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‘Candour and tenderness’: Anne Sophie Duprels in the title role of Opera North’s Suor Angelica.
‘Candour and tenderness’: Anne Sophie Duprels in the title role of Opera North’s Suor Angelica. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
‘Candour and tenderness’: Anne Sophie Duprels in the title role of Opera North’s Suor Angelica. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Il tabarro/Suor Angelica; Don Giovanni review – high piety and low pleasures

This article is more than 7 years old

Grand theatre, Leeds; Coliseum, London
Opera North delivers a devastating Puccini double bill, as a brutal new Don Giovanni turns heads at ENO

The death of a child nominally links the two plots. Yet Puccini’s Il tabarro and Suor Angelica are so different they shatter any fragile notion of similarity. One is set outside in Paris on the banks of the Seine, a dark, seedy, hard-drinking male landscape of relentless labour and squally sexuality. The other is clean, enclosed, ordered, all-female; a convent in which freedoms are repressed, desires scrubbed and pumiced out of sight. God alone is love. Anything else is sin. As a double bill, strongly cast and presented as part of Opera North’s autumn season and conducted by Jac van Steen, they devastate.

These short operas equal two thirds of Il trittico. Puccini’s trio, premiered in New York in 1918, makes a long evening and is complicated and costly to stage; therefore it’s quite a rarity in the theatre. Each work can be paired with something else – not restricted to Puccini – which is how they are more usually seen. Now, with a new Suor Angelica directed by Michael Barker-Caven, Opera North has all three operas in its repertoire. One day a complete Il trittico maybe, but this was a richly satisfying evening even minus the brilliant, comedic third element, Gianni Schicchi.

Il tabarro (The cloak) arguably contains some of the composer’s most poised and finely wrought music. (There are plenty of moments in Puccini that make you think this. Tabarro tends to get swamped by more obvious contenders.) At the opening, the orchestra’s watery undulations conjure the night heat of the river bank. Borrowing from Debussy’s example, Puccini stamps his score with pentatonic chords (open fourths and fifths moving in parallel motion), a desolate sound pierced with harsh, tugging, repetitive chords. The musical tools are subtle, the result an outpouring of anguish. Puccini is intent, here, not on expansive melody but atmosphere, mood. In Leeds, conductor and orchestra tackled this music with sparing intensity.

‘You could quite see why this Giorgetta went for Luigi’: David Butt Philip and Giselle Allen in Il tabarro. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Barker-Caven, artistic director of the Civic theatre, Dublin, has revived David Pountney’s enthralling 2004 staging, which made a punchy return in its industrial shipping container setting. Husband, wife and lover were all well sung, the Italian baritone Ivan Inverardi making his debut as Michele, a bruiser and bully whose heart bleeds. Giselle Allen sang Giorgetta as if living every cruel twist of the drama for real. Everything this wonderful Belfast-born soprano tackles has depth, credibility and vocal stamina. You could quite see why this Giorgetta went for Luigi. Any other attributes aside, the Somerset-born tenor David Butt Philip is an alluring performer, with soaring top notes and musicality oozing from, well, everywhere really.

Anne Sophie Duprels in Suor Angelica. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Designed by Hannah Clark, using plain lines, earthy colours and traditional Carmelite-style garb, Suor Angelica makes its usual, terrible impact – how could it not with the expressive, imaginative Anne Sophie Duprels in the title role? – but the production is marginally less successful. The ensemble of nuns were not always as cleanly drilled as you might hope – a first-night wobble no doubt – though the many cameo roles in the large cast were all strong and characterful: among them Soraya Mafi, Fiona Kimm, Sarah Estill, Claire Pascoe and others less easily identified. Patricia Bardon, worldly and power-dressed in leprous yellow, held the ambiguities of her role as the Princess in perfect poise. Duprels’s Angelica, reduced by the unending tragedy of Giselle Allen (Giorgetta) and her life, had candour and tenderness. The whole staging was undermined by an ooh-er, holy-moly ending in which a rose window splinters into a kaleidoscope, out of which all kinds of embryonic images appeared. Hildegard of Bingen, quite a one for visions, might have envied their luridness. Still go, all the same. You can always shield your eyes from those closing moments.

Richard Jones’s new staging of Don Giovanni at English National Opera, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with innate command of line, tempo and structure, and with strong chorus and top singers, will split audiences even in the course of the evening. My neighbour was disgruntled at the interval but left at the end intrigued and convinced. A few overplayed details aside, this production is taut, brutal and thought-through and coherent. It glitters with black, chiselled wit. The programme quotes from Pagan Spain (1957) by Richard Wright, who drew parallels between Franco’s Spain and his own African American southern roots. This gives you an idea of Jones’s preoccupations in his first Mozart staging: those heavy, overlapping habits of religiosity, sensuality, prostitution and Hispanic pageant, which run through the veins of this troublesome masterpiece.

Christopher Purves (Don Giovanni) and Christine Rice (Donna Elvira) in Don Giovanni at the Coliseum: ‘glitters with black, chiselled wit’. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Paul Steinberg’s sets capture that closed-door world of mahogany and 1950s drabness, wonderfully offset by Nicky Gillibrand’s black satin and lace costumes for the women who queue up for brief pleasures with the libertine Don. Christine Rice’s Donna Elvira, wild-eyed with near raving intensity, is all the more potent for the control this sympathetic performer exerts in one astonishing aria after another. Donna Anna (Caitlin Lynch) is always harder to read: does she love or detest Giovanni? Jones pinpointed her dilemma: a life of boring safety with Don Ottavio (unboringly and daringly sung, with gleaming tone, by Allan Clayton) versus thrill and inevitable heartbreak. Mary Bevan’s engaging Zerlina, in bridal frock and heels, convincingly suggests a young woman all at sea, head turned by an older, powerful man, desires muddled, tempted yet regretful. Nicholas Crawley’s Masetto was far more interesting than we usually encounter. James Creswell who, before he turns to stone, has his own saucy trousers-down encounter, boomed winningly as the Commendatore.

As for Giovanni himself, and his ginger-wigged, green-eyed, trembling, simpering, enthralled and appalled sidekick Leporello, we were in luck. Christopher Purves and Clive Bayley, who alone delivered every word of Amanda Holden’s translation with clarity, are consummate artists with long careers. Their voices may not be as shiny bright as their suits, or as those of singers two decades younger. What they bring in experience and salty seasoning is incalculable.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Il tabarro/Suor Angelica ★★★★
Don Giovanni ★★★★

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