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Opera Australia: La Boheme - Giacomo Puccini (1993)
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The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra.Julian Smith, Conductor.
Recorded live from the Sydney Opera House, this Australian Opera production of Puccini's perennial favorite was staged by the creative team who made the hit film Strictly Ballroom -director Baz Luhrmann and designers Catherine Martin and Bill Marron.
They have crafted a compelling and artful reworking of the opera, using the post-war privations of 1950s Paris as a convincing setting, and capturing, above all else, the youthfulness and intensity of the story with a raw sincerity.
After the PBS showing of this recording, John J. O'Connor wrote in the New York Times, "Familiarity can breed ennui, but an occasional jolt of imaginative freshness can work wonders.Irresistble proof is available in this Boheme…Like the opera itself, Mr. Luhmann's interpretation is shamelessly and quite gloriously romantic.By the slow close of its final curtain, there will not, I assure you, be a dry eye in anybody's house…Watch this smashing production and be seduced all over again.
The stars of this basically ensemble production are Cheryl Barker as Mimi and David Hobson, tall and hansome as a movie star, who plays Rodolfo with a flip, boyish carelessness that makes his love for Mimi all the more moving when he loses her.They are splendidly complemented by Christine Douglas and Roger Lemke in the parts of the good-hearted but flirtatious Musetta and her lover, Marcello.
Rodolfo's other companions in the garret -David Lemke as the musician Schaunard, Gary Rowley as the philosopher Colline - are typical exuberant students.
Julian Smith conducts Puccini's rich, eloquent score, and the dramatic vibrancy of Luhrmann's production makes some of the composer's finest moments, such as the very different tensions between the two pairs of lovers, emerge with moving clarity.
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