A triumphant unity: Il trittico in Bucharest

Brasov is Romania’s sixth largest city, roughly the size of Wolverhampton in the UK or Scottsdale, Arizona. For its opera company to take on Puccini’s most complex and heterogenous work was a bold undertaking, but one in the end that required no special allowances to be made. Indeed, through the course of a ten-day celebration of Puccini, mounted as the third edition of the Bucharest Opera Festival, prejudices about “provincial” opera have been consistently challenged and overcome.

The condensed nature of the enterprise has required touring companies to pitch up with their casts and sets at the Bucharest National Opera, set up overnight and squeeze in a run-through of an act, if they are lucky. Under these circumstances, they have achieved remarkably polished theatre. In doing so they have also shown that Puccini may have been commissioned by the likes of La Scala and the Met, but his mastery of verismo lends itself to the telling of extraordinary stories in ordinary places.

More than any other of his operas, though, Il trittico thrives not on diva-power but the corporate values of a tight-knit company. The curtain went up on Il tabarro to show Adrian Mărcan (Michele) standing glum at the helm of his barge, Cristina Radu (Giorgetta) folding up laundry beside him, a child’s vest just a tiny but potentially explosive sign of the tension simmering between the couple, and of a tragic backstory hinted at in Alexandru Nagy’s direction.

Puccini has always taken heat for his apparently sadistic anatomy of female suffering. Yet there was palpable sisterhood in Florentina Soare’s richly inflected portrait of La Frugola, the keen-eyed but good-natured strawberry-seller – like the vest, setting up fruitful contrasts and connections with the other, superficially disparate parts of the trilogy. Adrian Dumitru sung a viscerally engaging Luigi with a high-voltage upper register, but Mărcan had bided his time, like the surly Michele, to bring spine-chilling authority to his brooding solo and denouement.

Threads teased out by this Trittico, and its place within Puccini’s output as a whole, included women dreaming of a brighter past and a more independent future, in grim circumstances forced upon them by men and by their own life choices. Marian Pop’s tableau-like presentation of Suor Angelica underplayed the touches of individual character which Puccini took care to bestow on the convent sisters, but it did effectively isolate Aurelia Florian as the wretched heroine. Florian’s soprano was uncomfortably frayed at points, but “Senza mamma” rose all the same to the appalling nub of the story. Cristian Sandu’s conducting drew out all the Parsifal-accented harmony and pathos from Angelica’s central dialogue with the Princess, sung with magnificently unyielding hauteur by Carmen Topciu (Brasov boasts an embarrassment of riches in the mezzo department).

Updated for no obvious reason to 1966, Valentina Mărgăraş’s staging of Gianni Schicchi stayed otherwise true to the original mise-en-scène before springing a fine surprise at the very end, too good to spoil here. Sandu marshalled his forces on stage and in the pit to pace the quicksilver score as the missing link between Falstaff and The Rake’s Progress, taking in Der Rosenkavalier along the way. Aghenie Alexandru made an implausibly youthful Schicchi – ages and family relationships rather stretched the imagination at several points in the trilogy – but the compensation lay in his abundant energy and centred, classically schooled Italian tone, which was a hallmark of “local” Romanian voices over the course of the Festival. Silvia Micu addressed “O mio babbino caro” directly to him, affectingly so, and then duetted with Liviu Iftene’s Rinuccio in an outpouring of timelessly authentic, Italianate lyricism.

Puccini took pride in the dramatic unity of Il trittico, and with reluctance allowed its constituent parts to be severed when audiences took fright at the raw drama of Suor Angelica, in particular. On this occasion, the mind was left racing by the virtuoso élan of his achievement with the trilogy as he had originally conceived it, drawing lines between destination points across a map of the entire history of opera. While experiencing Trittico in the context of his entire mature output undoubtedly sharpened the focus of that achievement, it was greatly to the credit of the Brasov company that the trilogy itself proved completely coherent and satisfying unto itself. Maybe Puccini knew best after all.

Peter’s press trip was funded by the Bucharest Opera Festival.