It has taken Puccini’s triptych of operas, Il trittico, the best part of 100 years to come in from the cold. Richard Jones’s Royal Opera productions of Il tabarro (The Cloak) and Suor (Sister) Angelica were added to an existing staging of Gianni Schicchi in 2011, but it remains a rarity — and, for some, a long haul — to see all three one-acters in a single evening.
By the time he wrote Il trittico, Puccini had tired of singers hogging the limelight and applause for arias interrupting the flow of his dramas. It is significant, perhaps, that in Trittico’s nearly three hours of music, there is only one showstopper: Lauretta’s little ditty O mio babbino caro, pleading with her father to find a solution to the problem of Buoso Donati’s last will, in Gianni Schicchi.
It’s the only number the wider operatic public knows from the triptych, and a favourite with sopranos in recital and on disc, but it lies at the heart of one of Puccini’s most genial and original masterpieces. A comedy and ensemble piece of irresistible black humour and scabrous wit, it targets the grasping venality of Donati’s relations while seducing the audience with the titular prankster’s ingenuity and the happy outcome for the lovers, Lauretta and Rinuccio, from either side of the tracks.
For decades, Gianni Schicchi has enjoyed status as Trittico’s high point, whereas Angelica has been disparaged as mawkish, sentimental, unworthy of the attention of “serious” opera-goers, with its tale of a single mother forced into a nunnery and “redeemed” by a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary, welcoming her to heaven with her dead child.
Until Jones’s production, the miracle had always seemed a dramatic stumbling block, but his decision to set the opera in a children’s hospital run by nuns seems to me a stroke of genius. Of the three operas, Angelica seemed the one most likely to draw a facetious response from Jones, yet he plays it absolutely seriously, and in Ermonela Jaho he has an ideally heart-rending heroine who needs no divine intervention to move us to tears. The Albanian soprano returns in the role she made her own in 2011, singing with even greater intensity and dramatic involvement now. She gives her all in her clash with her implacable aunt, the Princess, played by the commandingly tall Anna Larsson as a more conflicted, complex figure than one would have thought possible. Here, it is she who appears intimidated by Angelica’s passion. Jaho is unmissable in this role.
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On the first night, neither of the outer panels made as strong an impression. Nicola Luisotti, taking over as conductor from Antonio Pappano, seemed to be nursing his principals in Tabarro: a mature-looking Giorgetta (Patricia Racette) and Luigi (Carl Tanner), struggling to win hearts in the face of the jealousy of Michele (an overparted Lucio Gallo). Gallo fares better as Schicchi, in which role he deploys his authentic Italian delivery to pointed comic effect. The young lovers, too, are an attractive pair. Susanna Hurrell’s Lauretta sings her showstopper peachily, and Paolo Fanale works his socks off to compensate for a voice that’s a tad on the small side for Rinuccio at the ROH.
As ever in this Schicchi, the small parts are collectable: Elena Zilio’s Zita, Gwynne Howell’s doddery Simone, Rebecca Evans’s pushy Nella and Marie McLaughlin’s busty Ciesca all stay — just — on the right side of caricature, hilarious just with their body language during the reading of the original will, barely containing their fury when Schicchi dictates the new one, leaving the best things to himself.
Scottish Opera’s new production of Handel’s Ariodante gives us a glimpse of what life at English National Opera might be like if its chorus is put on part-time contracts. Certainly, the solo parts are well sung, with Sarah Tynan as a diamantine Ginevra and Caitlin Hulcup an unusually convincing mezzo in the castrato title role: she has breath to spare in her drawn-out lament Scherza infida, and fireworks aplenty in her climactic Dopo notte. Jennifer France sings delightfully, too, as Dalinda. In Harry Fehr’s chic staging (sets and costumes by Yannis Thavoris), Xavier Sabata’s preening Polinesso seems too decent for Handel’s dastardly villain. It’s a casting coup for the company to have engaged him, but Fehr does nothing with his histrionic gifts.
Like so much at Scottish Opera these days, the production is tame and uninvolving, the tiny, hired-in chorus used to move furniture and fill space during the solo arias, rather than being integral to the company’s work.
Chelsea Opera Group does valiant work promoting rarely staged operas, but it can also prove its mettle, astonishingly, in once popular pieces such as Verdi’s Il trovatore. Casting difficulties have dogged this fire-and-brimstone masterpiece in recent decades, but COG mostly does it full justice, thanks to Andrew Greenwood’s pacing of the score and the best playing I’ve heard from the mostly amateur orchestra. Perhaps the chorus could do with a bit of rejuvenation in the Anvil Chorus, but the soloists were fine.
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Marianne Cornetti, a big-voiced American who has sung Amneris at Covent Garden, was the audience’s favourite for her barnstorming style, tempered, admittedly, with some delicacy in Ai nostri monti. After overcoming initial nerves, the Leonora of the South African soprano Sally Silver was my pick: she has a smaller voice than traditional exponents of the role, but she tackles Verdi’s runs, trills and turns with astounding delicacy and sings in long phrases with dramatic involvement. It’s almost a crime such a singer is so little used by our mainstream companies.