La Rondine, Opera North, Theatre Royal, Nottingham, 10 November, 2023.

4****: William Ruff.

For many in Opera North’s audience Puccini’s La Rondine will be a discovery. It’s so easy to fall in love with its gorgeous melodies and its unusual mix of comedy and pathos, domestic intimacy and public spectacle.

Its heroine, Magda, is a familiar operatic type. In the days when talented women were excluded from most careers, she relies for her economic survival on being the mistress of rich men. She’s a bird (the title means ‘The Swallow’) trapped in a gilded cage and she yearns for freedom, to return to her youth and have her life all over again. At Bullier, a popular night spot, she falls in love with a young man called Ruggero and they go off to live together.

When he eventually gets his family’s approval to marry her, we see Magda’s heart breaking. Puccini’s world has very different standards for men and women. A ‘fallen’ woman can’t marry a man from a respectable background, so she sadly decides that she must leave him forever. Yes, it’s all very sad but no one dies (a rarity in Puccini operas) and the overall effect of the opera is light and sparkling rather than grim and doom-laden.

Opera North’s production (directed by James Hurley) is part of its ‘Green Season’ and no doubt laudable recycling means that the sparkle lies more in the music, lighting and costumes than in a set which relies on the (admittedly ingenious) use of metal frameworks. The posh frocks, however, instantly create a sense of period glamour. Act 2’s Parisian nightlife is conjured up by an enormous, tree-like floral display which draws the eye through its explosion of colour and economically suggests the exciting, fulfilled life which Magda so desires. In the same scene Puccini calls for a crowd of ‘students, artists, ladies of the night, adventure-seekers and curious onlookers’. Opera North don’t hold back: they pack the stage with energy and activity (including some impressively acrobatic dancing) whilst producing the sort of vocal thrills from their superb Chorus which make rib-cages vibrate.

The cast is strong. Galina Averina is a vocal actress who convinces you that Magda’s are the genuine, deep emotions of frustration, yearning and (at the end) pain as she faces the inevitability of returning to her caged life. Sébastien Guèze as Ruggero is not only forthright and ardent in his singing but also suggests the vulnerable idealism of youth. Their passionate duet at the end of Act II was one of the production’s most moving highlights. There’s another significant (but secret) relationship in the opera too: that of the Poet Prunier (Elgan Llŷr Thomas) and the maidservant Lisette (Claire Lees). Together they made their improbable affair wholly convincing.

The Orchestra of Opera North has been wonderfully consistent over the years. Not only are they in fine form in this production but their conductor Karem Hasam is completely inside Puccini’s sound-world, with all its ebb and flow, light and shade, making his orchestra as finely nuanced an actor as any other member of the cast. If La Rondine needs a champion, it’s certainly found one in this Opera North production.

Cast:

Galina Averina MAGDA

Sébastien Guèze RUGGERO

Claire Lees LISETTE

Elgan Llŷr Thomas PRUNIER

Philip Smith RAMBALDO

Pasquale Orchard YVETTE

Creatives:

The Chorus and Orchestra of Opera North conducted by Kerem Hasan

James Hurley DIRECTOR

Leslie Travers SET DESIGNER

Gabrielle Dalton COSTUME DESIGNER

Paule Constable and Ben Pickersgill LIGHTING DESIGNERS