If La Rondine flies your way, catch it mid-flight
A star was born. Doesn’t happen often. At the Met they usually appear, already shining. Pitch up for an opera. Excellent singers, great orchestra, terrific show, but no zingers. La Rondine, Puccini’s lightweight ‘operetta’, or so cognoscenti sniffers would have it, was a first for me. Had been advised, nothing special.
With renowned soprano Angel Blue singing the lead role of Magda it was certainly worth a look. Other Met debut singers to entice, but unfamiliar.
Curtain up. Spontaneous applause, unusual at the often-curmudgeonly Met. Wonderfully elegant set by Ezio Frigerio, direction from Nicoläs Joel. Three assistant directors. That obscure observation becomes relevant later.
We were in rip-roaring 1920s Paris, then on to the Riviera for another of Puccini’s “let’s make ‘em weep” failed-love stories. So far, so conventional. But the French tuberculosis vaccination programme did seem to have worked. No social distancing from infected singing corpses in Act III predicted by the synopsis.
Suddenly, Lisette, Magda’s maid, burst into action with joie de vivre, an exploding force de nature, même une tendance criminelle ironique et amusante, that grabbed the audience by any sensitive part of the anatomy left carelessly exposed. This little regarded opera was off to the races. We were watching something special.
Every so often at a performance that unexpected miracle happens. “Tout en court”, Emily Pogorelc, American soprano in her Met debut role, self-identified as an unforgettable “soubrette sublime”! A blast. Retained the attention of the whole house with her determined portrayal of the pushy maid with aspirations above her station. The maid, that is, not Pogorelc. Hilarious with it.
Oh, incidentally, she has a terrific voice to accompany the presentational fireworks. An incisive soprano, singing a clear line without too much vibrato, carrying much warmth and emotion. Come off the fence, Malone, Pogorelc was not just a star. She had walked on stage and gone supernova.
I would splurge the balance of my Air Miles account to see her sing Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. Casting directors, pay attention.
La Rondine, too, was a revelation. Just as Verdi determined to show he could “do” comedy with Falstaff, so Puccini, who had observed the 1905 success of his Hungarian colleague, Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow, wanted to prove he could lighten up a bit. Jump on the commercial bandwagon and satisfy the growing demand for shorter, accessible works. No sacrifice of the sung-through operatic format, though. The ringing opening may have been pure musical theatre, but La Rondine is, in its Puccini genes, an opera.
It’s easy today, in an era where many composers agonise for years while squeezing out compositions that attract grant support but sparse audiences, to forget that Puccini was working in a commercial hothouse, driven by the Italian publishing house Ricordi. He did leave an estate valued at £200m!
They had a virtual monopoly in the Italian market. However, La Rondine – the only Puccini opera to slip through the Ricordi net – was published by the rival breakaway upstart house, Sonzega, because they “got” the economic opportunity a Puccini operetta-type work offered.
In La Rondine, a rich old banker Rambaldo (bass-baritone, Alfred Walker, a Met regular), keeps seasoned courtesan, Magda (soprano, Angel Blue, an all-round superstar), in Parisian splendour. Magda is known as “La Rondine, The Swallow”, which immediately flags up that she is accustomed to flying in and out quite a lot.
Her maid, Lisette, (Pogorelc) who has an insubordinate relationship with her boss, is fancied something rotten by a poet, Prunier, (Beckhzod Davronov, a lyric tenor from Uzbekistan). Prunier is a pompous show-off and won’t admit publicly to the Lisette relationship. She is beneath his pay grade.
He is also something of a resident comic turn in the Rambaldo household, holding forth to guests on this and that, forecasting which self-flashing Tory MP will replace Rishi Sunak as party leader, predicting a Tory victory in the autumn election. That sort of obvious twaddle.
He reads palms and when he reads Magda’s he forecasts she will have an amorous adventure. Bang on cue, enter Ruggero, son of a friend of Rambaldo, sent with a letter of introduction for his Parisian internship. The panting youth doesn’t take long to spot Magda as his first assignment.
They fall in love in the nightclub of amorous adventure, Bullier’s, Magda leaves Rambaldo, to set up with Ruggero in the Riviera. He want’s mummy’s approval for a wedding. Mummy writes to say okay – assuming Magda is an honourable sort. As a seasoned courtesan Magda realises she would sully pernickety mum-in-law’s household. Can’t have that.
Meantime, Prunier has shacked up with Lisette, and tried to set her up as a singer. Disaster. They arrive at Magda and Ruggero’s pad with the howls of her debut audience’s derision ringing in Lisette’s ears. The former maid doesn’t waste too much time grieving. Stuff singing for a game of soldiers.
She re-enters Magda’s service. Prunier offers to meet her, as of old, at 10:00pm. She shrugs. They go off arm in arm, the previous relationship resumed. Magda returns to Paris, leaving with an offstage high ‘C’. Ruggero goes home to mummy. All romantic expectations frustrated.
The key to the success of this performance was that Pogorelc’s portrayal of Lisette elevated the Prunier-Maid storyline to almost the same dramatic level as the Magda-Ruggero affair. Their attempts to seek out different lives fuelled by romance ran in parallel. Both couples failed for different reasons, then returned to their original comfort zones. Magda and Lisette were both swallows. Les Rondines.
An unusual feature of the show is that we were spoilt for Pogorelcs. There was another. Alison Pogorelc, one of those three assistant stage directors. In a conversation with the sisters – a pleasant Zoom call later, set up by my Manhattan fixer, Kathie Norchie of Wexford Opera Factory renown – they discussed how they had worked together on the Lisette character. I figured Emily P needed little encouragement.
Alison P won the Opera America ‘Winning Concept Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize 2022-23’ for her Salome (Richard Strauss). She has other assistant directing credits across America and Europe and is passionate about early music.
She understands its power to tell stories relevant to times present just as powerfully as it told them of times past. Impossible? Just watch Alison P’s short film An Unexpected Odyssey: Longe mala; umbrae; terrores, as she uses Vivaldi’s music to take two children on a modern-day journey of adventure and imagination.
Raising sisterhood to another level, Che si può fare?, composed by Barbara Strozzi, Venice and Padua 1619-1677, features Emily P attempting to answer the rhetorical ‘What can I do?’ question. Filmed in a troubled, modern, drone-captured cityscape, she eventually discards her fashionable shoes, heads out to sea, but wakes up in the bath. A good thing too. We would have missed her at the Met.
Back to La Rondine, Angel Blue sang the Magda role wonderfully but lacked acting conviction. She fell in love with, then dumped Ruggero almost dispassionately. No sign of the vim she displayed in last season’s Porgy and Bess. Blue presided over proceedings instead of driving them forward impetuously. No more so than when she was playing hard to get in Bullier’s.
For Jonathan Tetelman, an American tenor with a tremendous CV in Europe and elsewhere in the US, it was also a Met debut. What a fine job he made of it. He was topping out a recent personal Puccini-fest. His Deutsche Grammophon CD, The Great Puccini, a tribute on the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death is hot property.
On the podium was Italian conductor Speranza Scappucci, whose name is deserving of an opera all its own. She was fondly remembered for her 2022 Rigoletto at the Met and brought real drive to the score. Scappucci is well known on the opera circuit, but mostly as a repetiteur. Good for the Met giving her a forum in which she could properly display her talents. More, please.
La Rondine is tip-top for anyone ‘frit’ of opera. Accessible, lyrical, kicking off with Magda’s wonderful Act I aria, Chi il bel songo di Dorreta, providing drama, romance, a sharp libretto from Giuseppe Adami, high comedy, and a tragic denouement, this is an ideal starting point for anyone thinking of taking the plunge.
Little performed recently, the work is coming back into vogue. Washington Concert Opera delivered a semi-staged version at the Lisner Auditorium last Sunday. If La Rondine flies your way, catch it in mid-flight.
And another thing!
Italian music publishing house, Ricordi, is staging a “must see” exhibition in Berlin, Opera Meets New Media – Puccini, Ricordi and the Rise of the Modern Entertainment Industry.
To be followed, doubtless, by Talk TV Hits the Buffers – Rupert Murdoch and The Small Matter of £90m Down the Drain. There is nothing new under the sun of new media challenges.
The exhibition, marking the centenary of Giacomo Puccini’s death, offers, through an examination of the maestro’s international career, a reflection on the influence that new media and technological innovations had on musical theatre at the beginning of the 20th century. It was an epochal transition, a true revolution for the enjoyment of music that until then could only be experienced live.
Two technological revolutions, sound recordings and the moving image, which had previously been considered only “curious novelties” simultaneously came of age. Records that could be played at home and the cinema posed a commercial threat to the traditional business models of music publishers such as Ricordi.
Their cash depended on rights and royalties from live performances in theatres. How music publishers would react and adapt to these innovations in those early years was a crucial determining factor for their commercial success.
The challenges that publishers faced in that fin-de-siècle were strikingly similar to the new technology issues that music producers face today with streaming.
Some directors on the cusp of successful careers get it. Alison Pogorelc’s cinematic presentation of art songs, OperaGlass Works, the UK company that specialises in filmed opera, and the Met’s HD mission, taking its brand round the world are all examples of opera’s brave new world.
More, when I visit the Berlin exhibition in early May.
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