Giacomo Puccini was, frankly, a manipulative horror. He set out to mangle his audience’s hearts and he knew exactly how to do it.
Therefore, if you don’t exit his La Bohème an emotional wreck, whether it is your first viewing or your 200th, there’s something wrong. Happily – if that isn’t too paradoxical a term – you’ll need plenty of tissues for its latest ENO revival.
Updated to the Paris of 1930, with Isabella Bywater’s designs inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s photography, this classic 2009 Jonathan Miller production keeps coming back because nothing is broken and it doesn’t need fixing.
Now, under revival director Crispin Lord, some exciting young singers are making Rodolfo and his impoverished artist friends very much their own.
First, there was a fine ENO debut from the Irish soprano Sinead Campbell-Wallace as Mimi, the consumptive neighbour who embroiders flowers. She, though, was no shrinking violet. Tuberculosis could kill anybody, sweet or otherwise, and this Mimi seemed independent, self-assured and somewhat ahead of Rodolfo’s seduction game.
Campbell-Wallace is blessed with a big, bright belter of a voice and one suspects Mimi won’t always be her signature role, given the large repertoire that awaits her.
She was well matched by tenor David Junghoon Kim as Rodolfo, the bookish poet with a tank top and a dark side; he boasted the requisite effortless top notes and fount of lyricism, but also made Rodolfo’s lightning infatuation with Mimi believably genuine rather than creepy.
As his hot-tempered flatmate Marcello, baritone Charles Rice excelled in character and vocal punch alike. The established star of the cast was soprano Louise Alder as a gloriously irrepressible Musetta whose waltz aria raised Marcello’s hackles, the temperature and ultimately the roof.
Part of the production’s joy, though, is in the detail of smaller roles: Simon Butteriss delivered a characterful double-whammy as both Benoît the landlord – apparently channelling Alf Garnett – and Alcindoro, Musetta’s older lover, whose repeated order to her to “keep your voice down” proved suitably hilarious.
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There was high-octane horsing-about with Benson Wilson’s Schaunard and a particularly tender Overcoat Aria from William Thomas as Colline.
The chorus let rip in the Café Momus Act II, and the children – depleted on this occasion, since the boys’ school had a Covid outbreak – made up in gusto for what they lacked in numbers.
But the biggest cheer deservedly went to the orchestra and its conductor Ben Glassberg, in whose hands this huge-hearted score bounded to life, roaring and soaring.
Finally, a tribute to the late librettist Amanda Holden, whose splendid translation makes it seem the most natural thing in the world to sing Puccini in English.