VoxCarnyx

Perth Cathedral, St Ninian’s

Lately there has been no shortage of productions of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, the central part of Puccini’s late trilogy, around the world, and Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford recently identified David McVicar’s Il Trittico two years ago as a highlight of his decade with the company. So the piece was a bold choice for Opera Bohemia in its continuing relationship with Perth Festival of the Arts.

It turns out to be an inspired one, possibly guaranteeing that the company fills the opera slot in the festival’s programme into the future because of its clever site-specific success.

Perth’s huge Scottish Episcopal Cathedral has not featured as a festival venue before, and it has neither the ancient history nor the acoustic properties of St John’s Kirk, as well as the distraction of traffic noise, but it offered a much better space for the presentation of opera, particularly this one.

The convent-set Suor Angelica occupied the space without much in the way of staging, the Amicus Orchestra and conductor Alistair Digges behind a raised platform to which the singers processed following the long choral overture, during which we were introduced to the pregnant Angelica (Jenny Stafford).

Seven years later she is among the nuns, having been forced by her family to abandon her child, of whom she longs for news. Before the arrival of her aunt, The Princess (Louise Collett), for the great confrontation of the opera, Douglas Nairne’s production presents a very believable portrait of the cloistered life, with simple costuming and design by Alisa Kalyanova and her team, and effective lighting by Leo Wittwer.

This is very much an ensemble show, many of the singers company stalwarts; the chorus work is excellent and the step-out roles characterful. Digges and the Amicus players provide a consistently vibrant account of Puccini’s score, the mature composer at the very top of his game in a work that held a number of personal resonances.

Collet, revealing her rich mezzo range, is very good as The Princess, her initial severity softening as the pivotal scene unfolds, and Stafford is a compelling stage performer throughout the hour and a quarter, musically absolutely on point in a demanding role.

For a long time Suor Angelica was seen as the tricky part of the Il Trittico set – melodramatic and doctrine-fixated – and often omitted to create a manageable evening of Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi (as English Touring Opera did at the 2011 Perth Festival), but that perception has certainly changed.

The denouement is still problematic, with the apparent intercession of the Virgin Mary, in the shape of the sailor-suited ghost of Angelica’s dead son (seven-year-old Rosie Nairne-Clark here), overriding the fate of eternal damnation for suicide. This production – and Puccini’s glorious score – effortlessly sweeps those difficulties aside.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Fraser Band