English Nationwide Opera opens its season with Puccini’s Tosca, in a staging by Christof Loy, new to London, however first carried out by the Finnish Nationwide Opera in Helsinki in 2018. Carried out by Leo Hussain, it’s a compelling, albeit idiosyncratic piece of theatre. Loy, as one would possibly count on, fastidiously probes his protagonists’ psyches, typically with fascinating outcomes. On the similar time, nonetheless, you possibly can’t assist however really feel he’s attempting to do fractionally an excessive amount of with it, deploying parts of symbolism that don’t at all times cohere.
A deliberate jumble of durations in Christian Schmidt’s designs underscores the ideological battle between revolutionary republicanism and a corrupt monarchy on the work’s centre. Scarpia (acted by the indisposed Noel Bouley on opening evening whereas Roland Wooden sang from the facet of the stage) and his henchmen put on ancien régime outfits, whereas Adam Smith’s Cavaradossi and Msimelelo Mbali’s Angelotti are in Fifties fits. Sinéad Campbell-Wallace’s Tosca successfully shuttles between each worlds, showing in church in Act I in a New Look gown, and donning 18th century costume when she later arrives in Scarpia’s rooms. Crimson and gold theatre curtains, descending from the proscenium or slowly obscuring elements of the set, in the meantime, recommend, a bit of awkwardly, the blurring of actuality and phantasm in Tosca’s thoughts. And the Shepherd Boy in Act III has change into a Tosca-lookalike in Cavaradossi’s creativeness as he lies awaiting execution in his cell.
Loy is powerful, nonetheless, on the pervasive ambiance of oppression and brutality. Campbell-Wallace performs Tosca as an primarily susceptible lady, whose propensity for self-dramatisation additionally masks catastrophic naivety, and who by the tip of Act I has walked unwittingly into the entice ready for her. Scarpia, an actual sadist, writhes erotically on the church flooring throughout the Te Deum and later paws Tosca obscenely as she sings Vissi d’Arte. Within the ultimate scenes, she stays traumatised by the reminiscence of the homicide she has dedicated, and Smith’s Cavaradossi, ardent, however ever the realist, is all too conscious that the promised mock-execution is fraudulent and that he's genuinely going to his dying.
A few of that is extraordinarily highly effective, and the performances are sometimes comparably robust. Campbell-Wallace’s voice blazes comfortably in its higher registers, however there’s nice lyrical heat in her scenes with Smith, and Vissi d’Arte is superbly performed. Bouley is a mesmerising theatrical animal, although Wooden sang with fantastic evenness of tone and nice dramatic fireplace. Smith, in the meantime, makes an amazing Cavaradossi, his arias gloriously phrased, his method with phrases typically immaculate, and his excessive notes thrillingly sustained in his transient second of victory over Scarpia in Act II. The smaller roles are persistently properly solid, whereas ENO’s orchestra is on superb type for Hussain, whose conducting is all grand ardour and sweeping depth, and totally gripping.
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