Valentina Peleggi / Ressenyes

The universality of its central themes of love and loss are easy enough to relate to; the Artistic Director of the ENO, Daniel Kramer, credits La Bohème’s prevailing popularity with the decision to restage its “near-perfect equilibrium between realism and romanticism, comedy and pathos, at whose heart lies the relationship between the forlorn couple of Rodolfo and Mimi”.https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-la-boheme-london-coliseum-3/

First seen in 2009, Miller’s Bohème nudges the action forward some 100 years to the ‘années folles’ of the 1920s. Café Momus becomes an edgy guinguette where Fitzgerald and André Breton might have traded writing tips with Rodolfo, and a Josephine Baker-esque Musetta (Nadine Benjamin) holds the stage. It’s a neat sleight-of-hand, nicely framed in Isabella Bywater’s revolving sets — an unobtrusive restoring of operatic order after Benedict Andrews’s teenage rebellion of a crack-den Bohème for ENO in 2015.

This is a reworking of Purcell’s late seventeenth-century opera Dido and Aeneas, based on Virgil’s Aeneid and originally written for a London girls' school. It uses the original words and music, apart from a few cuts, but transposes it to the now of contemporary Southwark and makes the sorceress and her witches who plot Dido’s ruin into voices within her own head. Rachael Lloyd therefore sings both Dido and the Sorceress.

Seven fine musicians from ENO’s own orchestra, bolstered by the eloquent theorbo of David Miller, played Purcell’s score with idiomatic fluency under Valentina Peleggi’s firm direction, while a dozen sensitive choristers supplied the opera’s chorus, semi-chorus and small solo parts. Together they created an aural vista of the highest class. The three principals did well too, although Rachael Lloyd, admirable as ever, has a mezzo timbre that’s a few watts too bright for her mournful Dido. Her lament “When I am laid in earth” should ideally be more heartrending than it was here. Njabulo Madlala, who sang Jim in ENO’s recent Porgy and Bess, gave a strong account of the underwritten Aeneas, while 18-year-old Eyra Norman, an undergraduate at the RCM, more than held her own as Belinda with a youthful soprano that was wholly attuned to the director’s concept.

Le chœur d’adultes et d’enfants de l’English National Opera se réunit, soudé, entraînant et solidaire sur scène. Le résultat vocal est joyeux et rassurant. Enfin, l’orchestre symphonique, dirigé par la cheffe italienne Valentina Peleggi, dynamise et propulse dans la musique de Bizet dès l'ouverture brillante, à travers ce sombre et cruel road-tripe espagnol.

Driving the drama is ENO Mackerras Fellow Valentina Peleggi. Her conducting is dynamic yet detailed; rarely if ever at ENO have the lines of the orchestral contribution been so finely honed, and the orchestra clearly loves her, on top form throughout. Chiselled rhythms, a full realisation of the colourful orchestration, a deep grasp of the ongoing dramatic thrust were all in evidence, as was a willingness to relax into the lyricism where appropriate (as in the José/Micaëla passages in the first act around what in French would have been ‘Parle-moi de ma mère’); and now the run has settled in, ensemble problems were minimal. The wonderfully reedy bassoon at the beginning of the second act particularly merits mention.