Recording of the Week, Puccini's Il Trittico from Salzburg

Christof Loy’s production of Puccini’s triptych of one-act operas at Salzburg was one of the highlights of last summer, with Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian (tackling all three leading female roles) as the main attraction. Only briefly available on streaming, it’s been issued on DVD and Blu-ray today – and now that I’ve collected my emotions I can confirm that the hype was entirely justified.

Loy’s decision to reorder the operas (Schicchi/Tabarro/Angelica rather than the usual Tabarro/Angelica/Schicchi) is the one idiosyncratic element in a production that’s otherwise fairly straight-down-the-line. All three stagings are coherent and uncluttered: the wide stage, high ceilings and minimal furniture allow plenty of space for many illuminating little details to register in the busiest scenes of Schicchi and Angelica, though Fabrice Kebour’s atmospheric lighting ensures an appropriate sense of hothouse claustrophobia for Tabarro.

As the curtain rises on the performative mourning of the Donati family (all guzzling spaghetti in between noisy sobs), the first thing to catch my attention was the nuanced, hyper-alert conducting of Franz Welser-Möst, whose astringent approach brings all manner of orchestral detail to the fore throughout and plays up the spiky modernist elements of scores which were premiered when Berg was already hard at work on Wozzeck.

The second thing was the sheer quality of this large ensemble cast, both singly and together: Alexey Neklyudov’s swashbuckling Rinuccio and Enkelejda Shkosa’s Anna Magnani-ish Zita stand out, but every member of this dysfunctional family is brilliantly drawn and strongly sung. (Special mention for Matteo Perione’s deliciously camp doctor and Mikołaj Trąbka’s slick, coked-up lawyer who appear later on).

Schicchi himself is imposingly sung by Misha Kiria, his eat-the-rich resentment never far from the surface; several telling flashes of anger towards his daughter cast a new light on Lauretta’s desperation to marry Rinuccio, and Grigorian’s genuinely anguished account of ‘O mio babbino caro’ accordingly comes across as a trepidant entreaty rather than a cutesy show-stopper.

Grigorian’s unconventionally dark interpretation of Lauretta points up a certain kinship with Giorgetta in Tabarro, another sensual young woman living with a volatile man and longing for a richer life; she’s absolutely riveting here as the barge-owner’s wife struggling with bereavement and her white-hot passion for strapping docker and fellow dreamer Luigi. There are compelling performances from handsome-voiced tenor Joshua Guerrero (a dead ringer for Ben Affleck) as Giorgetta’s ill-fated lover and from Roman Burdenko, unusually sympathetic as her brooding, eventually homicidal husband.

But the main event is a performance of Suor Angelica which packs a punch so powerful that Loy’s reshuffling of the trilogy seems non-negotiable: I can’t imagine that either Grigorian or the audience would have had the emotional bandwidth to dry their eyes and throw themselves into the high jinks of Schicchi afterwards. As in Schicchi, the smaller roles are strongly characterised, with an especially touching performance from Giulia Semenzato as former shepherdess Suor Genovieffa, whilst Martina Russomano’s sassy Osmina and Daryl Freedman’s irrepressible foodie Dolcina add a welcome dose of levity.

Veteran mezzo Hanna Schwarz is luxury casting as La Badessa, her firm, dark voice in such fine fettle that I couldn’t help wishing she’d been upgraded to La Zia Principessa, Angelica’s implacable aunt who delivers the devastating news which leads to the tormented nun’s suicide. That role is taken here by Karita Mattila, who has charisma in spades but seems vocally out of her comfort-zone, her big gleaming soprano challenged by the low-lying lines of a part that’s usually allocated to a true contralto.

Grigorian’s Angelica is quite simply in a league of its own. In the early stretches of the opera she’s all cool containment, whittling her sound down to an almost early-music-ish purity – but from the moment when the dam bursts during the great confrontation with her aunt she stakes her claim as one of the greatest singing actresses since Callas.

Delivered next to a photograph of her dead son, ‘Senza mamma’ emerges as a fractured, almost Expressionist monologue (the audience who enthusiastically applauded arias in the two earlier operas are stunned into silence), and her terrified death-throes are so visceral that the production almost warrants a content-warning. Please don’t miss this towering performance, but make sure you’re feeling emotionally robust enough to handle it.