It is rare and rather risky for one singer to undertake all three soprano roles in Il trittico. Renata Tebaldi tried (Gardelli) but did so rather too late in her career, by which time her voice tended to harshness under pressure, spoiling her intelligent and sometimes effective Angelica, making her Giorgetta sound shrewish. The nearest to a satisfactory one-woman triple-bill so far has been achieved by those sopranos who've been content to attempt two out of three of the heroines. Victoria de los Angeles, the most moving of all Angelicas, is also a very charming Lauretta in Tito Gobbi's first account of Gianni Schicchi (Santini; this set also includes a good Tabarro conducted by Bellezza, with Gobbi the finest of all Micheles, but only the Schicchi is in stereo). Renata Scotto, more surprisingly, omits Lauretta but is as touching an Angelica as she is movingly tragic as Giorgetta (Maazel; Scotto's admirable tenor is Placido Domingo; the accompanying Gianni Schicchi has Gobbi again, 63 but hardly sounding it, and Ileana Cotrubas as a girlish Lauretta). Up to now those two sets, and in that order if you don't mind mono, would have been my prime recommendations.
Another option for any soprano wanting to record all three roles would be to attempt them at different stages of her career. It will sound most ungrateful to a singer who has given me pretty well unalloyed pleasure over the years, but I do rather wish that Mirella Freni had done that. Artist that she is she can of course suggest what her Angelica would have been like if she'd sung the role when she was the most delightful Susanna and the most moving Mimi imaginable. Now the tone has darkened somewhat, it spreads rather under pressure and she can no longer risk a thread of voice at the top of the register. In the sparsely accompanied ''Idesiderii sono i fiori dei vivi'' she fines down the tone and merely touches the higher notes: here and elsewhere she is very touching, but she brings too much force to ''Senza mamma'' and the awkwardly approached high A at the end is precarious.
The darker quality of her lower tones suits Giorgetta splendidly, though. As it happens her Luigi (Giacomini) also has a dark, baritonal quality, and this gives the earthy, urgent quality of a fated affinity to their scenes together. Here too, in her conversational exchanges, even the merest scraps of dialogue, Freni's intelligent acting and use of words rounds her character admirably. Her Lauretta is less interesting: it is competently, even glamorously sung, with full tone, but there's not much naivety or charm to it.
In Il tabarro, she and Giacomini are so electric (he, in this role, is quite formidable) that they cast what should be the dominating role, Juan Pons's light-voiced and seriously under-acted Michele, in to the shade; that this Michele should overpower and terrify Giacomini is quite unthinkable. It says something for Freni's Angelica that she should come so strongly out of the encounter with Elena Suliotis's Princess. She has now three voices, a hollow baritone, a not quite focused mezzo and a soprano of still penetrating force. The abrupt gear-changes between them and her powerful presence make her a weird but forceful antagonist. With Freni merely giving an accomplished guest appearance in Gianni Schicchi, a lot rests on the shoulders of Nucci in the title-role and Alagna as Rinuccio. Nucci, alas, is another of those baritones who seem to think that whining through the last third of the opera in 'comic' nasal tones can somehow make up for under-characterization in the first two-thirds. It can't; when he makes his first entrance you hardly notice that anything has changed, and thereafter hectoring is the nearest he gets to rendering Schicchi's wily subtlety. Alagna sounds to me like a basically attractive lyric tenor who's pushing his voice much too hard: the result is pinched and charmless. In this opera, incidentally, the use of sound effects (trampling feet, rustling paper and so on) is taken to excess, doubtless to make up for the general lack of any real sense of the stage. The lawyer Maestro Spinelloccio, instead of the Bolognese accent optimistically demanded in the score, is given a Schicchi-like whine and ill-fitting dentures that whistle at every sibilant. Not funny.
Bartoletti is reliable throughout, the recording is well balanced and reasonably spacious, and there are some decent singers among the supporting casts, though few of them seize the opportunities for pungent characterization that Puccini hands to them on a plate. So when all is said and done, one and a half out of three isn't a good enough success-rate for a Trittico. I do hope Decca are thinking of issuing Il tabarro separately. If it comes to that I wish all record companies would issue their Trittico operas separately.'