EIF: A powerful performance of Suor Angelica

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

The bar has been set very high by previous concert performances of operas at the Edinburgh International Festival. Most recently there was last weekend’s superb addition to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Mozart sequence, but also with Wagner in earlier years.

The Usher Hall audience is accustomed to singers having memorised their roles and bringing their theatrical skills to the concert platform. The new Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Antonio Pappano, and the dozen, mostly young, female voices from Covent Garden he brought for the last concert of the orchestra’s residency at this year’s Festival  can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that.

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With the proviso that the singers were, for the most part, restricted by being behind their music stands, there could be no complaints about their performances. Suor Angelica, the middle work of Puccini’s Il Trittico, is enjoying a notable return to favour, with many staged performances. Its journey from the fun banter of the opening convent scene through the confrontation between the tragic titular figure and her imperious aunt, the Principessa, to the anguished liturgical dilemma of its conclusion was as powerful here.

Carolina Lopez Moreno was vocally superb in the title role, which she paced with skill, leaving the revelation of the full power of her voice, secure at challenging pitch, until the opera’s climax. The smaller roles of the other nuns were all characterfully portrayed by 10 singers, mostly recent graduates of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker emerging artists programme and a testament to the selection standard for that scheme.

The one singer clearly “off the book” – to the extent of dismissively pushing down the music stand nearest her at her first entrance – was Ukrainian mezzo Kseniia Nikolaieva as the Principessa. The Covid pandemic apparently denied us her Carmen for Scottish Opera, but here was a role for which she was as perfectly suited as our own Karen Cargill, with her richly-toned contralto voice. The dynamic exchange between herself and Morena’s Angelica was ferociously intense.

With Edinburgh Festival Chorus filling the choir stalls and these instrumentalists, led by former Scottish Chamber Orchestra leader Benjamin Marqise Gilmore, providing a gold-standard interpretation of Puccini’s masterful orchestration, the evening was a perfect illustration of what Pappano is bringing to the LSO. The first half featured two stunning concert-openers: the youthful Puccini’s Capriccio Sinfonico, with themes he would later repurpose on the opera stage, and the even rarer Juventus by 20th century Italian conductor/composer Victor de Sabata.

For festival tickets see here