TOSCA

Speranza

For a time after the critically savaged opening of Luc Bondy’s gritty, spare and somewhat smarmy production of Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera, some nourished the forlorn hope that the Met would come to its senses and revive the immediate predecessor, by Franco Zeffirelli, widely beloved for its grand and hyper-realistic sets.

But it is clear by now that the Bondy version — revived every year since its premiere and shorn of its worst excrescences, sexual and otherwise — is here for at least a while.

So it is probably time to stop the comparisons and accept or reject it on its own terms.
      

If acceptance came slowly at the latest revival, the reasons were more musical than theatrical.

 

This though the main singers were all veterans of earlier outings in this production: Patricia Racette as Floria Tosca, the passionate vocal diva; Roberto Alagna as Mario Cavaradossi, the painter and Tosca’s lover; and George Gagnidze as Baron Scarpia, the cruel and grasping police commissioner and Tosca’s would-be lover.

      

A big part of the problem was the conducting of Riccardo Frizza, a newcomer to the production, who allowed the orchestra to ride over the singers in the first act and, to a lesser extent, throughout.

 

All the singers, that is, except for Alagna.

      

Metal in the voice is one thing, but Alagna’s sound in the first act was sheer unalloyed steel, impressive in its amplitude but lacking in subtlety and with pitch soaring literally over the top a couple of times.

      

This blasting approach worked better in the scene of Cavaradossi’s torture in the second act.

 

And in the third, Alagna rose to considerable flexibility in the shaping of words and lines.

 

 

Racette’s Tosca also improved throughout, though she started from the opposite vantage point: clean but colourless and uncharismatic in the first act.

 

By her great aria “Vissi d’arte” in the second, despite some pitch problems there, she had warmed into a character of real dimension, which she continued to develop.

      

Gagnidze fell victim to Mr. Frizza’s enthusiasms early on, Scarpia’s chilling “Va, Tosca,” at the end of the first act going for little.

 

Though he reveled in Mr. Bondy’s seedy conception of the character, he never summoned quite enough vocal power or menace to go with it.

      

In any case, by the third act, with the musical qualities now mostly in place, this admirer of the Zeffirelli production, which was not without quirks of its own, had also developed a certain grudging affection for Mr. Bondy’s staging.

 

The starkness of the sets suits and amplifies the work’s desperate moods and places the music in sharp relief.

      

In this case, the orchestra was in too sharp relief, but its playing, as opposed to its volume (Donovan Singletary’s Angelotti and John Del Carlo’s Sacristan being further victims), was wonderful.

 

Alagna’s “E lucevan le stelle” was accompanied by a gorgeous clarinet solo by Boris Allakhverdyan, after an equally fine cello solo by Jerry Grossman.