Puccini’s richly balanced show holds back the blood and guts

Il Tabarro/ Suor Angelica Opera North/Grand Theatre Leeds

Master of theatrical craft though he was, Puccini slightly miscalculated when composing his wonderful trilogy of one-act operas Il Trittico. To perform them complete (with intervals) requires three sets, a huge cast and four hours, thus making them tricky economic propositions.

A common solution is to reduce the trittico to a dittico by combining the brilliantly comic Gianni Schicchi with one of the two melodramas, hardnosed Il Tabarro (The Cloak) and tearjerking Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica). Opera North regards conformity as cowardice, however, and has decided perversely to ditch the fun bit and pair Tabarro and Angelica.

The experiment works well, not least because Jac van Steen conducts both with such delicacy, holding back on the blood and guts in favour of teasing out the refinements in Puccini’s orchestration and allowing the subtleties of the characters’ inner situations to communicate without storms battering them from the pit. What could have been a relentlessly gloomy sob-fest turns out to have its own balanced ebb and flow, richly contrasting in tone and atmosphere.

Michael Barker-Caven directs sensitively. For Tabarro, he recycles the designs for David Pountney’s 2004 staging, in which what the libretto specifies as a barge on the Seine becomes more like a container in a layby; with Angelica, he plays no gratuitous tricks beyond the slightly intrusive introduction of a silent halfwit beggar-woman employed as the convent porter and a rather naff apotheosis in which Angelica walks naked towards starry redemption.

No matter: the stories are clearly told and the singers all act with conviction, conveying both the roughand-tumble of Tabarro’s sweaty proletarians and the gentle twittering of Angelica’s fellow nuns. Giselle Allen and Ivan Inverardi make a raunchy Giorgetta and Michele, the bargees whose marriage is crumbling under the strain of a lost child; in the nunnery, Soraya Mafi sparkles as the frolicsome Genoveva and Patricia Bardon is icily impervious as Angelica’s baleful aunt.

But two of the cast stand out. One is the young tenor David Butt Philip, singing as Giorgetta’s lover Luigi with a clarion tone and stylistic confidence that promise a major career in the Italian repertory; the other is that tremendous operatic actress Anne Sophie Duprels – who inhabits the tormented soul of poor Angelica with an intensity and sincerity that was heart-rending. Both are superb.

Until October 26, then touring to Salford, Nottingham, Edinburgh and Newcastle. Box office: 0844 848 2700