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GELFAND’S WORLD - This series, which I originally dubbed “The View from the Balcony” is my attempt to provide some feedback, and maybe a little bit of insight, into local culture -- performances by professional companies and the odd amateur which reach the required level of excellence. I’ve mostly concentrated on local opera companies, as they provide a taste of humanity’s highest cultural achievements. This is not to belittle Tolstoy or Yeats, but when an author combines poetical words with an orchestral accompaniment and the world’s best vocalists, something new and different happens.
I’ve also tried to make clear that these little pieces are by a non-musician and for the non-musician. In brief, I’m interested in the whole experience that is available to the audience, who come in all shapes and sizes, ages, and musical understanding. I’m looking for that magical moment, those few seconds when the hair rises on the back of your neck, when your eyes fill with tears, when you are IN the plot and part of the moment, and you are identifying completely with that person on stage.
So this is an easy one, because in Puccini’s La Boheme, how is it even possible to not identify with the two main characters Rodolfo and Mimi, she the doomed dweller of an otherwise romantic Paris and he the lover doomed to survive her ever-so-young passing? And let me give you one more hint: Their love and parting and coming back together and more parting leading to that one momentous coming together in her last hour of life – all this is accompanied by some of the most beautiful orchestral playing.
But let me leave the critical analysis of La Boheme to another source. Cait Frizzell is a classically trained opera singer who is now doing a series of online discussions which are called Scores Unstitched. Cait includes a nimble wit in an American voice. She asks questions like why so many modern opera productions involve ugly sets, and why it is so often difficult to understand the words, even when an opera is being presented in your own language. In doing all this, she presents – over the course of multiple YouTube videos -- an introduction to what opera is, including an exhaustive listing of all the different kinds of voices that you might hear. (Ever wonder what the difference is between a coloratura and a lyric soprano?)
Anyway, Cait tells us something about the entire repertoire created by Giacomo Puccini. You can listen to her description of the plotting of La Boheme at about the 6 minute mark in this Youtube, although the opening of the YouTube piece is well worth listening to. She refers to “My absolute, all-time love of my life, La Boheme.” She goes on to explain that “Because my yardstick is that I could watch the most low budget, terrible casting, and I would still give it a standing ovation because . . . “ and she goes on to explain what is so special about La Boheme. Basically, it is real people, flawed and noble, hurt and fighting back, who suffer and, for one of them, die.
In other words, there is no need to critique the music or the plot line, or even the words. People have been flocking to Opera houses for 129 years to hear it. There are plenty of reasons.
So if I want to review the LA Opera production of La Boheme, it doesn’t take a lot of words. I don’t think that this was the greatest performance in LA Opera history, but it was an adequate performance of Puccini’s La Boheme, so just at that level it is a remarkable work of art which blew a lot of the audience away emotionally and delivered the goods musically. To my ears, the soprano Janai Brugger (from Darien, Illinois) stole the show as Mimi, the tubercular girl who will sing beautifully and strongly, only to die in peace at the very end. Baritone Gihoon Kim (South Korea) was strong as Marcello and delivered some timely comedy to the proceedings. Soprano Erica Petrocelli (Rhode Island) was musically adept and sexy as Musetta (which is what everyone expects of this part) but adds a little more depth. Tenor Oreste Cosimo was the only Italian I can find in the program – even though American opera houses were staffed mainly by Europeans for much of their existence – and if I can say this delicately, he started out as a bit of a disappointment because, in the opening act, he didn’t throw a big voice around the way that famous tenors of the past couple of generations would have done. He held it back a little, concentrating on nuance and hitting the right notes. The problem for any working tenor these days is that there are all those recordings using singers like Pavarotti (or the other two tenors) who combine beautiful voices with plenty of power, at least in front of the microphone.
To my mind and ear, the music and cast and the tenors got better as this performance went along, so that acts 3 and 4 were wonderful, both musically and dramatically. It does so by milking every bit of drama, tragedy, loss of life and love, all set to Puccini’s score.
To find the direct emotional effect on a naive audience member, new to the story, we could listen to the character played by Cher in the film Moonstruck, after she is taken to see a performance of La Boheme: “I didn’t really think she was gonna die.”
So far this season, this company has put on two pieces about urban poverty, love, death, and human strife – West Side Story and La Boheme – and they both worked marvelously when viewed (and heard) from this balcony seat. There are at least a couple more that are worth considering. The Philip Glass opera Akhnaten is about the Pharoh who is said to have introduced monotheism. It is musically quite different from 19th century Italian opera or Wagner, and it is well worth seeing. Later in the season, LA Opera will do Verdi’s Falstaff. It has been one of the LA Opera staples, and has a wonderful, marvelous, lovely ending. Falstaff was Verdi’s last opera and second comedy, and it is well worth seeing.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
