La bohème

It's only in the last year that Rhys and I have become interested in opera.  I always saw it as an elitist hobby. In Wales, however, regardless of class or income, many people enjoy classical music and opera in particular.
           We live next door to two musicians who work for the Welsh National Opera(WNO) and one of them is Rhys's guitar tutor. My counselling room backs onto their music room where they rehearse. Sometimes my clients are privy to our very own secret concert of cello and violin, giving a melodramatic backdrop to the action in my room. All the musicians' children are also musical. Before their eldest son went to uni, we would often hear his beautiful piano pieces and singing as he practised for the entrance exams. More latterly their younger son has taken up the trumpet. We now get the theme tunes from, 'Eastenders', 'The Last of the Summer Wine,' and 'Wallace and Gromet.' At least the latter usually breaks the tension and gets a laugh. When a client's just lost their husband or is suffering from post-traumatic stress there aren't a lot of laughs.
           So having had all this for free for so long through our adjoining walls, we thought we'd like to see the performances that go with the music, and now we're rather hooked.  What helps is the sur-titles in English and Welsh.  It still seems to take an age to hear a performer singing that he enjoys a drink, fancies another man or is leaving his woman. At least now we know exactly what's happening. The other great thing for ignorant opera goers like us are the pre-show talks. On this occasion Dewi Savage, who I remembered as an actor in the days when I worked for Spectacle Theatre, did the honours in a self deprecating way that got laughs from the predominantly silver-surfer audience.  In these half hour talks you get to know a bit of the background of the life and times of the composer, in this case Puccini, and a synopsis of who loves who, who falls out of love with who, who gets jealous and who dies of consumption- and there's still time for a G&T before the show starts.
          This WNO production of La bohème is conducted by Simon Phillippo, directed by Annabel Arden with David Kempster as Marcello, Alex Vicens as Rodolpho, Giselle Allen as Mimi and Kate Valentine as Musetta. The opera is set in Paris's Latin Quarter at the end of the nineteenth century and as the title suggests is the story of a group of bohemian artists who fall in and out of love in a garret, get jealous, and sing over each other in magnificent voices as Mimi dies of consumption.
         We didn't go away humming a well known ditty as we did for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro. And we weren't quite convinced that the bohemians were in their early twenties-more like their forties, but we did enjoy the drama of the performances, the singing, the orchestra, and the atmospheric line-drawn set, pumping out smoke over the rooftops of Paris.
          WNO is on tour with this production until the 1st of December 2012. www.wno.org.uk