Puccini’s Opera “La Bohème” revisited by the Canti di Garonne will be staged on November 18th at 8:30 pm at the Ducourneau theater. A hymn to youthful dreams and love.
After Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” in 2011, Rossini’s “Il barbiere di Siviglia” in 2017 and Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” in 2019, the company Chants de Garonne wanted to tackle another great work of the Italian repertoire : La Boheme by Puccini.
While this four-act opera evolves into a more dramatic register than the three previously mentioned, it includes many extremely happy and often comical moments, making the outcome even more tragic. It is all Puccini’s art, and in particular in “La Bohème”, to mix passionate feelings, comic situations and tragic scenes with a confused naturalness.
Intimate and romantic setting
“La Bohème” is also a hymn to youth, his dreams, his excesses, his vitality, his difficulties and, of course, his passionate feelings. The choice of interpreters of the same age for the role, capable of embodying these nice students and capable of managing the vocal difficulties of the Puccini repertoire, was extremely delicate. Six first-rate opera singers were selected, the Chants de Garonne, thus continuing their mission as a springboard for young opera artists. In the same spirit, the two small roles were entrusted to the students of the Toulouse Conservatory.
“Our desire is to highlight this work, not in the splendor, but in the intimacy induced by the libretto itself: an attic in the rather miserable Latin Quarter where students evolve whose only wealth are their dreams. Of love and poetry “, argues the director of Les Chants de Garonne Emmanuel Gardeil.
In Paris, in the nineteenth century, a group of penniless students counted on the joys of life to sweeten their miserable everyday life a little, because eating, warming up or paying the rent was a luxury … The tenderness of the little cousette that Mimì brings light and warmth to the poet Rodolfo: both live their love intensely at first sight and reveal it to their friends on Christmas Eve. The painter Marcello is used to the strokes of genius with Musette, his fickle lover: their couple acts as a more tumultuous counterpoint to the more melodramatic one, of Mimì and Rodolfo, who end up melting in the name of an impossible love. In fact, she Mimi knows that she is condemned by her consumption, which gradually devours her. Although separated from Rodolfo, she will come to exhale her last breath in her arms, under the eyes of the unfortunate comrades unable to cure her.
