This new Bohème from Valencia falls unsatisfactorily between two stools, with Davide Livermore’s production plumping for a safe but bland, uninvolving middle ground between updating and tradition. We get plenty of state-of-the art theatrical trappings – the set is not much more than a large skewed box, on to which multiple images are projected – but the minimal props tend to be bunched up in the centre of the stage, where most of the small-scale action, in straightforward period costume and unatmospherically lit, feels dwarfed, the principals rattling around in a vast empty space.

And it seems like no one has really decided whether the projections are there to participate in the action (they give us a hazy inn in Act 3 and occasionally reflect what Marcello ‘paints’ on his own smaller electronic canvas) or simply complement it, which they do somewhat superfluously with blown-up Impressionist paintings from galleries in Philadelphia, with whose Opera Company this is a co production. We are further distanced from the actual drama by Livermore’s tediously hyperactive staging of Act 2. In a bonus interview the director compares the scene to a Hollywood musical but that leads him to treat it as little more than a circus – fire-breathers, mime artists, stilt-walkers and oh-so-funny fawning waiters all vie for our attention and get a naffly choreographed extended curtain call at the end of the act.

It’s a shame, because the young cast make an appealing lot. The Israeli soprano Gal James – a name new to me – is a very impressive, straightforwardly affecting Mimì, and she sings with focused lyrico-spinto tone. There’s an honesty, too, to Aquiles Machado’s Rodolfo, and his slightly grainy but well-schooled timbre is attractive. Carmen Romeu and Massimo Cavalletti make a handsome Musetta and Marcello, and Mattia Olivieri and Gianluca Buratto are lively and likeable as Schaunard and Colline. Riccardo Chailly conducts a lovely, naturally paced account of the score and the orchestra play very well for him. These virtues can’t detract from overall disappointment with the production, though. The subtitles, apparently taken from an archaic singing translation, hardly help matters either.