Elegant, wistful Puccini, rousing, passionate Verdi

Opera North stages a charming Rondine, Chelsea Opera Group goes to a Masked Ball

Doretta’s Dream: Galina Averina (Magda) sings; Elgan Llyr Thomas (Prunier) at the piano, Philip Smith (seated left, Rambaldo) Claire Lees (Lisette) peeking from behind the curtain Picture by Tristram Kenton

Opera North’s recently departed general director, Richard Mantle, has always had a soft-spot for the most neglected of Puccini’s operas, La rondine (The Swallow). Originally commissioned by the director of Vienna’s Karltheater, Siegmund Eibenschütz in 1913 as an answer to the hugely popular operettas of Franz Lehár, the work was to have a German libretto - a first for the composer - but world war intervened, and with Italy and Austria on opposing sides, Puccini asked the Italian playwright and music critic Giuseppe Adami - later his librettist for Il trittico and Turandot - to transform his ‘operetta’ (without spoken dialogue) into a wistful ‘commedia lirica’ about mismatched lovers in Paris and Nice.

Puccini’s publisher, Tito Ricordi, rejected it out of hand as “bad Lehár” but Ricordi’s rival, Nino Sanzogno, was only too delighted to snap up an original work by Italy’s leading opera composer. It flopped at the premiere at Monte Carlo’s Salle Garnier - a Paris Opéra in miniature - in 1917, despite a cast of Italian stars, including Gilda della Rizza and Tito Schipa in the roles of Magda de Civry and her beau Ruggero Lastouc. The lyric comedy never quite recovered from Ricordi’s rejection and the lack of public enthusiasm. Indeed, until the last decade of the 20th century, it was rarely performed in the UK. After a 1970s production at Sadler’s Wells, directed by David Pountney and starring June Bronhill, La rondine had to wait another two decades before it joined the repertoire of a leading British company - Opera North in 1994. Probably not coincidentally, this was the year Mantle joined the company as CEO.

Francesca Zambello’s production, revived in 2000 and 2006 for the enchanting Scottish soprano Janis Kelly, was my first encounter with La rondine in the theatre, and the two Kelly runs, the second with the lamented Rafael Rojas as Ruggero, remain imprinted on my memory. James Hurley’s new staging is the third of ON’s ‘Green Season’ shows this autumn, after Olivia Fuchs’s sparkling vernacular Falstaff and, by all accounts, a zany Pountney Purcell concoction, The Masque of Might, which I had to miss when Storm Babet cancelled my Leeds train a fortnight ago.