Holds out huge promise for future seasons: If Opera’s La Rondine reviewed

One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades in her old lover for a younger, cuter model and after a summer of happiness leaves him too, without undue regret. That’s basically it. No death leaps from battlements, no ritual disembowelling; none of that stuff that we’re meant to find so regressive and problematic in an opera house, and so visceral and cool in an HBO drama. Just a simple, plausible romance, played out to glowing waltz melodies. It’s probably Puccini’s least popular mature opera.

But on a West Country evening in the last days of summer, as prosecco corks pop gently in the sunset and shadows lengthen across soft green lawns? Come on: it’s perfect, and nothing will convince me that Michael Volpe, the new executive director of If Opera (the outfit formerly known as Opera at Iford), didn’t choose it for precisely that reason. The venue for If Opera’s inaugural season was Belcombe Court, an impossibly pretty manor house just outside the really, utterly, unfeasibly pretty town of Bradford-upon-Avon and, well, you’re not going to do Wozzeck in a Conservation Area, now are you? Not that I’d put anything past Volpe, mind, and apparently the plan is for If Opera to be peripatetic – adapting its projects to different venues around the English mid-west.

On opening night, though, we had La Rondine in a big tent in the tussocky, lantern-lit gardens of Belcombe Court, with only the half-hourly hooting of the train to Westbury (or possibly Portsmouth Harbour) to puncture the idyll. It was unfortunate that one such blast coincided with the exact moment in Act One where Prunier (Ryan Vaughan Davies) expounds his swallow metaphor for Magda (Meinir Wyn Roberts), and where in Bruno Ravella’s production, an animated bird darts and soars across the backdrop. That apart, the opera tent sounded pretty decent: a big, bright acoustic that took the colours of the 26-piece orchestra and made them ping, even if the cast occasionally struggled to achieve clarity (basic audibility was never an issue).

But it was warm, it was fragrant, and under the baton of If Opera’s artistic director Oliver Gooch, Puccini’s Lehár-inspired melodies fluttered their eyelashes very seductively indeed. Ravella updated the action to the early 1960s, as required by opera director law, but in the first two acts, at least, Flavio Graff’s designs evoked a jazz-age atmosphere that felt right and looked elegant. The way Graff and lighting and video designer Luca Panetta lit and framed the wide, shallow stage was a lesson in how to make the most of a potentially awkward performance space.

And the cast? Well, Roberts made a touching Magda, with a generous sound that twined itself around Joseph Buckmaster’s tenor in their love duets (he was her toyboy, Ruggero), making the whole ensemble light up. As Prunier, Davies exuded such relaxed vocal charm that it was easy to assume that he was destined to be the romantic lead. As it was, his pairing with Lorena Paz Nieto (a properly sparky soubrette) as Lisette left you wishing that Puccini had made more of their subplot. Puccini clearly understood the convention that operettas are meant to have a serious couple and a comic couple, but like a lot of things in La Rondine, he never quite runs with it. This is high-level nit-picking: what he left us is still lovely, and If Opera’s production holds out huge promise for future seasons.

At the Proms the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Jules Buckley performed with Public Service Broadcasting, an indie band whose members appear to have stepped from the pages of The Chap magazine. Their latest project, This New Noise, was a musical celebration of the BBC’s centenary. The BBC, we were told, is invaluable and irreplaceable, and the performance ended with the full orchestra walking silently from the stage in the manner of Haydn’s Farewell symphony, the better to evoke the existential threat that the Corporation currently faces from Market Forces, the Wicked Tories, or possibly Charles Moore – the exact nature of the menace was not entirely clear.

It was more fun than it sounds, and the hipster beard quotient in the Arena was visibly higher than normal for a midweek Prom. Floodlights strobed around the hall and a big screen showed archive footage: Broadcasting House, the Daventry transmitter, and a faintly unhinged visual love letter to Lord Reith, set to pulsing chords. There was a wistful setting of the pre-war German poem ‘A Cello Sings in Daventry’, sung by Seth Lakeman (Werner Egk once wrote a whole radio opera with that title, which might have made an interesting Proms project). For much of the evening, though, the music did what pop groups always do when they get access to an orchestra: use it to play grandiose backing harmonies while the rockers noodle more or less inaudibly out front. It received a standing ovation.