Suor Angelica
Usher Hall, Edinburgh - 16/08/25
London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano (conductor)
Edinburgh Festival Chorus, James Grossmith (director)
Carolina López Moreno (Suor Angelica), Kseniia Nikolaieva (Principessa), Monika-Evelin Liiv (La Badessa), Elena Zilio (La suora zelatrice), Angela Schisano (La maestra delle novizie), Sarah Dufresne (Suor Genovieffa), Julia Solomon (Una Conversa II), Susan White (Suor Osmina), Katherine Craig (soprano), Annette Chapman (soprano); Sei Suore: Ros Sutherland, Talitha Kearey, Lesley Walker, Jeanette Bell, Lucy O'Leary, Kirsty Weaver.
Please, “give us proper tunes”, the people have often cried. Giacomo Puccini and Victor de Sabata certainly delivered that in the opening half of a programme dominated by a stellar performance of Suor Angelica. So did the London Symphony Orchestra under the calm and confident baton of Sir Antonio Pappano.
The choice of Puccini’s ten minute graduation piece, Capriccio Sinfonico, and de Sabata’s more layered and sophisticated 15-minute Juventus, proved a good prelude to the main course. In honesty, the Capriccio is not terribly interesting, but the considerable resources of the LSO gave its diatonic A Major disposition a few subtle twists, with the quiet opening and closing wrapped persuasively around a little drama and the lush and round string melodies.
By contrast, Juventus (‘youth’) is a much bolder tone poem about growing up and exploring. It carries that aspirational character into its wider and more varied musical palette. You can see and hear why Toscani and Richard Strauss soon championed it into becoming a standard within the Romantic repertoire. Pappano and the LSO were alive to its dramatic moments, shifting key centres and rich harmonies.
Unsurprisingly, Puccini’s Suor Angelica is an altogether more substantial piece. A short, one hour opera in the verismo style, it packs a huge emotional punch. It is a rollercoaster of feeling and atmosphere, in fact. The composer’s contemporary critics were scandalised by the agonistic tale of a woman living as a nun who gives birth to a child out of wedlock, has it taken away by her family, is consigned to a monastery where she longs to be reunited with her offspring, learns its tragic fate callously through an aristocratic aunt forced to visit her over an inheritance, and has to deal with the complexities of forgiveness, religious ostracism and redemption in the process.
Those who dismiss Puccini’s tale and its musical enfolding as too sentimental and melodramatic miss the yearning within its many musical folds, and the gradations of light and shade which shape it. As someone drawn more to modernism and beyond, the style here is not my home territory. But its impact is undeniable.
Bolivian-Albanian Soprano Carolina López Moreno gave a quite outstanding account of Suor Angelica herself, ably supported by an all-female cast of soloists, an orchestra more than capable of navigating the twists and turns of the score, and a well-drilled Edinburgh Festival Chorus. This glorious musical tableau is the middle opera in a triptych, Il Trittico. It has definitely re-established its place as a strong, moving and musically complex standalone opera in recent years.
Part of that have been various attempts to recontextualise a work originally set in the seventeenth century in relation to recent examples of the abuse and mistreatment of women in convents and other religious settings. This ability to remain relevant is important to its appeal. But as this rapturously received concert performance demonstrated, the music has also been among Puccini’s most underrated until recently. This EIF production will certainly be a staging post in its continuing journey to even greater artistic recognition.
