Puccini Lite

Puccini’s La Rondine, which the Royal Scottish Conservatoire has been staging - very nicely thank you, according to verbal reports - in its intimate  Glasgow theatre, continues to elude the international success it surely deserves. An Italian romantic comedy in the style of a Viennese operetta with a French setting, it is perhaps too much of a cocktail to fully catch on. Though Monte Carlo was the first place to see it,Vienna paid Puccini a good fee for writing it, which he did with less than perfect timing during the First World War. Perhaps inevitably, however,  the work has always perplexed opera houses and their audiences, who are prone to pronounce its name wrong (it should be La RON-di-ne, with the accent on the first syllable) and fail to identify with a heroine, the “swallow” of the title, who flies from her nest but returns to it dejectedly at the end.

Yet it’s a lovely piece, which achieves musical lift-off soon after it starts via the strains of a typically succinct Puccini aria, ravishingly sung in a 

.quite  different context  by Kiri Te Kanawa, her voice soaring sweetly out of the soundtrack of the Merchant-Ivory film of EM Forster’s Tuscan novel,  A Room with a View.  Antonio Pappano has championed the opera fairly recently in a beautifully sustained recording with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna as its stars. So there is hope.   But the work still lags far behind Madama Butterfly, which Scottish Opera has been triumphantly reviving this month in David McVicar’s fine fourteen-year-old production. 

What a pity for La Rondine.  Puccini did not compose so many works that we can afford to let go of such a good one. Opera North’s production of it in Leeds in 1994 lured me all the way from Edinburgh but failed to please. Nevertheless, as the RSC has shown, the cause is not yet lost.

16 May 2014