Il Trittico

Short and pithy they may be, but these three Puccini operas remind us how sophisticated this master of storytelling is in aligning musical combinations with so many quick details of plot, theme and rich character.  

Puccini’s showmanship is further enhanced by OA’s new artistic director Jo Davies choosing not one but three directors, each focusing on just one opera in this Italian triple bill of love and bloody revenge, tragedy and atonement, greed and burlesque.  Oddly, never before has Il Trittico been staged by other than one director.  The link here is the evocative and contrasting designs for all works by Michael Hankin.

Constantine Costi directs Il Tabarro, about the loveless marriage of a barge owner and his younger wife, set wharf-side one dusky evening on the Seine amongst the stevedores and streetwalkers; while Imara Savage takes on the tragic past and redemption of a nun in Suor Angelica set claustrophobically in a brilliant white box open to the heavens;  and Shaun Rennie goes over the top with Gianni Schicchi, a mad spoof about greedy relatives at a deathbed in an old Florentine mansion. 

Beyond white robes for two dozen nuns, Hankin’s costumes are deliciously Italian and colourful, whether excessively tasteless on the bourgeois relatives or more improvised by the strugglers on the wharves.

These emotional stories give a talented, almost all Australian cast the chance to inhabit vivid tragic and comic characters and singing roles whether in walk-on solos, arias, quick repartee or harmonies.  Chorus singer Angela Hogan, for example, is outstanding in three roles, the bag lady on the wharf; the unrelenting aunt La Principessa visiting poor Angelica; and as the dragon matriarch in Gianni Schicchi.  

Il Trittico is Davies’ first new production for OA and indicates her priority to give opportunities to Australian soloists, company singers and outside directors and creatives, to rebuild that ensemble, and bring in new generations of audience.

Other standout performances are from Simon Meadows and Olivia Cranwell as the unhappy couple onboard the barge and Russia’s Viktor Antipenko as her melancholy lover, the stevedore Luigi; from Meadows again as the wily Gianni Schicchi offering the desperate Donati family a scheme to change the will; and, winning most applause, returned expat Lauren Fagan singing so powerfully as the agonised but irrepressible Angelica, finally lifted by the Holy Virgin above the cruelties she suffers.

Verity Hampson’s lighting sublimely creates this metaphysical ecstasy in what is the pivotal opera of the three, and is so clearly detailed by Savage’s experience as a theatre director.  Russian American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya and the OA Orchestra weave perfectly Puccini’s soaring melodies and invention through these high dramas.  It’s a night with everything.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Keith Saunders