Puccini Suor Angelica by Nelsons and WDR Forces

Puccini himself called Il trittico “my three children,” and he loved them all equally — which hasn’t stopped posterity from favoring Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi while treating Suor Angelica as the embarrassing middle sibling, the one given to sentiment and easy tears. The opera has a reputation problem. It is all women, all nuns, all restraint punctured by catastrophe, and it ends with a vision of the Virgin Mary that audiences sometimes find mawkish and conductors sometimes conduct that way. Andris Nelsons, working with the WDR forces in Cologne in May 2011, doesn’t.

What he understands — and this matters — is that Suor Angelica is an opera about time. About the slowness of convent hours, the way grief accumulates in silence, the terrible velocity of a single piece of information arriving after seven years of not knowing. Kristīne Opolais, who was then still something of a revelation rather than a household name, grasps this completely. Her Angelica breathes differently in the opening scenes than she does after the Princess leaves. She has to. The woman who says, almost casually, that to die is life and glory — she doesn’t know yet what she’s saying. Opolais does, and she seeds those early phrases with something quietly premonitory, a shimmer beneath the lyric surface that you might not consciously register until the catastrophe arrives and you realize you had been warned.

The voice itself. Pure, focused, with a creamy upper register that never thickens under pressure and a lower range that carries real dramatic weight without turning muddy — Opolais is ideally equipped for a role that asks for stillness and then, without much warning, asks for everything else. She can declaim above a full orchestral texture without forcing. The pianissimi are genuinely soft, not merely reduced. In the great aria “Senza mamma,” she shapes the long vocal line with the kind of phrasing that seems inevitable, as if the music could not have gone any other way, which is the highest compliment one can pay.

Lioba Braun’s Princess is properly terrifying. The role invites a certain Kostelnička-ish rigidity — the aristocratic aunt as instrument of fate, delivering the news of the child’s death with the emotional temperature of a legal document — and Braun delivers exactly that, though she also lets in, just barely, something that might be read as conflict beneath the severity. Whether that ambivalence is intentional or simply the product of a sensitive performer resisting the role’s most mechanical demands, I can’t say for certain. It works either way.

The supporting cast is solid throughout. Nadezhda Serdyuk’s Monitress is calm without being colorless, authoritative without condescension — the voice of the institution, not its cruelty. Mojca Erdmann’s Suor Genovieffa has exactly the right brightness, that uncomplicated warmth of a young woman who has found her vocation and hasn’t yet had reason to doubt it. These smaller roles matter more than they seem to, because they establish the world Angelica is about to lose.

It’s worth pausing on the concert rendition question. Recorded over several days at the Cologne Philharmonie, this is the kind of event that could easily produce something competent but cool — singers without staging, a context that privileges the notes over the drama. The opposite happened. Nelsons draws from the WDR Sinfonieorchester Cologne playing of exceptional transparency and color; Puccini’s orchestration in this score is more subtle than in Tosca or Madama Butterfly, the palette more muted and strange, and it needs conducting that trusts the quieter moments. The WDR Rundfunkchor, particularly in the luminous final scene, sings with real spiritual weight — not the generic hushed reverence choirs sometimes offer in sacred contexts, but something genuinely rapt.

The program opens with the Symphonic Prelude in a major, a student work from 1882 — Puccini was then twenty-four, studying at the Milan Conservatory under Ponchielli, and the piece is exactly what you’d expect: Brahmsian in manner, well-crafted, showing the craft before the genius. It’s interesting primarily as archaeology, as evidence that Puccini learned his counterpoint and his form before he threw most of it overboard in favor of something rawer and more theatrical. Nelsons conducts it with evident affection, which is the right attitude.

There are recordings of Suor Angelica that I have returned to more often — Scotto’s 1977 account under Maazel, for one, with its almost frightening emotional exposure, or the Schwarzkopf disc that remains technically extraordinary even if it sounds slightly like a great soprano visiting a convent on a day trip. Opolais is younger-sounding than either, more vulnerable, less authoritative in the early scenes — which is actually appropriate. This is not a woman who has made her peace. This recording catches that.

Decisive verdict: among the best modern accounts of a score that deserves better than it usually gets.