La Bohème – Glyndebourne Autumn Season

Last Updated on June 8, 2026

A Haunting and Macabre La Bohème in Time for Halloween

4.5 out of 5.0 stars

It has been three years since I saw the premiere of Dutch director Floris Visser’s production of Puccini’s La bohème at Glyndebourne during the 2022 Summer Season. An opera I know and love, Visser’s version still feels like a jolt. He takes the familiar bohemian Paris and reimagines it as a monochrome fever dream, all gleaming cobbles and looming shadows. From the opening bars, the heroine’s fate hangs visibly over the stage. This is the first revival since the 2022 Summer and Touring Seasons, and Rachael Hewer directs the revival.

Puccini’s four-act opera, with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica after Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, is built on the 19th-century obsession with the femme fragile. Consumptive heroines like Violetta and Mimì have always captivated modern audiences, and post-COVID, that fascination feels oddly intensified.

The story revolves around two couples. Rodolfo, sung by Andrés Agudelo, falls for Mimì, sung by Aida Pascu. They are a convincing pair, Agudelo’s youthful impetuosity meeting Pascu’s delicacy in a performance that finds both the sweetness and the sting. There is real chemistry, too, and it pays off.

Agudelo, in his second Glyndebourne Autumn Season after Alfredo in La traviata in 2024, brings an easy charm and a ringing lyric tenor. Che gelida manina was neatly phrased, and the high Cs at the close of O soave fanciulla rang out with genuine thrill. Pascu, making her debut, is a lovely Mimì. Her bel canto line is poised, her top notes float, and her stage presence has that fragile radiance that Puccini’s heroine requires. She is still studying, but her 2024 ICMA Artist of the Year award has already marked her out. On this showing, it’s justified.

Marcello and Musetta provide the foil. Aksel Daveyan’s Marcello has a baritone with muscle and warmth; Camilla Harris’s Musetta is bright and sparky, occasionally a touch fierce at the top but always alive. Their Quando m’en vo had the right mixture of glamour and danger. Harris, once a chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, carries herself with ease and acts with intelligence. Daveyan plays the besotted artist to the hilt. Together, they make a fine pair.

Colline and Schaunard round out the garret quartet. These roles need genuine camaraderie, and this cast delivers it. Markus Suihkonen’s Colline has a resonant bass and a knack for tragicomic understatement. His Vecchia zimarra, senti, was a quiet highlight. Darwin Prakash, as Schaunard, was sharply dressed and sharper still in movement, his baritone agile and bright, albeit sometimes overwhelmed by the orchestra. His backstory is nearly operatic: discovered in Delhi, nurtured at the Glyndebourne Academy, trained at the RAM. He now looks entirely at home.

Visser is a director who prefers a single set, and here it works remarkably well. Thonet chairs stacked up as scaffolding in the garret are quickly assembled around café tables for the second act. The garret hearth is a manhole into which a fire is built from the pages of Rodolfo’s book. Act III unfolds at the entrance to the catacombs with the tavern off-stage. The world feels both unified and claustrophobic, yet inexorable.

The visual inspiration comes from Brassaï’s black-and-white photographs of 1930s Paris, all mist and gleam. Dieuweke Van Reij’s set features high grey walls and a street that fades into blackness. The seed for the design was sown when Visser stumbled on a gated street marked Passage d’enfer on a research trip to Paris. The catacombs were never far away, and he makes that literal.

Costumes by Jon Morrell stick to shades of grey, black and white, punctuated only by Mimì’s pink beret. Red balloons from Christopher Lemmings’s virtuosic Parpignol and pink flowers in the final act provide the only other splashes of colour. It’s theatrical minimalism, but it works.

The production’s most striking innovation is Death. Played silently by Lemmings, dressed like a spectral Peter Cushing, he is seen only by Mimì and follows her throughout. At the end, she simply walks away with him while her friends grieve. Inspired by Meet Joe Black and The Seventh Seal, this is a Bohème for modern audiences: unsentimental, fatalistic and just a little unsettling. It’s refreshing to see a director treat Puccini’s tragedy as tragedy, rather than a tourist postcard.

Adam Hickox conducted with pace and bite, drawing a taut, urgent sound from the Glyndebourne Philharmonic. Puccini’s lushness can sometimes get too comfortable, but not here. Having sung under his father Richard at St Endellion, it was oddly touching to see Adam in the pit. My last memory of him is of a small boy on a surfboard at Polzeath. Time moves on.

The Glyndebourne Chorus was its usual impeccable self, injecting real vitality into the crowd scenes, with the children of Glyndebourne Youth Opera adding their charm and professionalism.

This revival confirms that Visser’s Bohème is no mere gimmick. It has style, coherence and a sense of dramatic inevitability. If you want Parisian twinkle, look elsewhere. If you want Puccini served with a chill in the air and a figure in black watching from the wings, this is your ticket.

Nine performances between 11 October and 2 November

La bohème
Glyndebourne
Lewes
East Sussex
United Kingdom
BN8 5UU

The Autumn Season at Glyndebourne runs from 11 October to 14 December. The season includes revivals of Floris Visser’s La bohème and Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, together with a
A world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Railway Children, which opens on 30 October,
directed by Glyndebourne’s Artistic Director Stephen Langridge, with a libretto by Rachael Hewer. A staged concert of the new opera will be performed at the Southbank Centre on 8 November.