Il Trittico, Scottish Opera, review: Puccini triptych is an unmitigated triumph

Each of the three one-act operas that make up Puccini’s Il Trittico is a perfectly crafted masterpiece, and they are boldly contrasted: Il tabarro (The Cloak), a story of passionate love that ends tragically; Suor Angelica, an angst-ridden confrontation in a nunnery; and Gianni Schicchi, a comedy of greed, deceit and deception. Puccini wanted all three performed together, but that’s a big challenge, and over the years two of the three have more often been played together, or one of them with another one-acter. 

Scottish Opera’s new production presents the whole trilogy over a long evening, and the result is an unmitigated triumph. Each opera hits a precise spot of local colour and human emotion, aided by Charles Edwards’s vivid designs and Hannah Clark’s costumes (wild and hilarious in Gianni Schicchi). A barge slides onto the quayside at the beginning of Il tabarro, the gloomy water reflecting the Parisian sunset. A grey hallway by the chapel in the nunnery, with endless stairs ascending to the nuns’ rooms, creates the oppressive world of Suor Angelica (with one shaft of light from the garden). A tumbledown apartment crammed with papers and posters, opening out to 20^th-century Florence, is the home of the dying Buoso Donati in the final instalment. A glimpse of sunlight, and a yearning for home, are the threads that connect the tales.

Director David McVicar, now internationally successful, is himself a Glaswegian returning home. His Trittico is no revolutionary reinvention: it is rigorously faithful to the texts (barring a jump of a few centuries in Gianni Schicchi, and the contemporary parallel of a baby removed from its unmarried mother at the start of Suor Angelica). But it is precisely observant, sensitive to every twist and turn of the plots, and creates totally memorable stage pictures. He elicits fully developed characterisations from his singers, notably the stunning soprano Sunyoung Seo, who takes on both Giorgetta in Il tabarro and the title role in Suor Angelica.

She has an almost hysterical fervour in the voice as Giorgetta is riven with her passion for Luigi (the excellent Viktor Antipenko) or haunted by the memory of her son who was snatched from her in Suor Angelica. Her confrontation with her aunt, the Princess (the haughty Karen Cargill, unrelenting, chin aloft), is agonising, and no moment is as touching as the dying Angelica and the vision of her young child sinking to the ground together.

The intense emotional impact of that opera needs release, and here the audience was laughing from the first moment of Gianni Schicchi and enraptured throughout. Roland Wood, who had been the murderous barge owner Michele in Il tabarro, was transformed into a sour, crisply witty Gianni Schicchi, cheating the greedy family of Buoso Donati out of their inheritance. Francesca Chiejina moved from being the shepherdess nun Sister Genovieffa to his innocent daughter Lauretta in Schicchi, whose O mio babbino caro is the hit song of the evening.

This is a supremely professional ensemble show, with the Scottish Opera Orchestra in total command of Puccini’s orchestration under Stuart Stratford’s firm but occasionally rather deliberate conducting.  

At Theatre Royal Glasgow, 15 and 18 March; Festival Theatre Edinburgh, 22 and 25 March. Tickets: scottishopera.org.uk