Il trittico 2007-06-15

Internal Occurrences (2)

• Comment
  • For once it was my turn to accompany Sylvia on a business trip: a long weekend in Berlin, with tickets for three operas and an opportunity to catch a concert in the Philharmonie on the Sunday morning. This was my third Trittico and it differed from the others in putting Suor Angelica first, Gianni Schicchi second, and Il tabarro last, which I thought worked very well. Gianni Schicchi is fun, but I've always felt its levity to be a bit of an anticlimax after the intensity of the other two, so putting it in the middle makes a lot of sense. The production was amusing and rather traditional, except for the twist of portraying Amantio (sung by a grinning Hyung-Wook Lee) as an accomplice of Gianni Schicchi (and Lauretta as a dumb blond, replete with MP3-player). Suor Angelica took place in a dormitory, with Angelica spending most of the time on a bed, her herbal remedies replaced by pills and her sisters performing various forms of callisthenics around her. None of this wierdness bothered me, not even the impressively life-like Madonna on the balcony unfolding her hands and taking a quick smoke during the sisters' lunch break. But I did find the inventiveness detracted from the intensity of the final scene, and I wasn't reduced to jelly like I was in Oslo, despite fine singing by Amarilli Nizza. Il tabarro, on the other hand, worked very well. Chiara Taigi and Zoran Todorovich were magnificent as Giorgetta and Luigi, and the nightmare hopelessness of their situation was brought out by the succession of dreamlike apparations (including Mr. Spock), the portrayal of Luigi, Tinca and Talpa as bull, mole and fish, and the ambiguity of the ending, in which one wasn't quite sure whether Michele had killed Luigi or not. We both enjoyed it very much and stayed clapping until the bitter end.
• Date
  • 2007-06-15