A muffled car horn toots from the orchestra early in Il tabarro, the first of Puccini's trio of operas known as Il trittico which opened last week in a cogent new production to launch the Royal Opera House's self-styled "Olympic Season". The other two works in this marathon provide spiritual light and black humour: the seraphic Suor Angelica, here given a clinical, yet transfixing makeover, and Gianni Schicchi, a revival of the riotously salty 2007 staging. All are directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Antonio Pappano, ROH music director. Their fruitful partnership ripens with each renewal.
Why comment on the klaxon? Puccini always had an appetite for the latest fad. He sniffed out the potential of new Broadway plays, leading to Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West. He attended significant first nights, even of works by composers musically remote from him. His taste for novelty extended to automobiles, boats and luxury gadgets. In the middle of writing Butterfly, he had the stylish honour of suffering one of Italy's first-recorded car crashes.
How natural, then, for him to specify a car horn – especially when it can mimic the dull moan of a tug boat – in a score depicting seedy life on the banks of the Seine. Yet according to received opinion, Puccini must have lifted the idea from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, premiered a few years before Il trittico (1918). The reluctance to give Puccini credit for originality in his later works does not stand up to scrutiny. Dissonance, violence, a spirit of alienation – supposedly 20th-century attitudes – define Il tabarro and surface in the other two operas. These expressionist elements were to the fore on Monday night, the orchestration glinting, the drama taut.
Pappano is unrivalled in this music. He can tackle anything but he is a Puccinian to the core, his recording of Il trittico definitive. Every nuance in these fertile scores was exquisitely shaped and keenly delivered by the ROH orchestra, from glassy string effects in Angelica to rude bassoon in Schicchi. Given the current panic about music directors in the world's opera houses – following James Levine's abrupt departure, temporary or permanent, from the Met last week – let's hope the ROH has shackled Pappano in chains and thrown away the key.
In Il tabarro (The Cloak), Jones and his designer, Ultz, have paid close attention to Puccini's own words about this grand guignol story, in which a cuckolded barge owner murders his wife's lover: the boatmen's life is harsh; Giorgetta, mourning a dead baby, yearns for passion, gaiety and dry land. "These are the gleams and shadows that must give the crime a sharp and delicate flavour like an etching," Puccini wrote.
The bleak setting, updated to the 1930s, takes its inspiration from Frans Masereel, whose graphic novel in woodcuts, A Passionate Journey (1919), is a visual poem of urban loneliness. Tabarro has no heroes though Luigi, the lover, exudes sexual prowess in every utterance. The Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko has the vocal virility and smouldering looks to hook any river-bound desperate housewife.
As Giorgetta, Eva-Maria Westbroek, who created the title role of Anna Nicole in February, conveyed the woman's hopeless, raw desire with burnished vocal colours and blowsy physicality. Her dour husband, Michele, a superb Lucio Gallo, evoked electrifying pathos. His slight singing below the note, almost in the Russian style, intensified his anguish at losing first his child, then his wife.
For many, the problem work is Suor Angelica, derided as sentimental, though considered by others to exemplify the composer at his most perceptive. You may need to be a Catholic, a nun or a mother or, as in Sister Angelica's unfortunate case, all three, to appreciate fully the anguish and sinfulness involved. Even so, it remains shocking and affecting, despite its tackily redemptive ending.
Jones and set designer Miriam Buether (costumes Nicky Gillibrand) have pulled off a visual coup by setting it in an American Roman Catholic children's hospital c1960: eau-de-nil walls, iron beds, starched aprons, medicine trolleys just the right height for dropping a passing genuflection and big, sloping windows beneath a gabled roof making serene pools of sunlight. As Angelica, Ermonela Jaho manages a stiff stoicism suggesting inner angst, even if her outburst at learning of her son's death and subsequent aria overstretched her vocally. Her tearful curtain call was almost as touching as the opera itself. Anna Larsson commanded icy authority as the sadistic aunt, while Anna Devin's Genovieffa had spirit and charm. Jones fleshed out the original action to convincing, never intrusive effect.
The witty Gianni Schicchi, in this production originally paired with Ravel's L'heure espagnole, works triumphantly in its rightful place. Gallo, in the title role, is lugubriously funny, a natural comic. How you wanted to club that infuriating child and clock the greedy aunts and shake the dullard lawyer. For a night at the opera, it was even funnier than A Night at the Opera.
