★★★★☆
Call it flimsy. Call it frivolous. Call it an Ernst Lubitsch fantasy of love in a bygone age. A patchwork of Viennese waltzes and Parisian foxtrots, fragmentary street songs and heart-spinning arias, La Rondine offers sweet escapism and salty realism. Its courtesan heroine, Magda, has seen too much of life to fall properly in love. Its hero, Ruggero, has seen too little. Premiered in 1917, Puccini’s twist on the Traviata narrative has no particular sense of place, but an acute sense of social station and the longing to slip between worlds.
Designed by takis and lit by Mark Howland, Martin Lloyd Evans’s production places this fragile work in the VistaVision glamour of the 1950s. Magda (Elizabeth Llewellyn) lives in luxury, her split-level eau de nil salon accessorised with a grand piano at which Prunier (Stephen Aviss) picks out the opera’s most famous melody, Chi il bel sogno di Doretta. Everyone in Magda’s circle is dreaming of something, and the characterisation of the supporting ensemble (Pia Harris, Alice Privett, Sophie Dicks, David Stephenson, Henry Grant Kerswell, Timothy Langston and Alistair Sutherland) is a delight.
With a rip of the curtains and a roar from the chorus, we plunge into the jiving, hopping world of teenage movie culture in Act II. Matthew Kofi Waldren’s conducting is lithe and bright, a little breathless in its drive to maximise the colour contrasts from the City of London Sinfonia. Gently nudged by a solo bassoon, Alys Roberts’s tiny cameo in Nella trepide luce d’un mattin is exquisite. Here and in Act III, Llewellyn and Matteo Lippi (Ruggero) duet with a coppery gleam that soars into the night.
Does anyone’s heart get broken? Only Magda’s maid, Lisette (Tereza Gevorgyan), shrinking into the walls of the empty Côte d’Azur swimming pool, brittle with thwarted ambition and confused love for Aviss’s charismatic, sexually ambiguous Prunier.
Box office: 0300 999 1000 to June 23