US Edition 
Il Trittico, Opera Holland Park, review: 'an absolutely wonderful evening'
This Puccini opera demands huge resources but Opera Holland Park pulls it off, says Rupert Christiansen
Casting and staging all three parts of Puccini’s Il Trittico to an equal level of excellence challenges even the Met or Covent Garden. So hats off to Opera Holland Park’s management, which has deployed its relatively slender resources to brilliant effect and beaten the odds triumphantly. This is an absolutely wonderful evening.
At its heart is a remarkable double scored by the French soprano Anne Sophie Duprels, as both the bargeman’s wife Giorgetta in Il Tabarro and the eponymous nun in Suor Angelica. In terms of tonal beauty, Duprels’ voice isn’t inherently an instrument of the first-rank, but she uses it with consummate intelligence to express meaning and feeling. I have to cast my mind back a generation to Teresa Stratas to think of another soprano whose acting was so emotionally raw and compellingly vivid.
Sparing herself nothing, she makes the plight of both these victimized women painfully real: Giorgetta, immired in the tedium and frustration of her spartan and confined existence; Angelica, the meekly resigned girl in the back row who suddenly explodes with resentment at the way that single-motherhood has left her a pariah. Be warned: I found her enactment of Angelica’s suicidal agony almost unbearable to watch, not least as the staging denies her the sentimental consolation of a redemptive epiphany.
The cast of Suor Angelica at Opera Holland Park (Image: Robert Workman)
Duprels is surrounded and supported by terrific colleagues - notably Stephen Gadd as her saturnine brute of a husband Michele in Il Tabarro and Rosalind Plowright as her twisted yet remorseful aunt in Suor Angelica - as well as two exemplary productions, crisply designed by Neil Irish and lucidly directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans (Il Tabarro) and Oliver Platt (Suor Angelica).
Gianni Schicchi returns in a smashing revival of Lloyd-Evans’s 2012 mise-en-scène: sharp and sour in flavour, it presents Buoso Donati’s ghastly clan as Dickensian monsters of venality rather than amiable twits and makes Schicchi himself (Richard Burkhard, underplaying it nicely) a sort of rogue music-hall conjuror who turns out to be the hero of the hour. James Edwards and Anna Patalong are adequate as the young lovers; among the remainder of the energetic ensemble Sarah Pring, Aled Hall and William Robert Allenby shine brightly.
Steering the City of London Sinfonia with unfailing aplomb and mining with relish the wealth of colour and detail in these marvellous scores is Stuart Stratford. Lucky Scottish Opera to have secured him as its new Music Director.
Until 27 June. Tickets: 0300 199 1000; operahollandpark.com