The Royal Opera’s season isn’t awash with new productions, in fact until Christmas only has two thirds of one, but that was what it got under way with: all three short operas of Puccini’s Il Trittico, with Gianni Schicchi revived, and Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica fresh; they are all produced, and mainly very well, by Richard Jones, but each with a different designer. For the gritty naturalism of Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Ultz provides a range of blacks and greys, hardly redolent of the Paris where the opera is set, but adequately lowering to the spirits.
Tabarro begins with a swaying Debussy-esque figure, conveying the movement of the river and barges, but, also, cleverly in this production, the eternal procession of weighed-down stevedores. The pervasiveness of drudgery, boredom and frustration is so strongly established in the opening moments that much of the rest of the opera seems superfluous. Puccini is always intent on conveying the quotidian atmosphere in which sensational events will occur, but here he might be thought to do it all too efficiently. One of the very few cardinal rules of art is that you mustn’t convey boredom by being boring, but Puccini comes perilously close to breaking it. Though the piece lasts for just an hour, it feels longer because the events that precede the ultra-brief dénouement are in large part unrelated to it.
The painful triangle of the ageing barge-owner Michele, his miserable wife Giorgetta and Luigi, with whom she is having a perfunctory affair, is sketched in lightly some way in, Giorgetta has an aptly truncated semi-love duet with Luigi, a recriminatory scene with Michele, and time passes until Luigi mistakes the signal for the rendezvous and is killed by Michele. There are lashings of local lack-of-colour to keep the thing going, but Puccini self-denyingly avoids the lyricism which is his greatest gift. Antonio Pappano lavished all the care that this composer excites in him, and the singers were strong if not ideal, but I still felt that this is one opera that I don’t much want to encounter again.
Suor Angelica is the rarity. Once more, there is an immense amount of conscientious scene-setting, Puccini setting himself the difficult task of creating the life of a nunnery, not a place where he would naturally feel at home. In this production the action takes place in the sick bay, the nuns are nurses and there are many children to remind Angelica of her sin in having produced one some years before. Ermonela Jaho took the part wonderfully well, with a range of vocal colour which was far too affecting for one to be troubled by anxieties about sentimentality. Jaho proved herself, at the end, to be by far the biggest applause-milker since Boris Christoff. If she hadn’t been so fine, Anna Larsson’s unnerving Princess would have stolen the show. Creeping spider-like along the wall, it was touch-and-go whether she or Angelica would collapse under the strength of her neuroses. Whoever’s idea it was, this interpretation amounted to genius. The issue of the appearance of the Virgin Mary was ducked, but surely that, too, was a good idea, and this opera emerged as both dramatically a lot stronger and musically more varied than I had remembered.
The updated Gianni Schicchi proved more amusing this time round than last, with Lucio Gallo a low-keyed but convincingly sly Schicchi, and Francesco Demuro a dashing heart-throb of a Rinuccio. Unfortunately, his beloved Lauretta, in the person of Ekaterina Siurina, mauled ‘O mio babbino caro’ so mercilessly that Puccini’s one bona fide aria of the evening dissolved into gaps and gasps. But ensemble is everything in this opera, and it was immaculate. I think the work should be a lot nastier and darker than Jones allows it to be, but after the evening’s first two helpings of gloom it would be churlish to press the point.
The Royal Opera plays fast and loose with plots while retailing them in the programme as if Fidelity to the Work were their prime concern; ENO now zestfully produces a synopsis which actually relates to what we see and hear. Jonathan Miller’s production of The Elixir of Love is set in the Middle West of the United States, and that enables them to use a vast 1950s gas-guzzler, but otherwise not much is gained or lost. Oddly for a Donizetti opera, the chief source of pleasure is Rory Macdonald’s precise and witty conducting. Ben Johnson’s Nemorino is just too nerdy for Adina ever to change her mind in his favour, especially when the glamorous Belcore of Benedict Nelson is around. Andrew Shore’s Dulcamara is superbly sung if not funny — but then this production stints on laughs, even smiles. Sarah Tynan is a soubrette, and I’d like Adina to be sexy in a more generous way. Elixir should produce a glow as well as a titter, but they were mainly to be found in the orchestra pit.
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