La Rondine

[chickenfeet]

Today's MetHD broadcast was Puccini's La Rondine. The plot is opera standard implausible but it has some really good, typical, Puccini, vocal and orchestral writing. I imagine itcould be a bit dull because of the plot holes but the Met had cast real life married couple Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna as the lovers Magda/Paulette and Ruggero. The chemistry between the two was really very good. There's a lot of singing about the mystery of love in the first act but the real mystery is how Gheorghiu's dress stays on in the third act given the industrial strength pawing she's getting from her partner. The singing was pretty good considering that, apparently, Gheorghiu had a bad cold and the weather recently hasn't been kind to singers generally. I particularly liked Lisette Orepasa as, appropriately, Lisette. I think we'll see a lot more of her in comic and soubrette roles. One feels sure a Met Despina is in her future. (She's already done Susanna as an understudy).

The broadcast production was pretty good. I thought the sound balance was off in the first ten minutes or so but it seemed to get fixed and there was a couple of seconds of dropped sound in the third act. Otherwise I thought they did fine with camera angles and so on.