Barbara Ludman
CD OFTHEWEEK
La Bohme: Noir the black Bohme was greeted with acclaim from all quarters when it opened in Cape Town at the end of 1997. Librettist Hal Shaper had shifted the action from 1830s Paris to 1976 Soweto, setting an English text replete with South African references to Puccini’s glorious music. The seamstress Mimi and the poet Rudolpho meet on Republic Day; Mimi breathes her last a day or two after June 16. The garret where Rudolpho and his artistic friends burn Rudolpho’s poetry to keep warm is in Johannesburg. Caf Momus is a Soweto shebeen called Caf Mamma; the Christmas street scene in Act 2 is a Soweto street scene, and so on. The production featured some wonderful voices and excellent acting.
La Bohme: Noir moved on to Johannesburg and eventually overseas, where it also garnered rave reviews: one in the Daily Telegraph called the opera “sensational”. I thought so too when I saw it at the Civic. Opera was originally not an elite art form but one accessible to the audience; a play sung in English with a storyline set against a familiar background made the same kind of sense as a play sung in Italian in 19th-century Milan.
Only one problem, really, and it’s even clearer on the CD, from Prestige Elite Stage and Screen Classics and recorded during a performance at the Nico Malan in Cape Town, where we’re not distracted by the stage business: the music was written to be sung in Italian. English has an entirely different flow, a different rhythm.
Never mind; one makes allowances if the voices are good, and some are magnificent. Baritone Fikile Mvinjelwa won a richly deserved Vita Award for his singing of Marcello, Rudolpho’s friend; Agos Moahi as Rudolpho is splendid. Sibongile Mngoma who describes her voice as “heavy lyric” soprano won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award a year later. Her performance is, by and large, quite good, although occasionally, on the highest notes, her voice loses its sweetness, on the CD as it did on stage.