In anticipation of the centenary of Puccini’s death, in 2024, the Rome Opera has put the celebrations in the pipeline by launching a project in which, by choice of the musical director Michele Mariotti, the works that make up “Il Trittico” (“Il Tabarro” , “Suor Angelica”, “Gianni Schicchi”) are extrapolated individually every year and coupled with other one-act plays. More than a recomposed “Triptych”, as the Capitoline theater says, it is a decomposed “Triptych” to give life to other themed diptychs. Now “Il Tabarro” has been offered with “The Castle of Duke Bluebeard” by Bartók staged in the same 1918. In the first instance the works are dramas of the couple’s incommunicability and the loneliness of the male protagonist, with the outcome in a tragic case and in the other symbolic. In the “Tabarro” Michele is overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment upon discovering that his Giorgetta has Luigi as a lover, killing him and revealing his body to the woman with psychological violence. In “Bluebeard” the protagonist has gradually closed his wives in the seventh room of the castle because he is incapable of loving them: Judit, the last one, loves him so much that she wants to know his every secret, until she suffers the fate of the others as the firmament of the night .
That the director Johannes Erhart, to whom we owe a show full of mistakes and really bad, places in “Bluebeard” seven suitors of Judit (as many as the castle doors) who grope her using violence and even receiving complicity from her, is a serious whim, at the equal to the lack of logic in the “Tabarro”. At least there was the night, fundamental for the dramaturgy of both one-act plays: all in full light and even without images in “Bluebeard”. Luckily the singers are good and on the podium Mariotti provides capital evidence, naturally highlighting the modern points of the “Tabarro” and shrewdly capturing its hue, the musical flow of the Seine, so important for Puccini, up to the livid color before the murder . His soft phrasing, moreover beautiful, does not always guarantee the aplomb of the Roman orchestra in “Bluebeard”, but the dark timbre effects, decisive in Bartók, have the right charm. The Puccini triangle is interpreted with confident authority by Luca Salsi, Maria Agresta and Gregory Kunde; in the Bartokian couple the determination of Szilvia Vörös is more convincing than the little mystery of Mikhail Petrenko.