In 2006, Jonathan Kent was charged with replacing Franco
Zeffirelli's Covent Garden Tosca, created for Maria Callas,
after its run of four decades. Where bigger egos might have
chosen to make a statement, Kent spoke simply of devising an
arena for great singers to move through. Duncan Macfarland's
revival in 2011 showcases Angela Gheorghiu and Bryn Terfel from
the original cast, joined by Jonas Kaufmann.
If dioramas
of Rome are what you require, look elsewhere. Paul Brown's solid
stage architecture operates by suggestion, and his period
costumes take discreet liberties — an eminently satisfactory big
picture, in other words. But what matters most is Kent's
microscopic attention to verbal, musical and theatrical nuance,
mirrored throughout in Antonio Pappano's skill in fusing
Puccini's Technicolor atmospherics and sharp narrative close-ups
into a magisterial cinematic flow.
Here is melodrama in
excelsis — plotted like clockwork, pulsing with life. Consider,
for instance, the way panic resolves audibly and visibly into
exhausted relief when the fugitive Angelotti locates the hidden
key to a family chapel. Angelotti passes through the opera like
a dim comet early on and is never seen again, yet in the
towering, haunted Lukas Jakobski, he registers as the
protagonist of a full-fledged tragedy of his own. A muted,
disappointed Sacristan, Jeremy White forgoes shtick for
character. Even John Morrissey's laconic cynic of a Jailer comes
across as a man with tales to tell.
But Tosca stands or
falls by the principals. Kaufmann and Terfel, in
particular, goad each other to incandescence. In Cavaradossi's
Act I reverie, Kaufmann's startling clarion tones impart an edge
of the ferocity he later summons up in the clutches of Scarpia,
yet he scales back the final phrase, seamlessly, to end on a
note of pure romance. Epicurean in his tastes, savage in
appetite, Terfel's Frog Prince of a Scarpia cuts from silken
gallantry to the raging roar of a beast with equal ease. Many
great artists have put their signatures on these iconic roles
over the past 113 years, but I wonder: has anyone had the
imagination and the voice to realize them more completely?
Gheorghiu prefers to play what she thinks of as
herself. "I am not a tiger," she said before the 2006 premiere,
promising a Tosca who would be (in her forties) "really fresh,
feminine and young."
She kept her word. Radiant in a
marigold day-ensemble and coral hair ribbon, Gheorghiu wafts
through Act I with balletic grace. Resplendent in diamonds and a
snow-white evening gown, she endures the tortures of Act II with
polished composure. Hair down, jewels stowed, she tiptoes
through Act III on air, still spotless in her white dress,
though the safe-conduct pried from her victim's corpse is soaked
in blood.
Hardly your textbook Tosca. Yet even Met
audiences unbewitched by Gheorghiu's complacent art may get her
message this time. The transparency of her timbre and delicate
tints of grief and rapture are ravishing, and for a change, her
exquisite instrument does not drop out below her upper range. We
may have the sound engineers to thank for this — or could it be
that she simply functions better in London? Covent Garden is
half the size of the Met, and audiences there eat out of her
hand. Fight her charms if you can. She's one of a kind.
