Tosca

Music by Giacomo Puccini
Metropolitan Opera
New York, NY

There was so much negative press about this new production, I feared the worst.  In the end, I was pleasantly surprised.  The big complaint, from what I read, was that the sets were too spare and the staging was too restrained.  I did not have that feeling at all.  Generally, the staging of new productions at the Met over the past few years has been much more appealing.  The show that comes foremost to mind is the Don Giovanni from about a year ago. It was beautifully staged and cast, and dramatically believable and compelling. In the current Tosca, the abstraction of the sets makes for stark dramatic sense.  Their unadorned quality served to highlight the bald manipulativeness of Scarpia, the villain. The long, trying seduction scene – one can barely call it seduction – is like a large black, contemporary canvas – stark, bare and threateningly empty.  This highlights the arc of the drama rather than, as more baroquely decorated Met productions have done, to embellish it.  Without the embellishment, a kind of bare tragedy emerges.  In Madame Butterfly this tragedy is so direct and palpable, and, because of the Japanese theme, allowed more frequently to emerge with that kind of starkness.  I found a similar approach refreshing here in Tosca. 

Karita Mattila is a fine Tosca, though I kept imaging her as Brunnhilde and fantasizing what it might have been like to see Maria Callas in the role.  There’s a kind of spiteful directness in Callas’  persona that seems more appropriate to the scandalous position into which Tosca is placed.  Mattila has a kind of broad athleticism that makes one feel she could take Scarpia down in a tackle, but her voice is full and rich and it all seemed to work rather well.  George Gagnidze as Scarpia was characterologically perfectly slimy, while Marcelo Alvarez as Cavaradossi was, like Mattila, a little bit of a dramatic stretch.  But his voice, along with Scarpia’s were complelling and resonant.  James Levine was out on medical leave, but  Joseph Colaneri did a fine job with the orchestra.  The cello solos by Rafael Figueroa and duets by him and Dorothea Noack were just beautifully done.

– BADMan