Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian will be honoured as Singer of the Year this October in Germany’s most prestigious classical music awards. This triple triumph in Puccini’s three one-act operas at the 2022 Salzburg Festival must surely have been a major factor leading to that award.
Grigorian is winsome and winning as Lauretta in the comedy Gianni Schicchi, and the epitome of suppressed desires as Giorgetta in Il Tabarro. But it is as Sister Angelica that she rises to the majestic, utterly heart-breaking in "Senza mamma", a nun mourning the death of the son, separated from her at birth.
That becomes, in director Christof Loy’s re-ordering of Il Trittico, the climax of the production. The usual sequence, if all three operas are performed, frames this slower-paced piece between the drama and the comedy, giving audiences a cheerful send-off after all the tragedy. Puccini himself wrote, "after the black-hued Tabarro, I feel a desire to be amusing."
Instead, Gianni Schicchi comes first, with the tale of the convent last. I still have some reservations about Loy’s quick-quick-slow pulse of the complete cycle and its uneven emotional balance, although a virtue of a recording means the three pieces can be viewed in any order.
On the other hand, if the enterprise is considered as a showpiece for Grigorian, star of all three pieces in which no other singer appears more than once, Suor Angelica is both her most impressive performance and the most successful production. Here, camera close-ups and Etienne Pluss’s set design comes closest to capturing the intimate, closed society that characterises all three pieces.
In the others, the wide stage of the Großes Festspielhaus doesn’t help either in intensity or in voice reproduction, and Loy’s direction is short of invention and sometimes questionable. His Gianni Schicchi is restrained and rather unfunny, exemplified when avaricious relatives bickering over a will vent their irritation at the audience instead of each other.
Il Tabarro is Puccini’s most realistic, working-class opera, yet Loy places circus-like performers in the background, who also serve as spectators of Giorgetta’s fatal love affair. It is as if the comedy is played for drama, the drama as burlesque. Even in the final piece, the manner of Angelica's death seems misjudged.
Among other performers, Alexey Neklyudov is a sweet-toned Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi, displaying lovely portamento in his main aria, with Misha Kiria in the title role. Roman Burdenko and Joshua Guerrero are expressive as Giorgetta’s troubled husband and her rough-hewn Stevedore lover, and Karita Mattila plays Angelica’s aunt with high-heeled glacial formality.