Musica Viva to stage Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème

Musica Viva proudly presents Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, one of the world’s most beloved operas, at the Concert Hall of Hong Kong City Hall from 8 to 10 December.

La Bohème, with libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica based on the French novel Scenes of Bohemian Life by Henri Murger, is Puccini’s fourth opera.  The composition of the music took nearly three years and the opera was first performed in February 1896 in Turin.  Within three months, the opera was on its road to triumph, winning enthusiastic applauses in opera theatres throughout the world.

This touching love story tells the struggle for survival of a group of poor artists in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where they experience happiness and sorrow, love and disappointment.  The play is accompanied throughout by music that beautifully conveys its powerful emotion.  A brilliant work of art in every respect, La Bohème possesses the perfect balance between light-hearted comedy and romantic tragedy, between lyrical charm and passionate expression which is rarely achieved in opera.  The compositional approach was very original for its time, and the music is full of innovative ideas skillfully accomplished.  The same creative team, Puccini with Giacosa and Illica, went on to produce two more masterpieces following the success of La Bohème, namely Tosca and Madama Butterfly.  These three works, together with the increasingly popular posthumous Turandot, are now the permanent box office hits of opera-houses all over the world.

Directed by Lo Kingman and conducted by Lio Kuokman, this classic opera will be produced in collaboration with the Hong Kong Virtuosi, the Musica Viva Chorus, the Musica Viva Children Chorus, world-renowned opera stars and homegrown talents, bringing alive the magnificent love story on the Hong Kong stage.

The wonderful main cast includes tenors James Valenti (USA) and Dominick Chenes (USA) who share the role of the poet Rodolfo.  Sopranos Stefania Dovhan (Ukraine) and France Bellemare (Canada) star as the seamstress Mimì while mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa–Jackson (USA) and local soprano Etta Fung play the singer Musetta. 

La Bohème will be performed in Italian with Chinese and English surtitles.  Tickets will go on sale on 31 October 2017 (Tuesday) at URBTIX (www.urbtix.hk).  For more information, please call 6976 2877 or visit www.musicavivahk.org.

非凡美樂隆重呈獻 賈科莫．普契尼《波希米亞生涯》: 四幕歌劇

由非凡美樂製作，賈科莫．普契尼最膾炙人口的歌劇作品之一《波希米亞生涯》將於十二月八至十日登上香港大會堂音樂廳的舞台。

《波希米亞生涯》是普契尼的第四部歌劇作品，根據法國作家昂利穆傑的小說改編，編劇及撰詞人是佐高沙和依力卡。全劇作曲差不多用了三年時間，於一八九六年二月在都靈市首演。首演後三個月內，全球最重要的歌劇院都爭相上演此劇，贏來喝采連聲。

《波希米亞生涯》這感人肺腑的愛情故事劇情描寫巴黎拉丁區內一群藝術家們生活在貧窮邊沿掙扎求存的苦況，他們命中有喜有悲、有愛有恨。抒情至美的樂章貫穿全劇，使其一氣呵成。這部出色的藝術作品，把喜劇與悲劇、抒情與激情，都平衡得恰到好處。作曲手法在當時充滿新意。普契尼、佐高沙和依力卡這個三人創作組合在《波希米亞生涯》大獲成功之後，又合力炮製了兩齣傑作：《托斯卡》和《蝴蝶夫人》。這三齣名著，加上普契尼死後聲譽日隆的《杜蘭朵》，在全球最賣座的十餘部歌劇中名列前茅，受歡迎程度至今不衰。

是次演出由盧景文執導、廖國敏指揮，並聯同香港名家樂友、非凡美樂合唱團、非凡美樂兒童合唱團、國際知名歌唱家及本地優秀青年藝術家傾力合作，為香港觀眾呈獻這部動人心弦的歌劇。

至於演員陣容方面，男高音詹姆士．瓦朗提（美國）及 杜明尼克．車尼士（美國）將分別飾演詩人魯道夫。女高音絲蒂芬妮．亞朵芙嫻（烏克蘭）及法蘭斯．貝爾瑪（加拿大）將分別擔綱繡花女咪咪的角色，而慕塞塔的角色則由女中音貞潔．柯斯達．積克遜（美國）及本地女高音馮曉楓分別演出。

《波希米亞生涯》以意大利文演唱，並設有中英文字幕。門票將於十月三十一日（星期二）起於城市售票網售票處發售（www.urbtix.hk）。有關更多節目詳情，歡迎致電6976 2877查詢或瀏覽非凡美樂網頁（www.musicavivahk.org）。

完

二零一七年十月十三日

Giacomo’s Puccini’s La Bohème holds a special place in the hearts of most opera lovers: perhaps it was the first opera they had seen, or the first to draw tears. This is no story of kings and contessas, or a retelling of a story set in some far-off time and place. Puccini’s protagonists are six contemporary young people in the period of self-discovery between feckless youth and adult responsibility. (Think “Friends” but with purpose — and better music.) Puccini makes us want to believe: to believe in the characters, to hope that things will turn out alright for Mimí and Rodolfo, although we know they won’t. It is no accident that the story has been successfully recycled more than once, including the award-winning musical Rent.

Resetting Henri Murger’s 1851 Scènes de la vie de bohème — a collection of (probably at least semi-autobiographical) linked stories about a group of “bohemians” set in the years before the 1848 revolutions that engulfed France and, indeed, most of Europe — was so obvious that Puccini wasn’t the only one to think of it. His friend Ruggero Leoncavallo (of I Pagliacci fame) had the same idea. Indeed, Leoncavallo (by then no longer quite so friendly) publicly accused Puccini of stealing the concept. Puccini beat Leoncavallo to the punch; his opera premiered in 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Turin (conducted by no less than Arturo Toscanini). Within two years, it had been performed around the world from New York to Alexandria. Leoncavallo’s work premiered in 1897 and, whatever its merits— and there are many — it remained an also-ran, more often than not known as the “other Bohème”.

La Bohème was not, it should be said, Puccini’s first hit nor was it his first work that went head-to-head with another composer. His 1893 opera Manon Lescaut, his third and one which reworked a story that Jules Massenet had successfully set to music only a decade earlier, established Puccini as, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “the heir of Verdi”. But it was nonetheless La Bohème that ushered in the period of Puccini’s greatest creativity, the first of the trio of operas that includes Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

George Bernard Shaw also once said the “Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.” In La Bohème, the poet Rodolfo and silk flower-maker Mimì are true to form, but the baritone — the painter Marcello — is one of opera’s most appealing characters; everyone should have a friend in need like Marcello. Nor — as is opera’s wont — is the other soprano, the flirty, headstrong Musetta, the “other woman”. She gives Marcello a hard time, but is hardly, as she says of herself when praying for Mimì, “unworthy of forgiveness”; quite the contrary.

The protagonists are rounded with the musician Schaunard— who secures for the company of bohemians their holiday repast by singing for, and then poisoning, some eccentric Englishman’s parrot — and the philosopher Colline to whom Puccini gives one of opera’s most evocative bass odes when he bids his old overcoat adieu before pawning it in the finale Act.

Puccini’s music is, it goes without saying, unsurpassed; one hardly needs to understand anything to feel what is being communicated. But Puccini’s ability to get his audiences to identify with his characters comes just as much from his observations of the minutiae of daily life: candles blow out in the draft, keys are lost, love starts with holding hands in the dark, lovers quarrel and make up, people get hungry and pawn their possessions. They are people we know, or want to know.

La Bohème is a tragedy — how could it not be? — with long stretches of? some of the most lyrical paeans to romance ever written. But Puccini knew that life is as much about the absurd as the beautiful or tragic, and he includes a fair dose of comedy: whether the bohemians (as in other places of this article) putting one over on their avaricious, although in the end somewhat pitiable, landlord Benoît, or girl-about-town Musetta sticking her sugar daddy Alcindoro with her bohemian friends’ bill from the unaffordable Café Momus.

Words matter in La Bohème; the libretto — perhaps in honor of its poet protagonist — is filled with rhyme and rhythm and moments of great poetic power, none perhaps more wrenching that when Rodolfo tells the dying Mimì that she is as beautiful as the dawn. “You’ve mixed your metaphors,” she tells him, “it should be a sunset”. In portraying these lives of quite ordinary people with grace, compassion, humour and humanity, Puccini makes them — in their intimacy — universal. No one who has ever loved, or ever hoped to, can leave a performance untouched. La Bohème is, in spite (or perhaps because) of its heart-breaking denouement, a celebration of what it means to be alive. (by Peter Gordon)