been as a sophisticated demi-mondaine. In the first act, when Mimi’s candle goes out and she loses her key in the hero’s garret, Vasileva grinned a lot — not so much shy as archly simpering. In the second act, at the Café Momus, director Lalov for the most part kept the two new lovers hidden behind members of the chorus. But in the third act, especially in Mimi’s aria of farewell, "Addio, senza rancor" (which turns out to be an aria of reuniting), Vasileva was radiantly poignant, her lovely outpouring of glistening tone filling the theater. And her death scene, one of the most nearly foolproof moments in all of opera, was heart-rending.

Her Rodolfo, however, American tenor David Corman, from Minneapolis, Kansas, didn’t fare as well. He made a big sound, but it always seemed forced and a little rigid. He’s not much of an actor, either, rather lumbering. In his very first line, Rodolfo sings that he’s looking out at the smoke rising from the thousand chimneys of Paris (he’s a poet); Corman was nowhere near the garret window, and he was staring down at his desk. When Rodolfo tells Mimi that he loves her, Corman was gazing not at Vasileva but out into the audience, or down into the pit.

Maybe he had to keep his eyes glued to the conductor, because the problems that cropped up in Hristo Ignatov’s musical direction of the Rossini caused more serious damage to his Puccini. This opera depends less on the sparkle of individual numbers (as in Rossini) than on the flow of conversation and the way it flowers into song. Here everything was too slow and monotonously paced. Virtually every phrase ended with a dead spot that the singers couldn’t, or didn’t know how to, fill.

Neither the flat, drab borrowed sets nor Lalov’s staging helped. La bohème, as the program note reminded us, was an operatic breakthrough into Realism. These impecunious bohemians — poet, artist, musician, philosopher, seamstress — were new elements in opera. Puccini mixes laugh-out-loud high jinks with three-hanky sentiment, a combination he never tried again. It’s crucial that we believe in the reality of these characters, their horseplay and their sorrows. So all the gaffes in the staging — Rodolfo not looking out the window, Mimi looking for her dropped key in a part of the garret she’s never been near, people sitting in an outdoor café in the middle of winter, a roommate bursting in with an unexpectedly bountiful basket of food and wine yet not looking at his friends — made you think, "This is only an opera" rather than "This is like life." That wonderful sense of ensemble, the chemistry of personal connections, so apparent and appealing in Barbiere was almost non-existent in Bohème. This time, the supertitles were working, so you could read clearly the discrepancies between words and deeds.

It was fun to see Vladimir Samsonov, our Figaro, turn up as the painter Marcello, who’s driven crazy by that beautiful minx Musetta, the foxy blonde Ukrainian soprano Marina Viskvorkina. (She overplayed the comedy but was deeply touching in Musetta’s last-act demonstration of generosity to the dying Mimi.) And marvelous to hear the remarkable Viacheslov Pochapsky in the small but endearing role of Colline, the philosopher, who sings a tender and humorous farewell to his dear old friend, his overcoat, which he’ll hock in order to buy something special for Mimi. Colline demonstrated more genuine feeling for his coat than Rodolfo did for Mimi. Hristo Sarafov, the Bartolo, was back as two dupes, the landlord who wants his overdue rent and Musetta’s rich admirer, playing broadly but with a wealth of telling detail.

Despite the problems, even the incompetence, I suspect that by the end there were few dry eyes. The audience gave cast and musicians a standing ovation before heading back out into the storm.

Teatro Lirico d’Europa will be back at the Majestic March 23 through 26 for four performances of Carmen, and on March 27, Easter Sunday, it will stage an additional Bohème for ticket holders who couldn’t make it downtown in the storm (and anyone else who’d like to buy a ticket). We’re promised more-reliable supertitle projection, Teatro Lirico’s own sets, and its usual conductor. This concern for the audience is one more reason to love this company.

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Issue Date: January 28 - February 3, 2005
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