‘We’ll half when the flowers seem,” sing Mimì and Rodolfo on the finish of act three, pushing aside the break-up they've now accepted as inevitable. There’s nothing in Puccini’s music to dampen the viewers’s fond hope that they’ll work issues out within the meantime and reside fortunately ever after. However in Floris Visser’s new La Bohème, there's a chill to those phrases – as a result of the flowers are already showing, sickly pink in opposition to the monochrome set, uncovered by the tall, gaunt determine who has been shadowing consumptive Mimì since earlier than she stepped into Rodolfo’s life.
Loss of life will not be in Puccini’s solid checklist. However in Visser’s manufacturing, which performs on any variety of movie references from The Seventh Seal to Meet Joe Black, he's on stage a lot that it’s virtually a shock that he doesn’t get the ultimate curtain name. Can the others see him? Mimì can, as soon as she accepts her sickness; Rodolfo can’t, but he glances over his shoulder as if he senses one thing is there. The opera turns into one thing aside from – arguably greater than – a narrative of youth and doomed love. And Visser’s gamble pays off: it's riveting.
It helps that Christopher Lemmings is such a magnificently magnetic presence, silent aside from when he assumes the transient function of Parpignol, the toy-seller whose half-dozen notes normally go virtually unnoticed; right here he's doling out crimson balloons that you just suspect might need strings infused with cholera. These balloons are a uncommon spot of color in opposition to the black and gray of Jon Morrell’s costumes and Dieuweke Van Reij’s set, a blank-walled road stretching again into darkish nothingness.
In opposition to this, the life-affirming vibrancy of Puccini’s music strikes yet one more straight than ever, even when Visser missteps often – making Rodolfo fiddle with a recalcitrant typewriter throughout a hovering phrase of his aria, for instance. Yaritza Véliz sings Mimì with a white-gold, charged soprano. Sehoon Moon’s incisive tenor fits blase Rodolfo (Lengthy Lengthy, who ought to have been singing however fell sufferer to the visa delays which can be plaguing UK classical music in the mean time, takes over from the third efficiency). And Vuvu Mpofu is an irresistibly trendy Musetta.
Jordan de Souza conducts the London Philharmonic, and it’s as if all the color that has been leached from the stage is brimming over the sting of the pit. It’s not solely love that's defiant within the face of demise, however music, too.
In rep at Glyndebourne pageant till 14 August.
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