Productions like this one of Puccini's evergreen La bohème are the lifeblood of opera. The singers are not international stars of the sort to make the rafters shake, but all of them, led by Celine Byrne as Mimi and Merunas Vitulskis as Rodolfo, believe in what they're singing and propel the action forward naturally. If there's a star here, it's conductor Sergio Alapont, leading the Irish National Opera Orchestra. He faced a number of pandemic-era challenges in this 2021 concert performance at Ireland's Bord Gáis Energy ...
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Productions like this one of Puccini's evergreen La bohème are the lifeblood of opera. The singers are not international stars of the sort to make the rafters shake, but all of them, led by Celine Byrne as Mimi and Merunas Vitulskis as Rodolfo, believe in what they're singing and propel the action forward naturally. If there's a star here, it's conductor Sergio Alapont, leading the Irish National Opera Orchestra. He faced a number of pandemic-era challenges in this 2021 concert performance at Ireland's Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, working with masked players and singers except when singing, a spaced-out choir and orchestra, and everyone socially distanced. Despite these restrictions, Alapont keeps the music moving forward with febrile energy. The opera as a whole comes in several minutes faster than average, and Alapont manipulates the tempo at many points in intensely dramatic readings. The comic scenes in the opera crackle, and the action seizes the listener's imagination as Mimi's condition begins to...
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