La Rondine certainly isn't Puccini's easiest or most successful opera. Completed in 1917, it flutters - sometimes elegantly, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes passionately - from verismo platitudes to hand-me-down diversions to kitsch indulgences.
Inspired by Viennese operetta, the intimate extravaganza plays in France yet sings unabashed Italian. It borrows a bit of Léharsentiment here and recycles a lot of the Traviata plot there. There's even a fleeting hint of Fledermaus, with a saucy maid borrowing her mistress's gown for a party.
The exposition, essentially clunky, focuses on the doom of a high-class whore equipped with a heart of gold. Remember her? We're supposed to identify the sacrificial heroine with the swallow of the title, but as her pathetic story unfolds she seems more like a fallen sparrow.
Fortunately, the sparrow really managed to soar on Thursday at the New York City Opera, despite a doggedly literal production first scraped together 20 years ago.
Ralph Funicello's unimaginative sets resemble cheap window-dressing. Sam Kirkpatrick's costumes suggest a raid on the attic closet. Though intelligently motivated, Lotfi Mansouri's staging scheme seldom rises above the picturesque.
Peggy Hickey's artsy-balletic embellishments strain credibility. Rising blissfully above her surroundings, Pamela Armstrong ennobled Magda's platitudes with expressive warmth, luminous tone and dramatic urgency.
This soprano knows how to float ravishing sotto-voce phrases, knows how to convey pathos through simplicity, knows how to shade subtle nuances. She even knows how to overcome the intrusion of a grotesquely over-amplified piano in the famous opening aria. Pamela Armstrong. Remember the name.
Her colleagues seldom reached the same level of persuasion. Gerard Powers' pallid tenor sounded strained in much of the rhapsodic music assigned the stolid hero, Ruggero.
A second tenor, Tracey Welborn, negotiated the awkward turns and tessitura of Prunier, the resident wag, conscientiously. Angela Turner Wilson had to settle for pretty-pert platitudes as Lisette, the resident soubrette. The others tended to fade into the cardboard woodwork.
Saving graces emanated from the pit where Stephen Lord held the disparate elements together with sensitivity and style, verve and pathos. He almost made La Rondine sound like a masterpiece. It's an imposing achievement. Tel +1 212 870 5600
