It’s a good thing that the Royal Opera keeps its revivals of standard Italian repertoire in good shape, considering the many acute disappointments we have had this season from new productions, Italian, German, French. John Copley’s La Bohème was first staged in 1974, but the latest revival, with a fair number of fresh touches added by the associate director Richard Gregson, and with Mark Elder conducting, is welcome, even if not quite ranking with the finest of its previous runs.
It has an almost uniformly excellent cast, but some of these performers are mildly miscast; and for all the lucidity and careful climax-building of the conducting, it may suffer from being slightly too refined. Not that one wants this or any Puccini to sound like middle-period Verdi, or middle-period Verdi as it used to sound before being Karajanised, but the essentially popular nature of his work does suffer if it is made to sound as if it is aspiring to be the highest art.
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