Performance Review: La Bohème, San Francisco Opera, 2004

"The 1996 staging, which migrated to the War Memorial House in 1999 and 2000, is back for another round of six performances there (through Jan 18). Tuesday's tepid, patchy opening suggests that the original vigor of the Lamos staging is pretty well spent. Happily, baritone Mariusz Kwiecien didn't get the message.

In a San Francisco Opera debut as Marcello that accounts for a good share of the evening's musical and dramatic vitality, Kwiecien commands attention whenever he's onstage. His lustrous, virile tone and rugged wide-eyed good looks provide immediate appeal. But it's his instinct for the moment, a fine-tuned responsiveness and transparency, that makes his Marcello so real and gives this often pallid "Bohème" its pulse.

Kwiecien's swagger, as a lover and a painter, has a little pocket of doubt tucked inside. His voice can turn tender without losing its sinewy presence. He gives himself away without realizing he's doing it.

Impulsively vain and sulky as he is in the Café Momus scene with Musetta (Dina Kuznetsova), Kwiecien is even better in his Act 3 exchange with Mimi (Olga Guryakova). Here, as he gives advice to the ailing and lovesick Mimi, his voice takes on a burnished, soft glow. He gets drawn into her misery, a feeling that lingers through his own lover's spat with Musetta.

In the last act, Kwiecien's artfulness is apparent in a single, fleeting gesture. Holding his gaze on his poet pal Rodolfo (Vinson Cole) for an extra instant, he telegraphs a sense of doom and loving pity for his friend. This Marcello has a sixth sense for the ways that love and loss are hopelessly intertwined.

[...] Puccini's masterpiece can summon listeners back again and again, in endlessly varied ways. This time, Kwiecien's Marcello issues the most urgent call.

Steven Winn, "Kwiecien's Marcello stirs pulse of Opera's Bohème",
San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2004