Pocket Opera Closes Its Season With Puccini’s Bittersweet La Rondine

Reviewing for San Francisco Classical Voice, Michael Zwiebach takes up La Rondine, The Swallow, one of Giacomo Puccini's less-performed operas, last seen in the Bay Area in 2009 in a San Francisco Opera production. Pocket Opera chose this challenging piece to close its 2026 season, in co-production with the Mercury Theater in Petaluma. The final performance was given on Sunday, July 26, at the Gunn Theater in the Legion of Honor, and was, in the critic's view, a mixed success. As the company always does, it was sung in English, in a translation by the late Donald Pippin, Pocket Opera's founding director. La Rondine, Zwiebach writes, is constantly in the throes of a serious identity crisis. Is it a romantic comedy or a drama of love lost? Is it operetta or grand opera? Any company staging it must find the emotional arc of the tragedy and somehow meld it with the fluff and the fun. In the story, Magda, the swallow of the title, wants to fly free on the wings of romance but is caught in the Parisian love-cage of Rambaldo, the wealthy man who keeps her. When Ruggero, a young stranger from the south of France, turns up, Magda falls for him at a less-than-respectable dance hall. The two run away to the Riviera, but their happiness is short-lived: Ruggero wants to marry her, and Magda, refusing to pollute his sainted mother's home with her history as a courtesan, leaves him and returns to Paris and her old life. Against that sad story, Puccini and his librettists keep trying to lighten the mood, above all with the bickering affair between Prunier, a bossy and volatile poet, and Magda's maid Lisette, a would-be actor who is quite a match for her lover's attempts to control her. Given such a libretto, the music and the emotional temperature inevitably bounce back and forth, grand love duets competing uncertainly with feisty comedy and dance numbers. Among the cast, Ruggero was sung with appealing sensitivity by Maxwell Ary, who, with a supple physicality and remarkably clear diction, projected a lover's passion and vulnerability and revelled in Puccini's flowing melodies with his nimble tenor. As Magda, the coloratura soprano Michelle Allie Drever conveyed a rather different affect, her strong grand-opera voice favouring a dark palette of vowels that disguised the words and often sitting out of balance with Ary's more modulated singing, especially in the many duets where both ascend into their upper registers. The result made the chemistry between the two characters hard to believe. The comic elements were the most successful part of the production. Alex Taite, an Oakland native, was alternately gruff and sweet as Prunier trying to control his strong-willed partner, and the soprano Melissa Sondhi sang Lisette with sparkle and savvy. A bevy of partygoers carried the lighter scenes with the kind of repartee that animates operettas like Die Fledermaus or The Merry Widow, Clare Demer, Abigail Bush and Leandra Ramm especially delightful in various roles, chatting and flirting with irrepressible energy. The stage director Elly Lichtenstein did excellent work keeping those scenes clear and engaging on the tiny Gunn Theater stage. The Bay Area baritone Michael Jesse Kuo was appropriately forceful and stern as Magda's protector, Rambaldo. Supporting the singers expertly throughout, the conductor Mary Chun led the twelve-person onstage orchestra in her own superb arrangement of Puccini's orchestration. Pocket Opera's general director Nicolas Garcia welcomed the audience by announcing that the company will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary next year with performances including The Magic Flute and Rigoletto. This company may be pocket-sized, the critic concludes, but it proudly carries a suitcase full of big ambitions. Listen: "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" The opera's most famous aria comes early in Act One. At a party in Magda's house, the poet Prunier begins a song about a girl named Doretta and has no ending for it; Magda supplies one, in which Doretta finds her happiness in the love of a student. What do riches matter, she concludes, if true happiness blossoms? Kristine Opolais sings Magda, conducted by Ion Marin, from the Metropolitan Opera's official channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xG7aIfNq-g