FROM AROUND THE WORLD: LONDON.(Review)

Most opera-lovers know the story of how Puccini and Leoncavallo fell out over who should set Henry Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Boheme to music, how both nevertheless went ahead with their scores -- Puccini's reaching the stage fifteen months before his rival's -- and how, within a few years, Puccini's version gained the ascendancy, eventually consigning the Leoncavallo to the status of a rarity.

All the more welcome, therefore, was the chance to assess Leoncavallo's 1897 work in a full-scale production, as part of ENO's ongoing Italian season (Nov. 2). Tim Albery directed with panache, charting the emotional ups and downs of his characters with true verismo vividness and providing an Act II party scene -- set outside Musetta's apartment, from which she has been evicted for not paying rent -- that conjured a carefree sense of joie-devivre amidst wrecked personal finances. Jon Morrell's costumes were a triumph of style over taste -- Bohemians, after all, being more noted for exhibitionism than for quiet understatement -- and Stefanos Lazaridis's sparse sets evoked an atmosphere of poverty, though the first-act Cafe Momus looked distinctly under-populated on Christmas Eve.

While it would be foolish to pretend that this score equaled Puccini's comprehensive mastery in what is after all one of opera's perfect achievements, Leoncavallo's fertile melodic gift is nicely displayed in a succession of likable, sometimes potent numbers, his neat orchestration combining with lilting lyricism to give the lighter scenes an almost operetta-like delicacy. The closest dramatic parallel comes in the respective final acts, where Leoncavallo's consistently darker tone momentarily makes Puccini seem saccharine. As a whole, however, there's no denying that Puccini's scheme of interlacing tragedy with lightheartedness is cannier than Leoncavallo's, which effectively follows two cheerful scenes with two doleful ones. It might be interesting now to revive Mimi Pinson, Leoncavallo's 1913 revision of La Boheme, to see whether he improved the balance on rethinking the ...