Three sets of reservations, appropriately enough, nagged at me as I sat down with this film of Christof Loy’s 2022 staging of Puccini’s operatic triptych. First, Loy has decided to rearrange Puccini’s preferred order for the three operas, with Gianni Schicchi first and Suor Angelica serving as the finale. Second, it’s a Salzburg Festival production, conceived for the vast stage of the Grosses Festspielhaus, and it’s hard to imagine these three essentially intimate dramas sitting comfortably in that cavernous space. And third, it’s conducted by Franz Welser-Möst, a conductor whose work both live and on disc I’ve found consistently underwhelming.

Taking those three issues in reverse order, it’s fair to say that Welser-Möst exceeds expectations. He’s not what one might call an instinctive Puccini conductor, but that works to his advantage here: what he does supply is a sense of purpose, a powerful grip on the overall pace and an almost forensic clarity of orchestral sound. Deconstructed Puccini? Not quite, although it can make for an occasionally bumpy ride in Gianni Schicchi. But in Il tabarro, Welser-Möst gives an almost expressionist eeriness and bite (Pierrot lunaire occasionally came, rather startlingly, to mind) to some of Puccini’s boldest writing, and in Suor Angelica his detachment confers the inevitability of classical tragedy on an opera that’s still too often dismissed as pious kitsch.

That actually works rather well with Loy’s overall aesthetic. Yes, Étienne Pluss’s designs are huge, stark and not a little chilly; and while the single enormous room is well fitted to the austerity of Angelica’s convent, it also houses Buoso Donati’s deathbed in Schicchi and (absurdly) the river barge in Tabarro. The sheer distances involved make it hard for the cast to generate farcical momentum in the former and the necessary claustrophobia in the latter, though the video direction actually helps here, and it all comes good in the end. That’s a logical outcome of Loy’s reordering of the three operas, too: Suor Angelica is no longer merely an interlude, and the trilogy finds its focus around the heroine in each opera, with Asmik Grigorian’s three performances (alone of the cast, she’s the lead in all three pieces) becoming the golden thread upon which the entire staging hangs.

And she really is golden: living on her nerve-ends and singing with a radiance and a dramatic intensity that grows and grows to an ending of almost unbearable pity and power. She’s an awkward, anxious Lauretta in Schicchi: no disingenuous daddy’s girl but a young woman pouring all her hopes (and more than a hint of desperation) into ‘O mio babbino caro’. She needs to: Misha Kiria’s Schicchi is a tough nut, a salt-of-the-earth bruiser with a big, tar-coloured voice who barely conceals his resentment of his social superiors. You can see, though, why he might make an exception for a Rinuccio as cheerful and as ardent as Alexey Neklyudov. In Il tabarro, Grigorian embodies both resignation and a tremulous, sweet-toned longing; if Luigi (Joshua Guerrero) doesn’t seem quite as worth the risk she runs for him, Roman Burdenko, as Michele, sings with a black-toned depth that hardens into deadly menace.

Then we come to Suor Angelica, and Grigorian holds the stage almost throughout; a performance of heart-rending vocal beauty and equally potent vocal characterisation. Listen to the sweetness with which she floats her ecstatic line about desires being the flowers of the living; then hear the sliver of steel – and fear – enter her voice as she learns that she has a visitor. To cast Karita Mattila as the Princess was an inspired choice; Mattila snarls and purrs in full ice-queen malevolence and this Angelica – as we’ve suspected she might ever since we saw her incarnated as Lauretta two operas earlier – reacts with startling anger, before turning her violence inwards on herself. Grigorian is compelling; the whole dramatic and emotional weight of the Trittico falls on her in these final scenes and she (and Loy, and even Welser-Möst) proves more than capable of carrying it. You might feel Loy pushes it too far but you’re unlikely to look at these three operas in quite the same light again, and that alone would make this production worth seeing.