BBC Proms: Suor Angelica, LSO, Pappano review - earthly passion, heavenly grief

At first, I had my doubts about Puccini’s Suor Angelica in this concert performance at the Proms with Sir Antonio Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.

With the big band (up to and including Richard Gowers’s organ) arrayed far behind the conductor, the singers marshalled in a line in front, and the extensive ranks of the London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir rising on all sides, the Royal Albert Hall seemed to have turned Puccini’s late (1918) chamber opera – the detached final third of his portmanteau trilogy Il Trittico – into the form that this venue once loved best of all: an oratorio. 

Where would the strictly operatic feel, and sound, come from, especially in the deliberately low-key first third of the one-acter? The nuns in this (supposedly) 17th-century convent quietly go about their daily tasks with unshowy music full of telling descriptive touches before the storm strikes. True, Pappano’s wonderfully precise and idiomatic direction – from the celestial sparkle of bells and harp to splashes of brass and swells of springs – rightly placed Puccini’s fresh and vivid orchestration centre-stage. True, the massed choirs in their alternating force and subtlety made us grasp the vital choric role they play as framers, and interpreters, of the action. But, with most stage business absent, it felt like a low, slow burn, despite accomplished vocal flavours to savour from (for instance) Sarah Dufresne’s Sister Genovieffa, and Monika-Evelin Liiv’s commanding Abbess. But then news arrives that the quiet convent healer, Sister Angelica, has a visitor – the first in her seven cloistered and seemingly desire-free years. And all hell – all heaven too – breaks loose.

The visitor is Angelica’s imperious aunt, the Princess (Ukrainian mezzo Kseniia Nikolaieva), who after legal business brusquely tells her niece that the little son whose illegitimate birth led to her enforced conventual confinement has died. Chaste, cowed nun suddenly turned grieving mother, Carolina López Moreno (pictured below) was sensationally good. I don’t mean perfectly-judged in every bar – aiming for pianissimo top notes in this hall felt like a bridge too far, even though a rapt audience followed her at every step – but expressive, assured and credible in a way that shrank the vast barn to a fevered room. She aced the showpiece aria, “Senza Mamma”, with infinite tenderness, noble poise and finely moulded phrases throughout. 

But her breakdown – as she rushes into suicide with the herbs whose power she knows, then realises that damnation will separate her from her son – was wrenching, affecting, never simply mawkish. As for the vision of the all-forgiving Madonna that closes the piece, a concert staging hardly is spared the job of trying to embody Puccini’s disconcerting mystic turn. All we required were apt non-hammy gestures and the right, anguished but hopeful, tone and timbre. From López Moreno, we had both.We also had Nikolaieva’s extraordinary Princess, the aunt from hell (pictured above). Literally, you might have thought, as Puccini weaves around her an outlandish and sinister harmonic cloth that feels much closer (say) to Turandot than Baroque-era Italy. Pappano, as always, relished every flourish of the score, from growling brass to surging strings. Menacing, unworldly, not so much emotional sadist as alien force, Nikolaieva gave a supremely scary – yet mesmeric – account of the part. 

Strauss’s fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten also deals in thwarted motherhood, though its Shakespearean double plot – set simultaneously among supernatural and mortal beings – hardly comes through the Symphonic Fantasy he later made from its music, during his autumnal harvest in 1946. As the evening’s opener, this twilight tapestry of Straussian lavishness and whimsy furnished Pappano and the LSO with a sumptuous platform for their all-round dash and verve, from castanets and glockenspiel to bracing brass eruptions – with delectable trombones (pictured below).Abrasive in one passage, emollient the next, Pappano and his crew enjoyed the aural feast and communicated their delight. The heart, though, went largely untouched. Fair enough, since they – and Carolina López Moreno – had hatched plans soon to wring it dry.

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