Well-sung Puccini program shows limits of concert opera

The opera community's annual winter treat is the Academy of Vocal Arts' Kimmel Center visitation, when singers relax into the warm Perelman Theater acoustic and need not navigate the cramped, cluttered stage of AVA's Spruce Street theater. But there was a catch at this weekend's Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica (two of the three parts of Puccini's Il Trittico): Though musically distinguished in every way, they also revealed the significant limitations of concert opera.

In these mature Puccini works (which will repeat Wednesday at the Haverford School), music, character, and even physical movement are all of a piece. Thus, the rudimentary staging of important plot points (an inevitable quirk in concert staging) was unusually tough to overlook.

You also had to accept that the cloistered nuns of Suor Angelica were women in thoroughly slinky evening gowns. Or that the marginal denizens of French barge life in Il Tabarro wore formal evening clothes. You could close your eyes, but you'd miss the singers' stage charisma plus the emphatic eminence of conductor Christofer Macatsoris, who made every phrase live.

Yet in a staged production, would soprano Michelle Johnson have brought such fascinating originality to the title role of Suor Angelica on Friday? The muted scoring of the opera is a tip-off that Tosca-magnitude singing isn't appropriate here. Angelica, after all, has been sent to the convent to atone for giving birth out of wedlock, but during the course of the opera discovers her son has died, poisons herself to be with him in heaven, and then realizes (in her waning moments) that suicide is a mortal sin.

Often, the more restraint in the singers, the more handily the opera does its work. But Johnson gave a full-tilt characterization suggesting that suicide was an act of rebellion and liberation in the face of intractable forces. Touching base with all these emotional colors is more challenging when the colors are more vivid. Yet she succeeded: She has a rich, deep vocal timbre and knows how to use it.