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Tales of Wretchedness and Misery Vienna
Staatsoper
06/21/2026 - & June 25, 27, 30, 2026
Giacomo Puccini: Il trittico
Il tabarro: Nicole Car (Giorgietta), Arturo Chacón‑Cruz (Luigi), Ambrogio Maestri (Michele), Dan Paul Dumitrescu (Il Talpa), Andrea Giovannini (Il Tinca), Monika Bohinec (La Frugola), Hiroshi Amado (Song Seller), Ana Garotic, Andrew Turner (Lovers)
Suor Angelica: Nicole Car (Suor Angelica), Violeta Urmana (La Zia Principessa), Monika Bohinec (The Abbess), Daria Sushkova (The Monitress), Juliette Mars (The Mistress of the Novices), Ileana Tonca (Suor Genovieffa), Antigoni Chalka (Suor Osmina), Jozefína Monarcha (Suor Dolcina), Teresa Sales Rebordão (The nursing sister), Davison’s Pittock (A novice), Ana Garotic, Kristina Agur, Piia Rytkönen, Dymfa Meijts (The alms and lay sisters)
Gianni Schicchi: Ambrogio Maestri (Gianni Schicchi), Violeta Urmana (Zita), Nicole Car (Lauretta), Kang Wang (Rinuccio), Andrea Giovannini (Gherardo), Anna Bondarenko (Nella), Jusung Gabriel Park (Betto di Signa), Dan Paul Dumitrescu (Simone), Attila Mokus (Marco), Daria Sushkova (La Ciesca), Hans Peter Kammerer (Maestro Spinelloccio), Simonas Strazdas (Ser Amantio di Nicolao), Martin Mateo-Seebacher (Gherardino), Konrad Huber (Pinellino), Michael Wilder (Guccio)
Chor der Wiener Staatsoper, Martin Schebesta (Chorus master), Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Lorenzo Viotti (Conductor)
Tatjana Gürbaca (Stage Director), Henrik Ahhr (Set Design), Silke Willrett (Costumes), Stefan Bolliger (Lighting)
K. Wang, A. Maestri, N. Car (© Wiener Staatsoper/Michael Pöhn)
The Vienna State Opera’s current Il trittico proved, in the end, a musically distinguished evening that survived rather than was illuminated by its staging. Tatjana Gürbaca’s production is a characteristically severe exercise in conceptual unification, determined to read Puccini’s three one-act operas as a single study in damaged intimacy, coercion, appetite and emotional entrapment. One can admire the seriousness of that ambition without finding the results persuasive. Gürbaca’s staging is too insistent, too monochrome in its emotional outlook, and too distrustful of Puccini’s instinct for atmosphere, contrast and theatrical life. Yet the evening remained well worth hearing because the musical side was so strong: Nicole Car’s remarkable assumption of three very different heroines, Ambrogio Maestri’s formidable presence, excellent contributions from Arturo Chacón‑Cruz, Kang Wang and Violeta Urmana, and, above all, Lorenzo Viotti’s finely judged conducting made a compelling case for the work itself.
That matters because Il trittico is one of Puccini’s most astonishing achievements. It is not merely a triptych of contrasting genres – verismo tragedy, devotional melodrama and comic farce – but a work of extraordinary formal intelligence in which three sharply differentiated worlds are held together by the composer’s mastery of pacing, orchestral colour and dramatic proportion. Any successful performance must preserve the individuality of Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi while making one feel the larger design. Viotti accomplished exactly that in the pit. Gürbaca, by contrast, seems less interested in the individuality of the three operas than in subsuming them into a single bleak thesis about the ugliness of human relations.
Her production has little use for local colour or for the vividly realised environments Puccini creates with such care. The Paris barge of Il tabarro, the convent of Suor Angelica and the Florentine household of Gianni Schicchi are all treated less as living worlds than as abstract spaces of repression and estrangement. The problem is not simply that this approach strips away atmosphere; it is that it reduces the evening’s dramatic range. The three operas are forced toward the same emotional register of grimness, as though infidelity, jealousy, cruelty, greed and despair were all that mattered in Il trittico. Puccini, of course, is interested in all of those things – but he is also interested in sensuality, comedy, tenderness, pity and the sheer pleasure of theatrical contrast. Gürbaca offers little space for any of that.
Fortunately, the singers and orchestra repeatedly restored what the production denied. At the centre of the evening stood Nicole Car, a magnificent Tatiana in Montréal’s production of Eugene Onegin a few years ago, who undertook the punishing triple assignment of Giorgetta, Suor Angelica and Lauretta and emerged as the performance’s indispensable musical force. The achievement was not simply one of stamina, though stamina was certainly required. More impressive was the intelligence with which she differentiated the three women, adjusting scale, colour and phrasing to suit each opera while maintaining the same fundamental integrity of line. Car’s singing throughout the evening had poise, tonal warmth and a deep understanding of Puccini’s long‑breathed lyricism. More importantly, she never settled for generic effect.
As Giorgetta in Il tabarro, she avoided every cliché of the role. Rather than turning Giorgetta into a blunt verismo heroine, Car found something more inward and more interesting: a woman worn down by emotional suffocation, whose longing for escape has curdled into recklessness. The voice remains a richly upholstered lyric instrument, and she knows how to let it bloom without forcing it. What was especially impressive was her control of phrase. The music was allowed to speak through line rather than through exaggeration, and the result was a Giorgetta of genuine musical and dramatic substance rather than a mere emblem of adulterous frustration.
Recently heard as Don José in Montréal’s production of Carmen, Arturo Chacón‑Cruz sang Luigi with urgency and conviction. His is not a voice that overwhelms by sheer brute force, but he brought a bright, forward attack and a real sense of impulsive ardour to the role. Luigi must feel like a dangerous eruption into Giorgetta’s trapped world, and Chacón‑Cruz achieved that through communicative immediacy rather than decibel display. He gave the music thrust and heat, and if the role did not always suggest the last degree of vocal abandon, it was nevertheless strongly sung and dramatically alert.
More in his element in comic roles such as Falstaff and Don Pasquale, both heard recently at La Scala, Ambrogio Maestri’s Michele was more uneven. There is no denying the authority of the instrument, nor the sheer physical and vocal weight he can bring to the role. Michele’s menace and oppressive gravity were never in doubt. Yet the character also needs inwardness: he is not only a jealous husband but a grieving father and a man in whom love, suspicion and humiliation have become fatally entangled. Maestri’s performance, for all its power, could feel somewhat monolithic, too dependent on mass and declamation where more variation of colour and line might have deepened the portrait. Still, the final pages of Il tabarro landed with grim force, and there was no mistaking Michele’s tragic weight.
If Il tabarro established the evening’s musical quality, Suor Angelica provided its emotional centre. Here Gürbaca’s production was again a problem. She seems determined to evacuate the work of any spiritual dimension, presenting the convent simply as another institution of repression and social punishment. Such an approach inevitably narrows the opera. Suor Angelica is not merely a study in cruelty; it is also a work about memory, guilt, grace and the possibility of transcendence, however one chooses to stage the ending. Gürbaca appears interested only in the cruelty. But Car’s performance cut through the concept and restored to the work the humanity the staging withheld.
Her Suor Angelica was the finest thing in the evening. She resisted the temptation to make the role immediately pathetic or overtly saintly. Instead she built the performance with exemplary patience, keeping the voice centred, restrained and inward until the Princess’s revelation destroys Angelica’s hard‑won emotional equilibrium. That sense of dramatic pacing was crucial. Angelica must not begin in collapse; the tragedy lies precisely in the fact that she has spent years learning how not to collapse. Car understood that, and the result was devastating. The line remained beautifully sustained, the tone warm but controlled, and every phrase seemed to grow naturally out of the character’s emotional life rather than being imposed upon it.
Her “Senza mamma” was the evening’s emotional summit. What made it so affecting was its simplicity and discipline. Car did not treat it as a detachable concert aria or inflate it with sentimental effects. She trusted the line, trusted the words and trusted Puccini. The legato was poised, the phrasing unforced, and beneath the vocal beauty one heard the complete disintegration of a woman who can no longer survive on memory alone. It was singing of genuine distinction, not because it advertised emotion but because it embodied it.
Admired last summer as Kabanicha in Munich’s production of Kát’a Kabanová, Violeta Urmana was a formidable Zia Principessa. Too often the Princess is reduced to a melodramatic villain; Urmana was far more intelligent than that. She understood that the role is most chilling when sung from within a complete conviction of social and moral rightness. There was no need for snarling or caricature. The voice, still dark and commanding, carried the authority of class, family and punishment in every phrase. Her steadiness and refusal to overplay the scene made the confrontation all the more terrifying. The supporting cast of nuns was also strong, lending the convent scenes musical shape and ensemble discipline even when the production reduced them to functionaries within Gürbaca’s institutional machine.
After the intensity of Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi ought to release the evening into a different theatrical rhythm, but Gürbaca’s production once again insists on grotesquerie where Puccini’s score already says everything that needs saying about greed and opportunism. She seems not to trust the opera’s own comic mechanism, and as a result the staging can feel over‑emphatic where it should be quick, merciless and light on its feet. Gianni Schicchi is not a cosy comedy, but neither does it need to be bludgeoned into social ugliness.
Here, however, Maestri came fully into his own. As Gianni Schicchi, he was in his element: vocally commanding, theatrically shrewd and possessed of exactly the comic authority the role needs. He knows how to dominate an ensemble without flattening it, how to place a line for maximum effect and, crucially, how not to sentimentalise Schicchi into a lovable rogue. This was a highly intelligent operator who simply outplayed the greed of everyone around him, and Maestri relished the character’s manipulative brilliance without overdoing it. The evening came vividly alive whenever he was at the centre of the action.
Kang Wang made a fresh and sympathetic Rinuccio, bringing youthful brightness and welcome lyrical elegance to a role that can easily seem secondary. His “Firenze è come un albero fiorito” was sung with open tone and genuine enthusiasm, giving the opera one of its few moments of uncomplicated lyrical sunlight. Car, returning for Lauretta after the immense demands of the first two operas, wisely kept the role in scale. Her “O mio babbino caro” was tender, neatly shaped and integrated into the scene rather than floated out as a gala interruption. It was a small but telling example of musical intelligence.
The evening’s ultimate hero, though, was Lorenzo Viotti. He conducted Il trittico not as three disconnected one‑act operas but as a single large structure whose three parts illuminate one another. Just as importantly, he did so without blurring their very different musical characters. In Il tabarro he found a dark, tensile orchestral line and resisted the temptation to wallow in verismo sludge. The score’s nocturnal atmosphere was fully present, but it was never allowed to sag into formless gloom. The orchestra remained mobile, alert and dramatically alive, and one heard clearly how much psychological information Puccini has embedded in the orchestral writing.
Viotti was perhaps most impressive in Suor Angelica, where he judged the long span of the work with rare control. This is an opera that can collapse into sentimental flooding if the conductor is not careful, but Viotti trusted Puccini’s architecture and allowed the emotional tension to accumulate gradually. He never rushed the score’s climaxes or asked the orchestra to emote on the singers’ behalf. Instead he gave Car the space she needed while sustaining the pulse beneath her, and the result was an Angelica of unusual dignity and cumulative force.
In Gianni Schicchi, he supplied the rhythmic spring and bite that the staging often lacked. The score fizzed and snapped, the ensembles moved with precision, and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra responded with refinement and wit. Throughout the evening the playing was of a very high standard: warm, disciplined and vividly coloured. Viotti’s handling of transitions, his ear for orchestral detail and his refusal to sentimentalise the score were what finally gave the performance its coherence.
That coherence came from the pit and the stage musicians, not from the production. Gürbaca’s Il trittico remains too severe, too joyless and too determined to flatten Puccini’s triptych into a single Regietheater meditation on human misery. It has little interest in atmosphere, local colour or emotional contrast, and it often seems to regard Puccini’s theatrical instincts as weaknesses in need of correction. I find that a serious misunderstanding of the work.
And yet this was, emphatically, not a failed evening. It was saved – and at times elevated – eby the quality of the music‑making. Nicole Car’s extraordinary traversal of three utterly different heroines would have been enough to make the evening memorable on its own; Urmana brought chilling authority to the Principessa, Maestri was a first‑rate Schicchi and a powerful Michele, Chacón‑Cruz and Wang both contributed strongly, and Viotti conducted with intelligence, shape and an unerring sense of Puccini’s dramatic pulse.
So yes, the production remained a trial. But the singing and conducting were of such quality that they not only redeemed the evening, they reminded one of what Il trittico actually is: not a conceptual treatise on the sordidness of life, but one of Puccini’s most humane, varied and musically sophisticated masterpieces.
Ossama el Naggar
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