La Bohème brings Manhattan back to life

The crowd scene outside Café Momus in Act II of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème is opera at its entrancing best. 

Children’s chorus, hawkers hawking, Parpignol, the gaily dressed toy seller, well, Parpignolling, in his caravan toyshop drawn by a phlegmatic horse, hailed straight off the Central Park carriage line. 

Marching soldiers, triumphant Musetta, cuckolded old lecher Alcinodoro.

Marcello reinstated in Musetta’s flighty affections, enamoured Mimi and Rodolfo, marching soldiers, the swell of martial brass, finally joined by the full orchestra with a sway into a diminished chord, then ending on that emphatic, rising La, Ti, Do triplet – Puccini’s Paris street party rarely fails to bring the house down.

Last Saturday, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera La Bohème matinée, when the cast turned as one to wave to the audience, flourish handkerchiefs and bear Musetta aloft, as they always do in this sublime Franco Zeffirelli production, curtain fall was delayed. Only by 30 seconds.

 It was a signal that a defiant Met was back in business. The packed auditorium – 3,800 double-vaccinated souls – was as one with the cast on stage, joining in a frenzy of shared rejoicing. There may have been some dry eyes in the house, but not in Box 8, Dress Circle. 

Elsewhere in Manhattan, the signs of post Covid recovery were less certain. Walking up Madison Avenue to East 75th Street, I reckoned two out of five retail stores were shut. The “Temporarily closed for Refurbishment” signs I saw in June, are yellowing. Their fading optimism is proven false. 

I was en route to the temporary premises of the Frick Collection, usually to be found in the Frick Mansion in Fifth Avenue, home of Henry Clay Frick, the Pittsburgh steel magnate, the rival of Andrew Carnegie, who descended on New York at the high point of the city’s late 19th century gilded age. 

The quiet mansion, reflecting Frick’s passion for art, is a haven of peace in bustling Manhattan and a frequent retreat. It, like Madison’s boutiques, is also, “Temporarily Closed for Refurbishment”. Part of the collection has been rehoused at the former Whitney Museum a block or two away. 

It is worth visiting. Dubbed – with lacklustre imagination – Frick Madison, the curators have mostly done an excellent job hanging Frick’s treasures. There are some problems though. The Fragonard Collection looks lost in a museum setting. The nymphs, shepherds, maidens on swings, bucolic lovers, pouting pets, really need a domestic setting. Plonked individually on a harsh museum wall, they fail to interconnect, and the essential sense of intimacy that rescues them from kitsch is lost. Now they are reduced to chocolate box horrors.

And, where on earth is Thomas Cromwell? Frick hung his famous Holbein portrait on one side of the dining room fireplace, facing another Holbein, Sir Thomas More, Cromwell’s arch-enemy, on the other. The steel magnate had the nous to translate 16th century England’s most deadly enmity to Manhattan. I have often wondered. Was Cromwell Frick’s Andrew Carnegie? 

The present curators, perhaps history purblind, have had the nerve to loan him out — the ultimate insult to Henry VIII’s enforcer. I can’t wait until the old, two Thomas, foes glare at each other once more across Frick’s hearth. 

More bad news. Parpignol’s horse is under threat. Outgoing Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has singlehandedly revived New York’s mean streets familiar from the pre, tough-policing Mayor Giuliani days, is on a mission to ban horses and carriages from Central Park. 

To put it into context, it’s as if some grungy British politician was trying to marginalise Peppa Pig, our children’s loveable pink hairdryer.

Serendipity will bring freshly elected Eric Adams to the Gracie Mansion mayoral residence on New Year’s Day. Will his new broom sweep de Blasio’s replacement electric “showcars” aside? I hope so. 

Better to deploy that broom, sweep up the de Blasio manure, and maintain the carriage ride tradition started back in 1858.

Then, anti-corruption Democrat Fernando Wood was mayor. His tenure saw the hugely popular carriage rides established. 

Wood came from a rebel Democrat faction known as the Locofocos, named after the “Loco-foco”, a self-igniting cigar newly patented by entrepreneur, John Marck. 

As “loco” usefully carried the connotation of crack-brained it became a convenient term of political abuse. So, at CBI conferences today delegates can be heard in corridors mumbling, “Boris has gone Loco-foco”.

Obliging stage horses aside, this Met Bohème production, dating back 40 years and with 500 performances under its belt, returns freshened under the baton of Eun Sun Kim, increasingly making a name for herself in North America. The South Korean conductor took up the post of Music Director of San Francisco Opera in August this year. 

She is a fiery presence in the pit, and the Met audience warmed to her sparkling interpretation. Bohème is chockfull of dramatic entrances and exits requiring sharp articulation. Along with creamy duets – like Che gelida manina (Your Tiny Hand is Frozen)- sprinkled through the work, a willingness to change pace is essential, flowing with the action. Eun Sun Kim proved more than up to the task.

Charles Castronovo, the Lindemann Young Artist Scholar tenor, debuted at the Met in 1999 as Beppe in Pagliacci. His return to the Lincoln Center after 22 years was greeted with huge pleasure. 

The American tenor, from Queens, is a regular at London’s Covent Garden and I wonder if his rapturous reception on home territory will bring him more frequently to the Met.

Mimi was Anita Hartig, a Romanian soprano, who debuted in the role at the Met in 2014. Her dazzling international career is centred on Europe. She is the perfect Mimi. To be blunt, some sopranos are simply too, how can one put this, “robust” to die convincingly of consumption. 

Hartig is frail from the moment Rodolfo opens his door to her and that extinguished candle. Her voice also carries the sensitivity the role needs. Too often, the tubercular Mimi’s lines are sung by an inappropriate belter. This was a heart-stoppingly beautiful rendering.

Italian soprano, Federica Lombardi, played Musetta with all the brash panache the role demands, and Artur Rucínski, a Polish Baritone, took her on as the often frustrated and bewildered Marcello.  

The character part of Benoit, the grasping landlord cheated out of his rent by the rollicking Bohemians in Act I, was played by Donald Maxwell, the versatile Scottish baritone, who joined Scottish Opera in 1976. 

His international career first brought him to the Met in Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment in 2008. The Benoit role requires more than just a comedic turn. Maxwell brought a deep sense of pathos.

It was wonderful to see Maxwell onstage again. I had lost track of him after the 1970’s era of Scottish Opera performances at the company’s new Theatre Royal venue. He popped up once at Wexford. 

Yet, surprise, surprise when I opened my Playbill, here he was, as vital and in as good voice as ever in New York. 

La Bohème followed hard on the heels of Puccini’s Turandot earlier in the week. More of that on another occasion. Save that one dilemma must be resolved tout court. The title is pronounced “TuranDOH”, not “TuranDOT”. 

I have it on the authority of no less than Maestro Joseph Colaneri, a Met conductor, resident conductor at the Glimmerglass Festival, and established lecture circuit celebrity, that Puccini, who could not bring himself to finish Turandot, said so on his deathbed. 

Apparently, being unfamiliar with an opera ending where the heroine does not die of consumption, Puccini agonised over completing Turandot until – too late – he had suffered the fate of Mimi.

Manhattan still surprises. At three hours’ notice, a friend alerted me to a concert at the Century Association – a club so secretive only non-members – like me – are allowed to mention the name without being struck from planet earth. It has an inactive web page to ensure anonymity and the best macaroons in New York. 

The great macaroon crisis the club confronted in 2008 is the stuff of legend. On no-one else’s website does the invitation, “Accept all Cookies,” ring so untrue.

I was to be treated to a program, Legends of the Great American Songbook, courtesy of an amateur group, Six of Clubs. Amateur in name only. The highly talented troupe, one of whom is a good friend and bouleversé to see me in the audience, ranged over a magical programme.

Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Rogers, Hart and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Lerner and Lane, Frank Loesser, Bernstein and Sondheim. And they were only scratching the surface. How many more goodies can you wish for?

What a way to be reintroduced to the city that never sleeps. After slumbering for 18 Covid-stricken months, New York is reawakening. As the Six of Clubs affirmed in their final ensemble, There’s No Business Like Show Business, and New York is getting on with its show. I scoffed four macaroons and left.