Opera - Peter Conrad on a lavish production that has been hijacked by its stars
Who could love Angela Gheor-ghiu and Roberto Alagna as much as they love each other, or themselves? Their performances make room for connubial endearments, gluey kisses, casual fondlings and whispered intimacies, which remind the rest of us that we are excluded from their heavy-breathing company; yet what they mostly convey is a dual narcissism, the glancing encounter of two self-infatuated solipsists. It helps that Gheorghiu produces a sound of such luscious, dusky allure. Alagna, meanwhile, emits his high notes with the exhibitionism of a crowing cockerel on tiptoe, flapping invisible wings. Every so often they pause, hold a pose, and permit us to applaud them.
Irritating as I find their antics, I have reason to be grateful to them. They are responsible - first on disc and now on stage, in the Royal Opera's swooningly lavish production - for a revival of interest in Puccini's La Rondine, unjustly neglected ever since its premiere in Monte Carlo in 1917. It is easily mistaken for a rehashed hybrid of La Traviata (a courtesan takes up with a callow provincial lad, then renounces him) and Die Fledermaus (mistress and maid swap clothes and identities for a night of louche revelry), but it has its own distinct and brittly modern mood, expertly defined by the conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti - a wilting decadent languor, lacking Puccini's usual visceral violence. The kept woman Magda and her freeloading friends are bored, enfeebled by affluence and animated only by the frenetic imported tangos and fox-trots to which they are addicted. Magda spurns the banker who pays her bills in order to take up with the country boy Ruggero, but the gesture is half-hearted. When the money runs out, she does not hock her jewels to subsidise the idyll, like the self-sacrificing Violetta in Traviata; she tells her distraught victim some euphemistic lies, then wanders off to look for another keeper.
Nicolas Joel's production, in cavernous sets by Ezio Frigerio, places these people in a pampered, neurasthenic, hypocritically divided society. Magda's Parisian salon looks like the Sezession pavilion in Vienna, with gilded murals and candied majolica columns. The dance hall where she spends the night slumming - its smoky fug made infernal by a red, pulsing neon sign in the street outside - opens up behind this rich enclave, establishing the connection between high life and lowlife, dandified luxury and sordid energy. Magda and Ruggero break up in a conservatory of Tiffany glass, beneath a jungle of glazed vegetation; a major-domo discreetly closes the translucent doors to muffle Alagna's sobbing and Gheorghiu's last, floated, airborne A-flat as, like the swallow of the title, she takes flight in search of another feather-bedded nest.
The soprano and tenor have annexed La Rondine as a vehicle for themselves, on which they are cruising around the world (the production is shared with Toulouse). It benefits from their talents, but it also sharply catches and capitalises on their emotional limitations. Magda is supposed to improvise her first aria, "Il bel sogno di Doretta", with its self-deceiving dream of bohemian freedom. Gheorghiu, however, delivers a studied, technically immaculate, tonally ravishing account of the piece, complete with a shimmering high C, and in so doing banishes any notion that it is impromptu. Magda is paid to be glamorous and to provide sensual favours; Gheorghiu, too, regales us with her voice when paid the requisite fee.
When Ruggero invades the salon, timidly clutching his hat and gauchely gaping at the decor, he sings a louder, more rawly naive hymn to Paris, the city of desires. Alagna's delivery is full-throated, his volume and fierce sincerity not adjusted to the sophisticated setting. The other guests ignore him, yawning or hiding behind their newspapers. He looks visibly relieved when he gets a round of applause from the audience. At the end, deserted by Magda, Ruggero is left bawling for his mother. It is hard not to think that Puccini intended the role as a caricature of the bumptious and immature Italian tenor; Alagna blithely exemplifies the archetype.
For me, the show was stolen by a second tenor, Charles Workman, making his overdue debut as the poet Prunier - an amateurish fraud, according to Joel, although the critic Michele Girardi considers him to be Puccini's snide portrait of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Workman looks like a creepy long-legged spider, and his voice is as sinuous and flexible as his limbs. Mocking the fatuity of romantic love, he turns the character into the evil genius of this mercenary and superficial society.
At the end, flowers - all of them launched, curiously, from a proscenium box which contains recording equipment and is not available for public seating - were limply pelted at Gheorghiu and Alagna. Transfixed by popping flashbulbs, they almost outstayed their ovations.
The next day at Covent Garden, yet another tenor, Jose Cura, strutted, swaggered, smoked and snacked his way through Il Trovatore, indulging in some balletic sword-play as well. He also sang valiantly, but paid little attention to Elijah Moshinsky's clever Viscontiesque production or to his colleagues, one of whom bridled during the curtain calls when he was struck by the prong of a lily aimed at Cura. A star is a lonely planet.
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