Holds out huge promise for future seasons: If Opera’s La Rondine reviewed

One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades in her old lover for a younger, cuter model and after a summer of happiness leaves him too, without undue regret. That’s basically it. No death leaps from battlements, no ritual disembowelling; none of that stuff that we’re meant to find so regressive and problematic in an opera house, and so visceral and cool in an HBO drama. Just a simple, plausible romance, played out to glowing waltz melodies. It’s probably Puccini’s least popular mature opera.

But on a West Country evening in the last days of summer, as prosecco corks pop gently in the sunset and shadows lengthen across soft green lawns? Come on: it’s perfect, and nothing will convince me that Michael Volpe, the new executive director of If Opera (the outfit formerly known as Opera at Iford), didn’t choose it for precisely that reason.