La Rondine, review: 'charm'

Iford Arts' production of Puccini's 'problem child' operetta is sensitive and well-cast, says Rupert Christiansen

The cast of Iford Arts' production is led by Ilona Domnich
The cast of Iford Arts' production is led by Ilona Domnich

Although his name is a byword for canny stagecraft, Puccini’s instincts faltered when it came to La Rondine, the bittersweet operetta without spoken dialogue that he wrote just before the First World War, in direct response to The Merry Widow.

Several miscalculations were made, and it’s no surprise that after its unsuccessful premiere Puccini kept vainly fiddling with the score in an attempt to correct them. Crucially, the heroine’s personality isn’t strongly enough established for an audience to understand why she would sacrifice happiness for a vague moral qualm, and the whole of Act 3 is a damp squib both musically and dramatically (an entirely reshaped version of this scene has been lost).

Yet the piece does have its forty-watt charm. Slow waltzes and impressionistic colours evoke the sophisticated Parisian milieu, its atmosphere thick with Guerlain scent and cigarette smoke. The current of violent sado-masochism that charges so much of Puccini’s work is replaced by something more hesitant and forgiving. Two absolutely corking melodies – “Che il bel sogno di Doretta” and “Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso” – are milked for all they’re worth and should rank by rights among Puccini’s greatest hits.

Iford Arts near Bath presents this problem child in its tiny cloister, holding barely a hundred seats. The reduced scale isn’t altogether effective: even though the singers fight hard to articulate Robert Hess’s translation and the instrumentation has been drastically reduced, the balance between voices and orchestra excessively favours the latter, exacerbated perhaps by the acoustic impact of a new canvas canopy over the cloister roof. The result is something that doesn’t feel as intimate or as clarified as was intended.

The performance is otherwise creditable. Benjamin Occhipinti and his designer Emma Wee clothe the story in costumes which suggest the period of composition rather than the Second Empire specified by the libretto, but otherwise sensitively allow the wispy plot to unfurl without interference.

Oliver Gooch conducts the excellent Chroma ensemble and a well-chosen cast, led by the creamy-voiced Ilona Domnich, who sings with ravishing sensuality and warmth as the flighty titular courtesan (La Rondine means “the swallow”).

James Edwards is initially perhaps a notch too stiff as Ruggero, her infatuated provincial suitor, but he sings carefully throughout and turns up the emotional volume in the last act, while Ruth Jenkins-Róbertsson and Christopher Turner prattle brightly as the soubrette maid Lisette and her poetical suitor Prunier.

Until June 21. Tickets: 01225 448844; ifordarts.org.uk