OPERA REVIEW : Tradition Triumphs in S.F. ‘Boheme’

This, I suppose, is a tale of two “La Bohemes.”

Earlier this month, Los Angeles introduced a very fancy, very fussy, very costly, very busy version of Puccini’s little tear-jerker, with a famous film director moving a modest cast and a superfluous throng of extras across a picturesquely cluttered Music Center stage. For all its prettiness, the result was overproduced and, worse, undersung.

Meanwhile, San Francisco went quietly about “Boheme” business as usual. Simple business. Enlightened business.

The differences between the projects are telling. Los Angeles obviously thought the verismo classic needed to be updated and refocused, even if some of the original impulses were distorted in the process. San Francisco trusted the composer.

Don’t get me wrong. This is no diatribe against modern interpretations of established masterpieces. Anyone who has witnessed the vicissitudes of Peter Sellars’ Mozart, of Wagner in Bayreuth or just about anything at the Long Beach Opera knows how stimulating a new look can be.

By such standards, in fact, “La Boheme” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion looked like a hoary museum-piece. Herbert Ross came up with some innovations, to be sure, but they just got in the way--with poor Mimi entering 15 minutes before the orchestra could whisper her entrance music, and half of Paris assembled on a quaint rooftop to applaud the Bohemian kids’ horseplay.

There were no such trivial pursuits in San Francisco. Nor were there any theatrical inspirations, positive or negative. The focus was on the music.

The conductor in Los Angeles happened to be a very talented quasi-amateur: Placido Domingo. The conductor in San Francisco was a not-so-old master: Charles Mackerras. That made a drastic difference.

Mackerras, who graces the company as principal guest-conductor, knows exactly when to linger over sentimental details and when to surge onward. He knows how to savor gutsy orchestral outbursts without blanketing the voices. He knows where the grand climaxes are, and, more important, how to reach them without undue vulgarity. He exerts a comforting, illuminating force.

On Wednesday, he enjoyed the advantage of a strong cast of hard-working singing-actors. Most striking among them was an unheralded 24-year-old tenor from Italy: Roberto Aronica.

If all had gone as planned, Aronica wouldn’t even have been here. The scheduled Rodolfo was to have been Roberto Alagna, but family illness forced his withdrawal. Lotfi Mansouri, general director of the company, took something of a gamble when he turned instead to a novice who had made his first appearance on any stage only a year ago in Santiago, Chile.

But Aronica came with at least one wonderful credential. He had studied with that under-rated paragon of Italian tenors, Carlo Bergonzi.

The young man apparently has learned his lessons well. His voice--a light spinto--is slender and bright, quite open at the top. The tone is beautifully focused, and, for the most part, artfully supported.

Aronica is no shouter. He can muster, and master, a sweet pianissimo at one extreme, a ringing forte at the other. And he doesn’t shrink from the notorious high C in “Che gelida manina.”

He really caresses the line in passages of tenderness, and he points the text sensitively. He cuts a sympathetic, agile figure on the stage, and doesn’t seem to suffer from the awful disease of tenoral egomania.

Roberto Aronica. Remember the name.

Veronica Villarroel, his attractive Mimi,, is remembered for an uneven “Traviata” in Los Angeles last season. Although her supple lyric soprano sometimes turns a bit hard under pressure, she would seem to be better suited to Puccini than Verdi.

After a rather edgy start, she came into her own with an exquisitely shaded “Addio” in the third act and a poignantly understated death scene. She didn’t look exactly like a consumptive waif, but her performance was validated by vocal, musical and dramatic conviction.

The supporting ensemble was dominated by Anna Panagulias--disappointing in Los Angeles as Mozart’s Pamina and Verdi’s Gilda, but nicely cast here as a vivacious Musetta who kisses half the men at the Cafe Momus and sings that infernal waltz with insinuating charm. William Shimell partnered her as an unusually passionate, agreeably macho Marcello.

Philip Skinner was a lanky, sonorous Colline, Hector Vasquez a pleasantly wiry if small-voiced Schaunard. Renato Capecchi, veteran of a billion “Bohemes” (in which he has sung all the baritone roles), brought his customary class to the cameos of Benoit and Alcindoro.

The handsome, literal sets of David Mitchell, now seven years old, take only one (painless) liberty with tradition: at the end of the first and last acts, the translucent wall of the garret reveals a romantic panorama of the City of Light. Otherwise the viewer is confined to the intimate world that the composer wanted to explore.

Sandra Bernhard, who inherited the stage-direction duties this year, plotted the action with unobtrusive logic. The characters were deftly defined, their predicaments neatly motivated. The obvious goal here was credibility, not creativity.

Although the War Memorial Opera House yawned with empty seats for “La Fille du Regiment” the night before, the auditorium was packed for “Boheme.” The Los Angeles box office, it should be noted, reports similar successes. Never underestimate the appeal of a marvelously mawkish hum-along opus about a Latin Quarter poet who loves a terminal seamstress with a heart of gold and, hopefully, a voice to match.

Incidental intelligence: The Music Center “Boheme” was superior to its San Francisco counterpart in at least one respect: It had fewer intermissions. The pauses between the acts at the War Memorial Opera House--three, count ‘em, three--seemed longer than the acts themselves.