Taking young talent into Europe: what the Reisopera and Ajax have in common

The Robbens, Van Persies and Sneijders can also be found among Dutch opera singers, but just like their footballing compatriots, they can mostly be admired abroad. Scouting soloists at a young age, at home and abroad, training them and letting them gain international experience is the future.

The bus journey takes considerably longer than usual. A great opportunity to digest the director's final comments on the surtitles. Meanwhile, lighting designers exchange experiences. The first Curaçao opera, which will premiere a day later, is a topic of discussion and people are already looking ahead: how are the sets to be built throughout the Netherlands in September when Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is on the playlist? In the back of the bus, a few lines are sung - 'save that for the performance' cries director Christian Carsten. But mostly there is a lot of telephoning, reading and some sleeping. Business as usual.

But this trip is not that common. For the first time in more than a decade, the National Travel Opera is undertaking a major tour abroad. Not with a 'standard production', but with Puccini's blockbuster La Bohème, without chorus, with the necessary cuts and only piano, cello and clarinet. A pocket version, they call it themselves.

And does it work?

Yes, says the British public a day and a half later in London, yes says the public the following two weeks. And understandably so. Because if ever there was an opera that seems eminently made to be sung by a cast of young soloists full of ambition, it is La Bohème, starring poor but ambitious artists in Paris.

La Bohème is also an unadulterated tearjerker, which ends badly, as it should. By his own account, Martin van Amerongen always cried when he had seen a production of La Bohème. 'Nobody can stand it,' he wrote. 'Nobody!'

According to Van Amerongen, this was because of the libretto, which indeed shamelessly plays on the emotions of the audience. Poor poet Rodolfo falls in love with his equally poor neighbour's girl Mimi when she comes to borrow matches: 'Che gelida manina'; 'What cold hands!' Naturally, Mimi immediately reciprocates his love, but she suffers from tuberculosis - there is some coughing off in this opera - and dies at the end.

But the modern cynic doesn't fall for that, does he? French writer Michael Poizat therefore attributes the poignancy that La Bohème generates not to the story, but solely to the human voice: to be precise, where the soprano ends an impossibly long-held note for a necessary gasp of air.

And yes, they are oh so nice to listen to, the melody lines Puccini wrote, but they demand a lot from the soloists, which is why in the big opera houses singers are contracted who do not have the youthful élan of Puccini's personagers but act. That impossibly long-held note may sound perfect, but all too often the audience sees something very different.

Gone emotion.

However, the singers who jump on stage in London are not implausible for a second. And Hannah Medlam (Mimi) and Norwegian tenor Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy (Rudolfo) show that they have a great future ahead of them, while Dutch soprano Sonja Volten portrays a rarely equalled Musetta - not only do all the men in the audience fall like a log for her seduction skills.

How do Medlam, Gulbrandsøy, Volten and the rest of the cast hold up against a large orchestra? This paperback version already gives a pretty good idea. But above all, time and experience are needed. And it is precisely that experience that this trip and the new ensemble of soloists, which will get a chance in smaller roles in major productions in the coming years, offer.

Therefore, if it is up to the Reisopera, it will be repeated next year. Meanwhile, a crowdfunding project has been launched for this purpose, because merely looking to the subsidiser is also out of date.