Scott Cantrell

HOUSTON – The people – critics included – who go on and on about how the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra is the best in the world, how others are far inferior, should have been in Houston's Brown Theater on Saturday night. You'd have to catch the Met on an awfully good night to hear the nuance and finesse Patrick Summers consistently coaxed out of the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra in La bohème.

Just occasionally the orchestra overwhelmed the cast's young singers, but pacing was flawless and Puccini's orchestral detail was lovingly touched in.

James Robinson's staging, introduced here six years ago, updates the story to World War I years. The concept could work, but in practice some details seem gratuitous.

Designer's Allen Moyer's big steam-spewing locomotive in the city-gate scene is fun, but what purpose is served by the upstage stack of coffins? Why, for that matter, the skewed floors of the bohemians' garret – set, like everything else, inside big, grim warehouse walls? And do we really need Colline taking a leak in a bucket?

The cast is age-appropriate and vocally capable, without quite working magic. The most compelling vocalism comes from Albina Shagimuratova's Musetta, her soprano bright, substantive and expressively pliant. But she's not, shall we say, your conventional seductress, and the scene she makes at the Café Momus is over the top.

But then, like most Bohèmes, this one overdoes the comic shtick to the point that it's hard to shift gears for the tender and tragic moments.

Ana María Martínez, an alumna of HGO's apprenticeship program, has become virtually the house soprano. Her tone has taken on more power and texture, but both vocally and dramatically her portrayal of the hapless Mimi is curiously generic. Garrett Sorenson's Rodolfo has a slender tenor, but it's attractive and well-managed; unlike too many Rodolfos, he doesn't overdo the poet's neuroses.

Joshua Hopkins supplies Marcello with a particularly warm but clear baritone. Rounding out the bohemian contingent are Christopher Feigum's appealing Schaunard and Nikolay Didenko's nondescript Colline. Gwynne Howell plays the landlord Benoit and Musetta's sugar daddy Alcindoro. Both the adult and children's choruses, prepared, respectively, by Richard Bado and Karen Reeves, sing heartily and well.

PLAN YOUR LIFE Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and, with alternate cast, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and 2 p.m. Saturday at the Wortham Center's Brown Theater, Houston. $20 to $250. 1-800-626-7372, www.houstongrandopera.org.

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