Puccini La boheme. Katia Ricciarelli (sop) Mimi; Jose Carreras (ten) Rodolfo; Ashley Putnam (sop) Musetta; Ingvar Wixell (bar) Marcello; Hakan Hagegard (bar) Schaunard; Robert Lloyd (bass) Colline; Giovanni de Angelis (bass) Benoit; William Elvin (bar) Alcindoro; Francis Egerton (ten) Parpignol; Richard Hazell (bass) Sergeant; David Whelan (bar) Customs Officer; Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden / Sir Colin Davis.

Philips Duo (Mid price) (CD) 442 260-2PM2 (two discs: 106 minutes: ADD). From 6769 031 (12/79).

This is a highly efficient and often a beautiful Boheme, but not an especially moving one. Davis ensures that more detail is audible than usual; the complex ensembles of Act 2 are lucid, with every strand in the right place, and he is helped by a carefully balanced recording, but sounds more interested in the score than passionately involved with it.

Ricciarelli is in lovely voice, and whenever she is on stage the performance warms up by a degree or two: if your test of a Boheme is Mimi's poignant centrality to Act 3, from the despair of "Marcello, aiuta!" to the tear-drenched phrases of "Addio, dolce svegliare", you will find this one worth sampling. Her Rodolfo, Carreras, is also in beautiful, fresh voice; one of this tenor's most attractive qualities at his best is the ability to respond to a colleague; you can hear him doing it in that Act 3 duet, with phrases of real tenderness. Elsewhere, though, it is fairly standard-issue tenoring: golden tone, ample line, but little sense of a real character, and Ricciarelli is sometimes content to follow him in this. Wixell, grittily intense, insists on acting every single word without really acting Marcello himself; his line is often broken by the sheer force of his projection. A nice Musetta from Ashley Putnam, though: none of the usual shrewish cackling in Act 2, and her concern for Mimi in Act 4 is touching. Robert Lloyd fines down his voice effectively in Colline's song, and all the secondary singers are decent. But the dread word 'efficient' hangs over the whole enterprise; even, dare I say, 'tasteful'. I'm the first to condemn histrionics in recorded opera, but if only someone, just once, had sacrificed beauty of sound to sheer wrenching expression.

Copyright © 1994 Gramophone Magazine.