If you’re anywhere near Edinburgh, get a ticket: Scottish Opera’s Il trittico reviewed

It does no harm, once in a while, to assume that the creators of an opera actually know what they’re doing. Puccini was clear that he wanted the three one-act operas of Il trittico to be performed together and in a particular order. Promoters and directors have had other ideas, and between the wars it was apparently common to perform the triptych’s comic final opera, Gianni Schicchi, in a double bill with Strauss’s Salome, which must have been an interesting night out. Come for the necrophilia, stay for the lulz.

But Scottish Opera’s new production presents Il trittico in the form the composer intended, and what d’you know? It works. Four hours (including intervals) is hardly excessive – we’ve all binge-watched longer box sets – and in return you get the full Puccini once-over: from the noirish slow burn of Il tabarro, through the emotional wringer of Suor Angelica and out into the comic sunburst of Gianni Schicchi. Puccini eases into his solid-gold showstopper ‘Il mio babbino caro’ at exactly the point that a Broadway composer would deploy their ‘11 o’clock number’: the tune, in other words, that you get to take home.

In Scotland, it arrives shortly before 10 p.m., but in every other respect David McVicar’s staging is as handsome, as entertaining and – when performed as well as this – as faithful a Trittico as Puccini could have hoped. I say faithful: all three operas have been updated to a generic postwar period (we’re given the date 1971 in Gianni Schicchi but Il tabarro and Suor Angelica could be anything up to three decades before that) and settings that could be Paris or Florence but might equally – judging from the shipyard cranes and baronial towers of designer Charles Edwards’s backdrops – be Glasgow itself.

The main point is that it’s naturalistic, and full of visual delights: whether the barge slipping through oily waters in the opening tableau of Il tabarro or the mildewed chaos of Buoso Donati’s decrepit merchant palace in Schicchi.