This staging of La Bohème for Welsh National Opera by the late Goran Jarvefelt is now in its 20th year. Like perennials whose genetic makeup allows them to reappear with vigour, so it is with Puccini's tale of bohemian life. At least, that is what companies count on. But it is the discovery of fresh new voices that gives an overworked production its viability. Here, WNO has stolen a march on other companies by giving British debuts to two singers who are already making a mark elsewhere and who, on the strength of these very assured performances, ought to go a long way.
The South Korean-born Jae-Chul Bae has a string of big competition prizes to his name, and it's not hard to see why. His Rodolfo was a poetic singer, the tone gentle and expressive but also capable of great surges of robust and even sound, without strain.
His Mimì was the Chilean soprano Angela Marambio, similarly garlanded with prizes. She, too, had an impressive range and the ability to colour her voice so as give the dying consumptive a credible fragility, yet conveying with powerful feeling the aspiration to lasting happiness. From the beginning there was chemistry in this partnership - a compatibility revealed in the relative ease of their movement together, whether alone on stage or in the bustling Cafe Momus scene (when all eyes tended to be diverted by Deborah Norman's feisty Musetta).
Perhaps the greatest imperative for Mimì is to die well. Marambio did, expiring with grace rather than histrionics, so that when the grief-stricken Rodolfo took her limp body into his arms, it was unbearably sad. Carlo Rizzi, WNO's former music director, managed to realise an intimacy in this final scene that was all the more potent for emerging at the end of a tightly driven performance.
The horseplay in the artists' garret was suitably boisterous, with David Kempster's Marcello always an authoritative presence, even if Timothy Mirfin as the philosopher Colline looked the leaner, hungrier man. And what a relief that the only white powder in this production is in the snow scene.
· Repeated on Saturday and June 6. Box office: 029-2087 8889.
