Puccini's "Il Trittico": the Opéra-Bastille in front of the accomplished perfection

We dreamed of the return of Il Trittico to the Paris Opera, where the work had not been performed since 1987, and its director Alexander Neef offered it to Bastille, with a vibrant and sumptuous show, co-produced by the Salzburg Festival which unveiled it in 2022. A rich idea from the director, Christof Loy, to have modified the order of the works composing the Puccinian triptych to make it a profoundly human journey – from the farce Gianni Schicchi to the heartbreaking tragedy Suor Angelica, by way of the verist drama Il Tabarro – supported, moreover, by a direction of actors as accurate as it is discreet. It was a real relief, then, to see people of skill and taste - set designer Etienne Pluss, costume designer Barbara Drosihn, lighting designer Fabrice Kebour - working with finesse to successively transport the spectator to 13th-century Florence, the banks of the Seine at the beginning of the 20th century and a convent near Siena in the 17th century.

Doing justice to some of Puccini's most refined orchestral works, to the clockwork precision of their rhythms and their crypto-Ravelian timbre combinations, requires, finally, a true theatre conductor, and we were not disappointed, after his