Pappano Conducts Puccini and Strauss

Pappano Conducts Puccini and Strauss
Royal Albert Hall

Tonight we've got a bit of opera! Two operas, in fact: 

1)  Die Frau Ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), by Richard Strauss

2) Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica) by Giacomo Puccini.

It's to be the first time Suor Angelica has been outed at the BBC Proms. But guess what... I've met her before! Yes, in 2019 I went to see a performance of Suor Angelica at St George's Hall concert room in Liverpool. Before that time I had never seen an opera before, so it was a bit of a bucket list job more than anything. (It was on a double-bill with Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, but it was the Suor Anglica I've remembered more, out of the two). They were performed by the North Wales Opera Company. Before tonight's Prom airs I have a root around to see if I can find the programme from the time, and I am successful - it's under my bed, amongst the mountains of other tour programmes and museum guidebooks I've hoarded over the years [It's times like these I glad I did - thank God for Ottoman storage!]. I even find my programme from Prom 48 at the RAH on 2016 - the one and only Prom I had attended before this year - I will add a photo and more about this, retrospectively, in my Introduction Blog from the start of the run.

But on to the music, and first up tonight is Die Frau Ohne Schatten, by Strauss. It starts off with some short, coarse tears on the lower brasses. Feels like a summons. The strings soon take over though, and it's a breath of fresh air. It's glorious! Repeating a simile I have already used, it's like wandering at leisure though a floral meadow. Lots of lilac, green, and yellow colouring. Is this a bout of musical synesthesia I've got? Yes, it's beautiful. It's majestic, but in a benign way, rather than the forceful way. Is it extroversion? I do think it is, now that I think back to that meadow. 

There's a bit of Mahler and Berio during the interval and, Oh My God, it's not that bad. Also a bit of Bach, never-a-bad-thing, on piano, to soothe us through.

Second half is Suor Angelica. What is there to say about it, really? Obviously it's a solitary piece, and that in itself is what makes it stick out to me. I have a read of my old programme from St George's Hall in 2019, and it offers me a 'plain English' synopsis of the tale - which follows through as I listen. It's a tragedy as old as time, and arguably even more tragic now than when it was first written. Because we, as modern listeners, are all too aware that that reconciliation with her son and Our Lady at the end, are nothing more than one final, pre-death hit of noradrenaline.