The old magic works like new. Chandos’s Opera in English series no doubt intends to attract the young, and let’s hope it does; it certainly casts its spell over the (say) ‘getting on’. For them, nostalgia will form part of the already potent brew. You don’t have to have climbed the gallery-stairs at old Sadler’s Wells or early post-war Covent Garden or for Carl Rosa in the provinces, but it helps. Boheme on a Friday night. Dadumpompom, curtain-up and you’re off. “This Red Sea Passage feeleth damp and chill to me”: incomprehensible words even if you could make them out, but it didn’t matter. And how those words stuck! “In vain, in vain I something all the torment that racks me. I love Mimi; she is my only something. I love her. Oh, but I fear it …” And so on. Lovely banalities, thrice-lovely score, ever refreshing itself but never again to be quite as it was in those early days of discovery and possession by half-remembered fragments.
In this translation the Red Sea Passage is still damp and chill, but it “feels” rather than “feeleth”, and “Oh, but I fear it” becomes “But I am frightened”. Old-timers (and others) may be relieved to find the tiny hand still frozen and the lovely maid still in the moonlight. Those who really remember in detail may wonder what has happened to Schaunard’s “The devil fly away with you entirely” and Rodolfo’s “What’s the meaning of these comings and goings, these glances so strange?” Answer (respectively): “The devil take the lot of you to Hades” and “Why all this coming and going? Why do you look at me like that?” Progress, I suppose. Anyway, the text (Grist and Pinkerton amended by David Parry) is a very acceptable rendering of a libretto which was, after all, first known in England … in English.
However well sung, that first performance, at Manchester in 1897, is unlikely to have offered orchestral playing as fine as the Philharmonia’s in this recording, and David Parry’s well-considered control of tempo is another strong factor at work in making this a special recording of the opera irrespective of language. The singers have that first requisite of a good Boheme cast: they work as a team. Cynthia Haymon is a gentle Mimi, perfectly lovely in the middle register of her voice, just a little worn on top. Dennis O’Neill, rather as with his Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana (8/98), provides a rare pleasure in this music, singing softly at the right moments (in the Quartet, for example); he also produces such a very good top C in his aria that he has no need to give us another at the end of the Act instead of obliging with the composer’s harmonies. Marie McLaughlin’s Musetta is not quite the sparkler one had in mind, but the fellow Bohemians are capital, in voice as in spirits. The ensemble in Act 2 is first-rate, the contribution of the Peter Kay Children’s Choir even better than that. The Couzens, father and son, have come up with production vivid as a video and the sound glows like Cafe Momus on that immortal Christmas Eve of long ago.'