Suor Angelica's Salvation

The Cinderella of Puccini's operatic triptych takes pride of place in WNO's staging and gets a stand-alone staging at ENO

Glorious singing: Natalya Romaniw as Welsh National Opera’s Suor Angelica Picture © Craig Fuller

Every year is a Puccini year, at least for the four operas that have become the ‘bankers’ of the standard repertoire. But 2024 is special: the 100th anniversary of the composer’s untimely death (November 29) after a throat cancer operation - Puccini was a lifelong chain smoker - which left Turandot unfinished. The core Puccini operas - La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900) and Madama Butterfly (1904) - are unavoidable this year, especially at Covent Garden, where revivals, often indifferently cast and routinely conducted, recur with wearisome frequency to fill the coffers of the UK’s international house.

It is regrettable, that, in his final year as the Royal Opera’s music director, Antonio Pappano, arguably the world’s most committed Puccini conductor, has not given us revivals of either La fanciulla del West (1911), or Il trittico (1919), though he did belatedly tackle his first Turandot in the theatre in 2023, a musically outstanding revival of Andrei Serban’s classic 1984 staging, which gets a further revival next year, conducted by Rafael Payaré.

As for anniversary events worthy of the name, there have been few in the UK: in June Opera Holland Park semi-staged a rare performance of his second opera, Edgar, and Pappano, in his new role as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, is giving us two performances of La rondine (The Swallow), an opera he recorded with the orchestra 30 years ago but has never conducted complete on stage. These December concerts will star Nadine Sierra and Michael Fabiano as the opera’s ill-starred lovers.