Glyndebourne Touring Opera's new season starts with a new production. The next 10 days will see a revival of the Don Giovanni first seen at this summer's festival, and the British premiere of Birtwistle's The Last Supper, in the production that opened in Berlin in April, but David McVicar's staging of La Bohème, conducted by GTO's new music director, Louis Langree, provides the best possible, most invigorating start to the tour.
La Bohème is an opera about young people, and for once it is cast with young singers, whose exuberance makes the tragedy of the last act even more affecting. Through Michael Vale's ingenious sets and Mikki Engelsbel's costumes the action is updated from Paris in the 1830s to present-day London. Rodolfo and his friends live in a squalid flat (just one rung up the social ladder, you sense, from homelessness), but the problems that usually go with updatings - details that don't fit, issues that have to be fudged - are solved triumphantly. In the first act Rodolfo fuses the lights in the flat to produce the darkness that has Mimi trying to light a candle, while the Cafe Momus becomes a glitzy bar, complete with flouncing waiters, silly Christmas hats, street performers and a throng of Christmas shoppers. In the third act the city gates of the original become the shuttered entrance to a tube station, and Marcello is painting a mural for the seedy club next door, while the Bohemians, back together in their flat for the final scene, snort cocaine (except for Rodolfo) just before the dying Mimi appears.
If all this were cosmetic it would mean very little. But McVicar has obtained performances of such telling detail from every member of the cast that the whole drama becomes utterly credible. The way in which Rodolfo (a supremely intelligent performance from Alfred Boe) charts his falling-in-love with Mimi (the touching Simona Todaro) through both his body language and his singing is compelling. This is a man, wimpish and hopeless in many respects, who can't believe what he is experiencing, who realises his whole life is about to be transformed by this encounter. This is in total contrast to the worldly-wise attitude of Marcello (the commanding Luca Grassi) towards his tempestuous affair with the flighty Musetta (Claron MacFadden, visually and vocally spectacular). When at the end of the third act Rudolfo and Mimi agree to stay together at least until the spring, the way in which they leave, he uncertainly a few paces behind, says more about the fragility of their relationship than any of their declarations.
Only one detail is puzzling. When Mimi makes her first timid approach to the door of Rodolfo's flat we see Musetta in the darkness, urging her forward, as if the two women are close friends - unlikely given their very different personalities, one would have thought, unless Mimi's history differs from the version she gives to Rodolfo. That one cares about these few seconds of the production is an indication of how thoughtful the show is and how completely it draws the audience into its world and its characters, and how they are brought so convincingly to life by every member of the cast. The contributions of Nicolas Teste (Colline), Riccardo Novaro (Schaunard) and Eric Roberts (Benoit and Alcindoro) are as significant as those of the principals.
Langree's conducting is vital too. He makes Puccini's so familiar score seem fresh and newly extraordinary; he does not overlook a single detail, and the orchestral playing makes all of them tell. The whole performance, in fact, has no weak links.
Until October 26. Box office: 01273 813813. Then touring to Woking, Norwich, Milton Keynes, Plymouth, Oxford and Stoke-on-Trent.
