Puccini’s La Rondine (The Swallow) is no apprentice work. On the contrary, it was his eighth opera, composed after La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Yet it wasn’t staged at Covent Garden until 2002 and remains popular largely only with the cognoscenti.
It has long been a favourite of Antonio Pappano, however: the first work he recorded with the LSO in 1996. And here he was reunited with that orchestra and a strong cast in the first of two concert performances (the second is on Thursday).
The Covent Garden production was conceived primarily as a vehicle for Angela Gheorgiu in the central role of Magda, a part taken here by Carolina López Moreno, standing in at short notice for an indisposed Nadine Sierra. And her first set piece is only 10 minutes into the opera. No pressure there then.
In fact Moreno was the only member of the cast not needing a score – she’s been singing it on stage recently in Turin – and she rose magnificently to the high points of each act, as did Michael Fabiano as her lover Ruggero.
One of the problems of the work is the lack of individuality in many of the characters. Sarah Dufresne, Angela Schisano and Marvic Monreal each took two roles but had all too little opportunity to shine in them. One would love to have heard more of each. Three male friends of Rambaldo, Magda’s ‘protector’ – sung by Hector Bloggs, Tom McGowan and Sang-Eup Son – fared little better.
As Rambaldo himself, Ashley Riches, in fine voice, wore a suitably sour expression to depict his character’s lack of humour. Serena Gamberoni and Paul Appleby as Lisette and Prunier flirted vivaciously as the lower-class lovers.
According to the Puccini authority Julian Budden, La Rondine ranks with any of the composer’s mature operas, but is let down by the third act. It’s true that there are structural and dramaturgical problems with Act III, and yet in a concert performance as fine as this, it can paradoxically seem to be the most convincing. This supposedly comic opera – a commedia lirica Puccini called it – here acquires a tragic dimension, and is certainly the most emotionally gripping.
The scene in which Magda’s lover Ruggero reads a letter from his mother recommending him as a husband is admittedly sentimental. And yet Puccini’s muted strings in this passage are ravishing, wonderfully delivered too by the LSO and Pappano. As Magda breaks the news that she’s not the virtuous woman she seems, the music builds to the kind of heart-stopping climax familiar from Puccini’s better-known works.
La Rondine occupies a position in Puccini’s oeuvre rather similar to that of Intermezzo in Richard Strauss’s, composed just a few years later. Each opera is unduly neglected, suffering comparison with what has gone before.
Yet each has progressive qualities – in the case of La Rondine, adventurous harmonies and hints of modern dance forms – that move the genre forward. Each, too, has subtleties that need careful handling in performance. This one, in Pappano’s impassioned reading, persuasively argued the case for a more regular place in the operatic canon.
Barbican, December 12; barbican.org.uk
