Puccini's La Boheme: from Gran Teatre Liceu Barcelona

Overview

Composed by Puccini
Mar. 13, 2012  3:00pm
Conducted by Víctor Pablo Pérez
Directed by Giancarlo del Monaco
Starring Ramon Vargas & Fiorenza Cedolins
2 hrs 50 mins including intermissions  Announced on February 1st: This opera will be captured live on March 7th and played in theaters in the us on March 13th.

"Honey-toned Mexican tenor Ramón Vargas sang the...romantic hero with passion, conviction and refreshing innocence, his beautifully launched high notes unforced and amply projected.” – David Mermelstein, Opera News

“There is a reason La Boheme is one of the most beloved operas: the music soars, the simple story is easy to follow, the lyrics are sincere, the characters are all youthful and charming, and it is a genuine heartbreaker.” – Pegasus News

A warm coat, a glowing fire, a true friend, a lover’s kiss – La Boheme is the most romantic opera ever written. Puccini’s beloved melodies perfectly convey the heartbreak and passion of young, poor, Parisian artists falling in love. Let La Boheme break your heart for the hundredth time, or the very first time, in this intimate and moving production from the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. Starring Fiorenza Cedolins as Mimi, Christopher Maltman as Marcello and Ramon Vargas as Rodolfo.

From the mid-19th century onwards — against the background of industrialization, the supremacy of bourgeois values, and an intellectual climate dominated by secular materialistic and scientific positivism — art became realistic, seeking to show things as they really were — almost photographically —, rather than making them more amiable or more beautiful. An opera such as La Bohème, which talks of the fragile nature of happiness in a world of poverty, cold and disease, is an obvious example of this trend.

In La Bohème, however, the aesthetic of Verism — the Italian equivalent of the French Naturalism of Émile Zola — becomes more sentimental and the brutality of social reality is depicted less crudely than elsewhere. Four young artists live out their everyday lives amid dreams and disappointments, waiting for the event that is to win them renown, but poverty and misfortune deprive the leading characters — Mimì and Rodolfo — of the joy of mutual love. The text and music relate all this with a pleasant melodramatic tenderness with which it is easy to identify.