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Student high jinks aside, the liveliest comic input was reserved for Adrian Lawson, doubling as the landlord Benoît and as Musetta's feckless suitor Alcindoro. Lawson has a Gilbert and Sullivan background, and if the carping, whiny voices and pastiched utterance just began to grow wearisome (a sharper vocal and visual differentiation between these two minor characters might have helped the opera: they looked like much the same person; hence some of the music hall variety of Act 2 -- differentiating a new character -- was lost), there was no doubting Lawson's vocal assurance and stylish slick timing.

On each occasion Adrian Lawson furnished a memorable comic turn, and both the outraged frustration of the hapless suitor and sugardaddy, who furiously picks up the bill just before the end of the first half, and the hilarious droop in the initially optimistic but hoodwinked landlord's fortunes before he is unceremoniously kicked out of his own garret in Act I were adroitly and wittily handled.

Marcello was warmly characterised by David Palmer, Heritage Opera's Prince Gremin in last season's Eugene Onegin, and their widely-praised Don Alfonso in Così, who has a most agreeable presence and offers an attractively weighted baritone, strongly delivered and warm of timbre: Marcello may need a little more firmness of purpose, but this was a secure and appealing performance, all the better for the marked tenderness and reassurance he offered to Mimi. His own partner, Musetta, was sung by the aptly coquettish yet touchingly considerate Michaela Bloom (alternating with Sarah Helsby-Hughes), who seemed most confident across the middle range, with some scope for a leavening in her uppermost and lowest notes.

Their spat and reconciliation in Act 3 furnished one of the sparkier moments in the evening, Marcello's avuncular fondness for Mimi had a salutary effect, and the conversion of Musetta to concern and empathy in the final act, pawning her jewellery to meet the needs of the doomed and beleaguered Mimi, was aptly moving.

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