Il tabarro & Gianni Schicchi
Cambridge Arts Theatre
English Touring Opera brought its production of two of the operas in Puccini’s Il trittico to Cambridge recently, as well as Figaro, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to go to. The production and performance of Il tabarro was the most convincing I have seen. Usually I feel that with this opera Puccini is worthily doing something different from any of his previous operas, and incidentally creating the only work which can justly be said to be verismo – a term ludicrously used for such markedly untruthful works as Andrea Chenier and Adriana Lecouvreur, as well as Puccini’s earlier works. With Il tabarro he virtually becomes the Zola of opera, grimly portraying the precarious and tedious life of bargees on the Seine.
There are few lyrical flights, and the ones that there are get cut short; or, in the brief references to La bohème he reminds us of the kind of glamourised world that he is used to creating.
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