This summer, Wagner lovers will be flocking to Munich. Kirill Petrenko opened his first Munich Opera Festival with a production of Parsifal, and will close proceedings with a Ring cycle later this month. In between, however, he has opted for Puccini, which is fitting in light of Petrenko's emergence as an interesting Puccinian following his recent Bayerische Staatsoper productions of Tosca and Il trittico. Now the latter work has made a return, in Lotte de Beer's 2017 staging and, as with the last outing, it boasts a luxury cast. Pucciniphiles are due a pilgrimage to Munich too, as it rarely gets better than this.
Petrenko's Puccini is bracingly alert, filled with colour and has a romantic sweep that is utterly transporting. The conductor adopted swift tempi for Il tabarro, leaving plenty of space to revel in the score's variegated detail. The most descriptive features, such as the darkly churning Seine and Paris' atmospheric streets complete with a car horn, were beautifully calibrated in unsmeared realisations of Puccini's aural scenography to convey the sheer modernity of the score. The Bayerisches Staatsorchester, a luxury unit boasting piquant winds, silvery strings and fearsomely incisive percussion, responded wonderfully to Petrenko's taut baton flicks and soaring gestures. What a shame this special conductor-orchestra relationship is soon to end.
Eva-Maria Westbroek's full-throttle Giorgetta lacked focus vocally, but the soprano gave a vivid depiction of the barge-owner's wife suffocated by unhappy love and her claustrophobic existence. She and Yonghoon Lee's Luigi had believable chemistry especially in a love duet that reached boiling point, and if the tenor's all-guns-blazing delivery was sometimes unvaried it was also thrilling. Wolfgang Koch's darkly ruminative Michele was altogether more nuanced: the German bass-baritone artfully sculpted his Italian text to powerfully convey the character's world-weariness, his suffering and all-consuming rage. Even in the context of such strong performances. Claudia Mahnke's La Frugola lit up the stage with a fruity "Ho sognata una casetta".
Lotte de Beer's production is minimalistic, the director choosing to focus more on developing individual characterisations. She establishes strongly distinctive moods and adopts unfussy period costumes within the triptych, though de Beer also achieves a degree of visual consistency by opting for the same set design – a large cylinder seen face on within which the action takes place – for all three works. The device proves particularly effective in Il tabarro, creating a sense of claustrophobia and cranking up the psychological tension when characters emerge like apparitions from distant mists.