In Irish National Opera’s short history the company has shown bags of vitality and innovation, and a little thing like a worldwide pandemic barely stopped them in their tracks. In the dark times of December 2020 INO launched ‘Twenty Shots of Opera’, new compact operas by 20 Irish composers which were streamed online. A couple of months later came a distanced La bohème at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin, again streamed and now captured on record.

The huge commercial theatre was no doubt a useful place to spread out an orchestra and singers safely, but the circumstances of this production and the almost tangibly dry acoustic of a huge and (presumably) empty auditorium contribute to a frustrating listen. What was no doubt a breath of fresh air when so little opera was being attempted now seems rather arid caught for posterity.

While INO’s orchestra sounds alert and sympathetic, Sergio Alapont’s conducting tends to the listless. Ensembles lack bite and vim, and there are long passages where Alapont lets the drama simply eke itself out rather than really getting a grip: the quartet for Mimì, Rodolfo, Musetta and Marcello that ends Act 3 is just one example.

The cast, with a healthy complement of Irish talent, is variable too. The fast-moving dialogue (Puccini is the king of concision) needs to sound as if these singers are really in their character, or else the ‘big’ moments count for little. Yet the soloists don’t dig into their roles nearly enough. The brash comedy of the Bohemians’ antics in their garret is dulled, and, as Musetta, a girlish-sounding Anna Devin makes little of her spotlight in Café Momus. Celine Byrne sings seamless legato phrases as Mimì, yet she delivers nearly all her lines with the same wan passivity and the vocal allure starts to pall. ‘The first kiss of April is mine’, she announces in Act 1, but sounding like she’s already half dead from consumption, and this Mimì only accepts ‘una crema’ at Momus (a delicious pudding, one assumes) with deepest resignation.

There are brighter moments from Merūnas Vitulskis’s Rodolfo and David Bizic’s Marcello. Vitulskis’s tenor has a bit of a beat in his higher register but shows tenderness, and fire, in the way he shapes the music and text; he duets affectingly with Bizic in a stylish ‘O Mimì, tu più non torni’. Ben McAteer’s Schaunard and John Molloy’s Colline complete the line-up of principals: well-schooled singers not caught at their most engaged.