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LSO and Tony Pappano, La rondine at the Barbican (Photo: Mark Allan)

Trust Puccini to write one of the world’s greatest musicals – before the art form had even been dreamed up. It’s not an insult to La rondine, either: this Italified Austrian operetta script, not really satisfactory either as drama or romantic comedy, could never yield a solid-gold opera, but Puccini makes out of it a miracle of a different sort, prophetic of the knowing sentimentalism of the 20^th century, while also being a thousand per cent Puccini.

He could do this stuff in his sleep, but he lavished Rondine with all the fruits of his operatic knowhow: the bantzy tone of Bohème, supercharged by a highly unoperatic degree of self-awareness in the characters, meshes piquantly with the unabashed ardour of Magda and Ruggero’s hand-me-down operatic passion, expressed in Puccini’s longest, most un-nuanced, least subtle torrents of ardent melody.

As operetta requires, there’s a realism about Rondine which admits that heartbreak is, in actual fact, rarely fatal: the show pretty much ends with a shrug as the couple part, deciding not to ruin their lives in the approved operatic manner. The fatal moment is prompted by Ruggero wittering on about babies, whose screams and nappies so comprehensively puncture the make-believe idyll that true opera cannot live without.

LSO and Tony Pappano, La rondine at the Barbican (Photo: Mark Allan)

It’s a long-winded way of saying that Rondine is swings and roundabouts – what you lose in true operatic punch is repaid in spades by the most sheerly enjoyable, least boring outpouring of heart-thrilling late romanticism ever penned. And Tony Pappano understands this very well, adding to it an ecstatic revelling in the swoon-inducing sensual overload of Puccini’s orchestral writing, whose enactment by the London Symphony Orchestra almost blew the singers – already teetering on a sliver of forestage to make room for all those violins – into the stalls below.

But not quite. If casting felt a little eccentric – Michael Fabiano’s Ruggero looking and sounding rather older than Carolina López Ramiro’s young-seeming Magda, when it should be the other way round – the singers, within the slightly uncomfortable limits of a not very directed quarter-staging, threw themselves body and soul into the spirit of the evening. She doesn’t have the most poetic tone or expression, but this forthright Magda was passionately sung, living Doretta’s dream with the correct degree of fervour until the sudden chill of those blasted babies (in fact the whole of Act 3, with its less than orgasmic aura, its tawdry money-chat over the beautiful memory of ‘Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso…’, its bitching and squabbles, frankly admits that the fruition of this love-affair is considerably less amazing than its anticipation).

Act 2 is where Rondine’s heart lives, though, with Fabiano settling into ethereally velvety tone for the first duet, the untrammelled orchestral waltzes, everything heading towards the cataclysmic kiss and the torrential indulgence of the showtune ‘Bevo…’, which eventually possesses the entire nightclub in a frenzy of erotic make-believe. For this you wave away and gladly pardon the flabby dramaturgy, the desultory plotlessness, the hokey premise of the whole thing.

Orchestral marvels too many to mention, every section filling its boots with Puccini’s goodies; a Prunier and Lisette, that joyfully cynical and frivolous couple, blithely (and in her case prettily spikily) performed by Serena Gamberoni and Paul Appleby, and a lively backing cast and thrilling chorus; Pappano balancing shameless indulgence with canny forward momentum through the filler bits… this really was the pre-Christmas blowout we all longed for.