SOME music just tugs at your heartstrings, no matter how often you hear it. A couple of bars of Puccini’s La Boheme and I am transported back to my very early childhood … my mother singing, or, a bit later when we had a radiogram, to Renata Tebaldi’s voice recorded at La Scala in 1951. It is probably the first time I had any idea of what death meant, those agonising cries and no springing back up to fight another day.

Somerset Opera chose the perennial favourite as their first show of 2026, the third time in its five decades that the versatile company has brought the story to its faithful audience. In case you don’t know, the company has offered a huge variety of opera and musical theatre to audiences around the county over the years, with a local amateur chorus to support young professional singers at the start of their careers or those whose homes are in the south west, and a professional orchestra. Their Taunton home is now St James’s Church, and for this production director Callie Nestleroth has set the action in the centre of the nave, with the audience at both sides of the intimate main acting area.

There is nowhere to hide for the students in the (now Taunton) garret. It is 1939, and the war is four months in. The streets are full of marching soldiers and eager Christmas shoppers and the penniless students are trying to keep warm and happy, and to ignore their hunger. Once they have dispensed with their grumpy and grasping landlord, they are off to the pub. Then, when only one of them is left to turn the light out, a girl arrives from a flat downstairs. One look at poet Rodolfo and she is hooked, and it’s mutual.

The Somerset Opera setting, and some stunning acting from the young principals, highlights the timeless nature of Puccini’s 1896 opera. Beautiful and sensitive playing from the eight-piece orchestra ensured that the atmosphere in the ancient church enhanced the doomed love of Mimi and Rodolfo and the tempestuous relationship of Marcello and Musetta, as their community faces a winter of cold uncertainty and calls to arms, to factories and to digging for Britain.

The chemistry between Mimi (Josephine Cresswell, daughter of Somerset Opera founder Brian Cresswell) and Robin Jeffcoat’s Rodolfo was immediate totally convincing. Robin’s thrilling tenor and Josephine’s plangent and playful soprano held the audience enraptured. Young baritone Ross Cumming has immense talent and his on-off romance with Stephanie Berner’s Musetta was compellingly real.

Under the musical direction of David Hedges, this production of La Boheme was another sell-out success for Somerset Opera, and the company continues its 2026 season with The Pirates of Penzance, touring the county from 19th to 30th March.

GP-W

Footnote: To the man sitting to my left, whose right arm, holding his mobile phone, was so far over my seat that I could not help but see that he changed his password, put in a Tesco order and played a game during the action of the opera. I really question why he bothered to buy a ticket if all he wanted to do was play on his “device”. Apart from the distraction to other audience members, it is insulting to the performers, particularly when they are so close.