The Covid pandemic may have kept Carlo Rizzi away from the podium, but they did give him the time to fulfil his idea, originally inspired by conducting the orchestral suite from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, of extracting orchestral works from of Puccini’s operas. In creating these scores, Rizzi was clear that he intended his “suites”, as he calls them (though each plays continuously) as celebrations of Puccini’s brilliance as an orchestrator, and not as concert-hall surrogates for the operas themselves. His scores – the Madama Butterfly suite is 17 minutes along, the Tosca, just over 20 – never attempt to fill in missing vocal lines.
Certainly in these performances by the Welsh National Opera orchestra he takes the opportunity to revel in the imagination and subtlety of Puccini’s scoring, though it seems to me that dramatically at least the Tosca reworking is the more convincing of the two. And Rizzi also includes the purely orchestral pieces that Puccini composed as a student, the Preludio Sinfonico, and the Capriccio Sinfonico that he wrote as a graduation piece.
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