Tis the season to be merry - bonhomie warms as hedonism ignites – and another festive revival of La Boheme duly appears from the wings of the Royal Opera House to general applause, this winter. From the plot’s bitter-sweet, Christmas Eve onset (love defying odds to emerge temporarily triumphant from privation’s icy pall) the opera merges pathos with bathos, and (unexpectedly) therein lies much of its charm. John Copley’s interpretation of La Boheme has been delighting loyalist and newcomer alike at the Royal Opera House since 1974.
      Puccini’s consuming, consumptive tale of love across the divide (death’s Styx the least of it) addresses the legend of bohemian Paris, which captured popular imagination from 1830. Like our very own Hoxton-dwelling hobo-trustafarians; poseurs, opportunists and charlatans mingled with soi-disant impecunious ‘artistes’ in Montparnasse and adjoining quarters. This was one of the first places on earth whose denizens enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame - long before Warhol hall-marked the rebel zeitgeist a century later.
      La Boheme affectionately reproduced an artist’s impression of creative penury and dubious red-light stimulae. In spite of its endearing cast of well-intentioned n’er-do-wells – cheeky-chappy chancers all – Puccini’s charismatic slummers were merely passing through his idealised shanty, immune to offal and ordure. Pretty, winsome, seamstress Mimi - a picture-perfect vision of local colour - is dying: a proto poster-girl for systemic neglect. No one would pretend today that the ersatz setting of La Boheme was more than a delicious construct. Novelists like George du Maurier, later immortalised the era with more conviction - his Trilby, an artist’s model destroyed by the infamous, control-freak Svengali.
      The past is another country, and today’s cast apply themselves to the libretto with confidence. Romanian Teodor Ilincai, filling in for a sickly Piotr Beczala, performs an assured and premature Royal Opera debut (originally scheduled for the 26 and 28 December) as Rodolfo. An easy rapport with Marcello elides smoothly into the ‘double-dates’ with stricken Mimi and coquettish Musetta. Inna Dukach is really rather good as this demi-mondaine; with a panache to match her pitch. Hibla Gerzmava’s Mimi is tiny but blessed with an ambitious voice. The Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, conducts the opera at Covent Garden for the first time. While obviously accomplished, he has a tendency to allow the orchestra to overwhelm the soloists at climactic moments – notably Rodolfo in the first act.
      Arguably, this reprise of La Boheme has no shortage of fans. However, I would like to see the staging and costumes given a revamp - an MTV-style pimp-the-glamour restyle for its faded image. Each time I witness Copley’s staging, I enjoy the score, depart uplifted - yet wish to heaven for some new feast for the eyes.
Caroline Kellett Fraysse