June 29 2011

NRC Handelsblad
24 May 2011
By Jochem Valkenburg

Impressively-styled ‘La Bohème’ in designer department store

As an artist it is hard enough to stay alive, let alone to achieve a place among the established order. That is demonstrated in Puccini’s opera La Bohème, but it is also a fact with which the Reisopera finds itself confronted. If it was up to the Council for Culture, the organisation would disappear from the ‘basic infrastructure’ and be reduced to a ‘medium-sized production centre’ that would work more on a project basis.

We must hope that new productions such as this Bohème would then still be possible. The production was – perhaps once one had got used to its predominating icy blue – a feast for the eye. Henri Murger’s 1851 novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème, on which the opera is based, played a prominent part, thanks to the use of blown-up pages of typescript (including handwritten corrections) as ‘wallpaper’. The rest of the design was also ‘modernising’, even though the dingy little garret where love blossoms between the frail seamstress Mimi and the poet Rodolfo remained a dingy little garret – incidentally, rather surprisingly displayed vertically from above in Act Four.

Act Two, which takes place in the restaurant ‘Momus’, here modelled as a designer department store, was the most impressive. The messy little crowd of bohemians was out of tune with the austere, snow-white, decadent environment, where Musetta’s aria Quando me’n vo was the spectacular high-point of the production. Her well-to-do older lover, laden with glossy shopping-bags, came off second-best when, clad in a short red Christmas-skirt, she once again seduced her ‘ex’, the painter Marcello. In the next Act, they fought each other amongst (and with) the rubbish bags behind a night club.

Stephanie Corley (Musetta), with her rich timbre, was a particularly positive high-light amongst the singers. Anita Watson was rather unconvincing as the mortally-condemned Mimi, partly because of her rather flat acting. The tenor Rafael Dávila was an outstanding Rodolfo, while Dutchman Thomas Oliemans defended his country’s honour excellently as Marcello. The conductor Patrick Davin might have treated the orchestral music more delicately, even if Puccini’s dramatics remained irresistible.