PUCCINI - A LIFE IN 7 WOMEN / Lirica Arts / Review

 

PUCCINI – A LIFE IN 7 WOMEN 

Lirica Arts 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Friday (2 August 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 5 August 2024 with the title "Japanese soprano Mako Nishimoto sings with power in Lirica Arts' Puccini tribute".

Commemorating the centenary of his death, local chamber opera company Lirica Arts presented a tribute to Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini by performing highlights from eight operas spanning the years 1883 to 1924. Curated and presented by Shridar Mani, much research and detailed history was crammed into 100 illuminating minutes of music and oration. 

Puccini was deeply in love with the female voice. The roles of Cio-Cio San, Tosca, Mimi, Turandot and Liu come to mind, but the seven women in the title also included Puccini’s ambitious mother Albina and his mistress-turned-wife Elvira. All of them shaped his musical life and helped seal his reputation as Western classical opera’s most popular and perhaps greatest-ever composer. 

Given its subject, sopranos dominated the concert accompanied by splendid collaborative pianist Beatrice Lin. Korean soprano Renata Hann opened the concert with Anna’s aria Non ti scordar di me from Puccini’s first opera Le Villi (The Fairies), revealing a sweetness of tone and excellent vocal control. 

As each opera was presented chronologically, Manon Lescaut was next. Japanese soprano Mako Nishimoto, who stole the show in Singapore Lyric Opera’s 2013 production of Madama Butterfly, displayed a healthy ringing vibrato in In quelle trine morbide. Opposite her, Des Grieux’s aria Donna non vidi mai sung by tenor Shaun Lee was put to a strain at its highest notes. 

The excerpts from La Boheme came from the Third Act. Donde lieta usci was Mimi’s touching aria of separation from her lover Rodolfo, with Nishimoto at her most sympathetic. Following that was the evening’s only quartet, Addio dolce svegliare alla mattina, with the opera’s two couples (Mimi and Rodolfo, Musetta and Marcello) breaking up, but for different reasons and to tragicomic effect. 

The concert’s other male singer was baritone Martin Ng, founder-director of Lirica Arts. His imperious role in the Te Deum as villainous police chief Baron Scarpia in Tosca was convincing for its gravity and grim determination. The opera’s finest aria, Vissi d’arte, belonged to Nishimoto’s Tosca, whose powerful performance will be remembered by many present. 

And who was not waiting for her Madama Butterfly? She did not sing the familiar Un bel di vedremo but rather the opera’s heart-wrenching final minutes in Tu tu piccolo iddio, where Cio-Cio San’s act of seppuku becomes inevitable. 

Two relative rarities came in Ch’il bel sogno di doretta from La Rondine (The Sparrow) and Senza Mamma from Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), both brilliantly helmed by Hann. Dramatic soprano roles should not overshadow those of a lyric soprano’s, and this concert succeeded by highlighting this aspect. 

Turandot was Puccini’s final opera, left uncompleted at the time of his premature demise. The vast contrasts between blood-thirsty Turandot and self-sacrificing Liu were laid bare by Nishimoto and Hann in an astonishing sequence that included In questa reggia (Turandot), Tanto amore segreto and Tu che di gel sei cinta (Liu) before closing with Liu’s Funeral. And that was where Puccini finally laid down his pen.