OPERA REVIEW : Puccini’s Rare ‘Swallow’ Flutters in Long Beach

Magda, the all-too worldly heroine with the voice of silver and heart of gold, is serving tea to her young lover, Ruggero, at their rented villa near Nice. The time is 1865. The season is spring. One can hear swallows. One can see the distant ocean through a grove of olive trees. The joy of sensuality is in the air. Also the pain of renunciation.

This is supposed to be the opening scene of the third act of Puccini’s sublimely kitschy, seldom-performed “La Rondine.” The title translates as “The Swallow.”

It is a lovely little tear-jerker embellished with lilting waltz fragments, shimmering flights of lyric expansion and fine operatic passion. The work began, in 1914, as a mock-Viennese operetta and ended up, at its Monte Carlo premiere three fateful years later, as a fragile verismo exercise.

The enterprising Long Beach Opera had its trendy way with “La Rondine” on Sunday. As usual, the producers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, leave sweet enough alone.

Take that scene in the last act. At the Center Theater, Magda and her friend inhabit a black marble mausoleum. Maybe it is a bathhouse.

The nostalgic soprano gushes onward and upward about “l’amor, l’amor, l’amor” while the nearly naked tenor languishes in a hot tub. He tries valiantly to look casual. Modesty--or is it her traditional prima-donna physique?--requires the heroine to keep on her billowy sari. However, she does muster a lot of awkward lolling and rolling, solo and in duet, on the cold, wet floor.

This is all very, very modern. Also very silly.

Hugo de Ana, the designing director imported from Argentina, forces the action forward to some vague period after World War I. Magda becomes a flapper. Except for scarlet blossoms that are strewn by the chorus about the stately stage during the celebrated second-act concertato, the favored color scheme is black on black.

At the beginning of what becomes a performance within a performance--that cliche again--the bleak set is invaded by a rowdy camera crew. Apparently, we are watching the filming of a silent movie.

Don’t ask why. Either De Ana purposely abandons this little conceit after 10 minutes, or it just slips his mind.

Most of the interpretive innovations are not particularly offensive. Some touches are even stylish and amusing. Much of the direction is chronically slick, however, and it tells us nothing helpful about the essential tone and the substance of Puccini’s pathos.

Most damaging is the shift in periods. The tragedy of Magda lies in a conflict between her personal morality and that of a confining society. She is made to forswear pure love because of a shady past (she was, horror of horrors, a rich man’s mistress). That may have made sense during the Second Empire. It hardly rings true in the Terrible Twenties.

“La Rondine” is an unabashedly old-fashioned creation. It really needs a traditional proscenium and the customary theatrical distances to accommodate its cozy once-upon-a-time conventions. Those conventions did not find a congenial home at the Long Beach Opera--with its glaringly intimate ambience, its potentially awkward thrust stage and dogged commitment to dramatic reassessment.

The casting of the title role aggravated the problem. Rosa Vento commands a gleaming, tremendously promising spinto soprano that impresses even when she sings too loud or doesn’t quite ascend to the proper pitch (the final pianissimo sigh was a case in point). Unfortunately, she tends to rely on histrionic generalities, and, hampered additionally by De Ana’s unflattering costumes, she could do little here to foster the desired romantic illusion.

Paul Austin Kelly as the sappy Ruggero looked very innocent, even in his bikini skivvies. Apart from a few stressful moments, he sang with nice tenorial ardor.

The less lofty lovers offered more strain than charm. Sunny Joy Langton turned Lisette into a strident soubrette. Rodney Nolan solved the poetic problems of Prunier in terms of buffo lyricism. David Myrvold grumbled sourly as Magda’s sugar daddy.

Replacing Randall Behr (drafted as a stand-by maestro by the San Francisco Opera), Michael Recchiuti conducted with considerable flair and obvious sympathy. The stationing of the modest little orchestra upstage, behind a scrim, created the usual communication problems, television monitors notwithstanding, and one could have wished for a bit more lustrous string tone. Still, this was an auspicious debut under trying conditions.

The opera, incidentally, was sung in Robert Hess’ functional English translation. One actually could follow the plot without the distracting benefit of supertitles. That was a pleasure.