UK Edition
Review
Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi, English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire, review: 'enormous fun'
Masters of all matters theatrical though he was, Puccini made several crucial miscalculations when conceiving his triptych of one-act operas. They require three completely different sets and a large number of soloists who cannot easily be cross-cast. They also have a forbidding running time (including two intervals) of something like four hours.
Managements have quailed at these challenges and the attendant expense, and the result is that three magnificent music dramas have never achieved the widespread popularity of the less demanding but cruder La Bohème or Tosca.
English Touring Opera’s solution is to turn the trittico into a dittico, omitting the all-female Suor Angelica and plumping for a straight contrast between the low melodrama of Il Tabarro and the high comedy of Gianni Schicchi. I adore Suor Angelica beyond measure, but for a company with limited resources this is a perfectly acceptable solution – and in this revival of stagings first seen in 2014, ETO does both pieces proud.
Perhaps James Conway’s sensible and well-designed production Tabarro doesn’t do enough to evoke the rough Parisian canalside, nor does it crackle with erotic electricity – it’s rather static where it should bustle and one doesn’t feel the three principal characters locked in lust, frustration and rage.
But buoyed by the enthusiasm of the orchestra conducted by Michael Rosewell, Craig Smith as the gruff bargeman Michele, Sarah-Jane Lewis as his desperate wife Giorgetta and Charne Rochford as the stevedore chancer Luigi sing with a full-blooded intensity that can ride Puccini’s melodic swell and give life to the sordid little tale of an unhappy marriage and a clandestine love affair.
Gianni Schicchi in contrast is a farcical riot – a little too raucous at times in Liam Steel’s overtly caricatured staging set in the Edwardian era and populated with outright grotesques, but enormous fun nevertheless.
Andrew Slater presents a cool and contained Schicchi – perhaps the sanest person in the farrago and deserving of the dosh he swindles out of Buoso Donati’s ghastly relations. It’s in a good cause, after all: a dowry for his daughter Lauretta, sweetly sung by Galina Averina, on her marriage to Rinuccio, the effervescent Luciano Botelho. Among the rest of the cast I’d single out Clarissa Meek, who has a ball doubling up as Buoso’s ancient cousin Zita and Frugola the cat-mad ragpicker in Tabarro. But this is a team effort, played out with irresistible gusto: let’s hope it gets the big audiences it deserves on its forthcoming national tour. Touring 2 June, in repertory with The Marriage of Figaro.
Tour information: 020 7833 2555; englishtouringopera.org.uk