LA COMMEDIA E FINITA! (oh no it’s not)
The title is the primary line, delivered by a livid Leoncavallo in 1893 Milan. It is a time of untamed flowering in opera , outdated Verdi’s grandeur and success inspiring a bunch of lesser composers. Alasdair Buchan’s anxious, keenly schoolboyish Leoncavallo, after his Pagliacci success, is fearful of being a one-hit surprise like Ponchielli or poor outdated Mascagni with Cavalliera.
His spouse Berthe tries to calm and reassure him, however the poor chap is enraged with the very existence, and visual smugness, of the extra suave Puccini. The latter wanders in, eavesdropping: Sebastian Torkia a imaginative and prescient of horrid confidence, all velveteen coat and glossy hairstyle. We quickly uncover why: over a cautiously collegiate espresso within the Galeria Puccini had requested his supposed good friend and inventive colleague what his new opera can be about. On studying that it’s based mostly on younger Parisian bohemian lives in a guide of brief tales, Puccini says that curiously, he’s doing the identical in his La Boheme.
Leoncavallo doesn’t consider him, reckons he’s stolen the concept. It’s an 1890’s Boheme-off, no mercy. Puccini reckons he’ll win anyway in the event that they each do it. So it’s a narrative a few story, and a rivalry, and extra importantly about artwork itself. Which, in a likeable conclusion, even Puccini admits shouldn’t be a contest. It was the fantastic thing about that fact at final, within the second act of James Inverne’s play, that made me correctly get pleasure from it. I had considered it for some time primarily as a pleasant quirky oddity for us opera-victims: I can’t communicate for specialists however have had a lifetime of amohitheatrical emotional catharses within the most cost-effective seats I can discover, and ridden the nice rolling rides of feeling conjured by Verdi and his contemporaries: heart-food.
Quirky it definitely is, the three actors sometimes having to increase the personnel , going meta to swop over (Lisa-Anne Wood as Berta at one stage irritably being made to take over the position of Gustav Mahler, of whom each males look like in awe). Torkia has most enjoyable, his face expressing each diploma of mischief; Buchan attracts most sympathy. It’s demotic, slangily updated, playful, with occasional snatches of aria from Berta, taking us fascinatingly by the best way issues developed.
For they each wrote Bohemes; first PUccini’s obtained dangerous critiques in Torino, Leoncavallo,having cried “Sweet Jesus, it’s a flop!!) . He was thrilled to get his own into La Fenice (where the chaise-longue briefly becomes a gondola) but Puccini then played his just down the road, undermining him. More meta-switches, as one becomes a ticket tout saying Puccini’s selling out. Leoncavallo has a triumph, though, and Mahler rudely says Puccini’s is “Hpllow, vulgar, disgusting”. But it turns into clear whose will final.
But there’s no triumph. They each know the way a lot the sheer emotion and humanity they attempt to specific in music is what counts – “I’ts got to be great or what’s the point?” When Leoncavallo lies depressed , refusing to work, it’s Torkia’s Puccini who arrives uninvited and goads him again to the piano, assisted by Berthe (“when you’re an artist’s wife you know how to pick him up when he’s knocked down. By a great artist”. he says) Which is important as a result of Puccini’s personal spouse, sometimes taken on in a fur stole by Lisa-Anne Wood, is of not susceptible to consoling him or forgiving his womanizing. So in a private sense Leoncavallo has gained. But in the long run neither triumph or defeat can matter. The music does.
parktheatre.co.uk to 9 Aug
score 4
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