Puccini, La Bohème:  Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Vjekoslav Sutej, dir. Jose Maria Condemi, set designer Pier Luigi Pizzi, costume designer Martin Pakledinaz, lighting designer Thomas C. Hase, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle, 5.5 & 8.5.2006 (BJ)

Of all Puccini’s operas, it is Tosca that has routinely attracted the largest share of quasi-moral indignation. Notoriously, the American musicologist Joseph Kerman, in his book Opera as Drama, dubbed it a “shabby little shocker.”

I have never understood such views. Granted, Tosca’s list of characters includes a pretty detestable villain, and, yes, the opera has its share of melodramatic situations (hardly a surprise, seeing that it is officially subtitled a “melodrama”). But two of the three principals–Cavaradossi, a dedicated political reformer, and Tosca herself–are real, likeable, and in many ways admirable people. They have serious jobs to do, and they do them seriously, he as a painter and she as an opera singer. In this respect they resemble, say, the Yves Montand and Simone Signoret characters in the film La Guerre est finie: they are lovers and human beings too, unlike the fluffier lovers-and-nothing-but that populate many an operatic potboiler–and certainly unlike the characters in La Bohème.

Oh, yes; I know the Feckless Four are nominally associated with intellectual pursuits, Rodolfo as a poet, Marcello as a painter, Schaunard as a musician, and Colline as a philosopher, and Mimì claims to be engaged in making artificial flowers. But all of them are conspicuous, at least while we are watching them, for failing to do much or indeed anything in their respective lines of business. And I know I am being grouchy, and no doubt incorrigibley bourgeois to boot, in finding their conduct in Act II –when they hightail it out of the Café Momus leaving Musetta’s long-suffering “protector” Alcindoro to foot their bill – totally reprehensible. It’s analogous to the kind of “innocent” shoplifting that frequently shows up in movies and for some reason doesn’t offend people who wouldn’t dream of perpetrating it themselves.

What all this, however, is intended as preliminary to is the suggestion that Bohème is a relatively mindless entertainment, and that it depends for its effect almost entirely on two considerations: that the main characters, though unproductive as members of society, should kindle our affection as individuals, and that the music should be well performed. Both of these desiderata were for the most part handsomely fulfilled in Seattle Opera’s new production, which I saw with both of its alternating casts, and which gave me a great deal of pleasure.

Against the background of gorgeous sets originally designed by Pier Luigi Pizzi for Lyric Opera of Chicago (where I first saw them way back in the last century), with fine costumes designed by Martin Pakledinaz and atmospherically effective lighting by Thomas C. Hase, the stage action is managed in masterful fashion by the young Argentinian director Jose Maria Condemi (who seems not to accent the “e” in his first name). Once past that tired old contemporary opera-production cliché of having characters stand on chairs, he never puts a foot wrong, whether in the intimate scenes of the outer acts, or in elucidating the tumultuous crush of persons that congregate in front of the café in Act II.

As to likeability, moreover, he has the good fortune to be working with an unusually personable group of bohemians, or rather two such groups. In what might be termed the no. 1 cast, the Australian tenor Rosario La Spina presented a particularly amiable, indeed cuddly, figure, and evinced a passionate belief in the emotions he was called on to register. Though on opening night he sounded ill at ease in the upper register, there is clearly a good voice waiting to emerge, as it quite likely will later in the run. But he really must guard against a tendency to shout that at one juncture reached the point of sounding almost like a deliberate joke: emerging from the tavern in Act III, he observed to his friend Marcello that “no one can hear us here” in tones so stentorian they could hardly have been missed on the other side of Paris.

It was instructive to compare La Spina’s strategy, when confronted by a difficult note, of attempting to subdue it by main force, with his counterpart Scott Piper’s more artful procedure in the other cast. Perhaps a shade less compelling in terms of demeanor, Piper still made a believable Rodolfo, and though he too showed a certain lack of power at the top of the range, he dealt with it by refinement rather than aggression. As the evening continued, furthermore, the voice opened out to produce some really melting passages.

Opposite Piper’s Rodolfo was the Mimì of another singer making her company debut, the German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin. This too was an assumption of considerable promise, and in her performance also an initially veiled quality above the staff was gradually overcome, to reveal a tone both beautiful and well-focused. She acted well, too. But in this regard she had (given that I had seen the other cast first) a hard act to follow. Ms. Barkmin played Mimì well, but on opening night Nuccia Focile simply was Mimì. After witnessing her performance, I went back to the always adorable Victoria de Los Angeles’s classic recording of the role conducted by Beecham, and found that Focile emerged from the comparison even more wonderfully complete in her projection of a character at once lovable and fragile yet possessed of a certain deep tranquillity–and her singing was on the same supreme level.

Among Rodolfo’s friends, aside from a Schaunard (Jeremy Kelly) who wasn’t always ideally audible, I thought the opening-night line-up of Philip Cutlip, a surpassingly attractive Marcello with a glorious baritone voice, and Deyan Vatchkov, commanding of stature, sympathetic, and highly amusing when he starts to dance, particularly strong. Michael Todd Simpson’s Marcello, Ashraf Sewailam’s Colline, and Marcus DeLoach’s Schaunard were nevertheless highly accomplished in their different ways. Of the two vocally excellent Musettas, Karen Driscoll on opening night was a shade the more shrewish, which is dramatically apt enough, whereas Margarita De Arellano exercised a lighter touch, and in consequence was possibly more believable when transformed in the last act from insensitive flirt to compassionate friend. Tony Dillon appeared in both casts, doubling as Benoit and Alcindoro, and gave us neat and amusing cameos of those two put-upon gentlemen.

It remains to commend the Croatian conductor Vjekoslav Sutej on his assured pacing of Puccini’s luxuriant score, and on the equally assured and often seductive playing he drew from the orchestra. I shall be happy to see him back next season for Tosca. In that opera, some of the more forceful orchestral sonorities Puccini occasionally, and not always appropriately, calls for in La Bohème – such as the big and excessively rhetorical chords that follow Mimì’s death scene, where surely a restrained and intimate conclusion was needed – may be expected to fit more naturally.

Bernard Jacobson