The Anna Livia International Opera Festival's new production of Puccini's La rondine, which opened at the Gaiety Theatre on Saturday, offered a completely different experience to the previous night's Herodiade.
La rondine, which was commissioned as a Viennese operetta, was once described as "a poor man's Traviata", and also bears uncanny resemblances to certain aspects of the plot of Die Fledermaus.
Roberto Oswald's set design for Anna Livia was again very basic, but the action was lively, with layering provided by the use of silhouettes seen through a large, oval surround, which dominated the stage.
Alison Roddy, a singer who hasn't been heard much in her native Dublin of late, creates a real presence as Magda, a role for which she showed both the spirit and the voice. I'm sure we'll be hearing much more of her.
The Argentinean tenor Carlos Duarte was somewhat subdued as her lover Ruggero, but the pairing of Italian tenor Dominic Natoli's Prunier and Kathleen Tynan's Lisette was as lively as you could wish. In fact, in terms of sheer vocal stylishness and a comic presence with a light touch, Natoli really stole the show.
The members of the festival chorus were small in number and rather too obviously stretched on this occasion (they were a lot more secure in Herodiade), and the orchestral playing under Franz-Paul Decker was also problematic.
Stage/pit ensemble wasn't always tight, and Decker rarely conveyed the feeling that he was entirely comfortable with the musical style of what is, by a long distance, the weakest of Puccini's mature operas, and therefore the one most in need of sympathetically supportive musical direction.
