An excellent pleasure of the performing arts is the chance to witness how elastic the classics could be. In opera, the identical function could be reworked, repeatedly, with every new interpreter, even throughout a singer’s lifetime. It is a purpose to maintain coming again.
On the Metropolitan Opera this season, for instance, there have been three casts for the revival of Puccini’s Tosca. The one factor they shared was the forced-perspective scene of David McVicar’s ornate conventional manufacturing.
The primary run, at the beginning of autumnit was uneven and largely underpowered. The second, in November, was noisy, with the highly effective soprano Liz Davidson sings Tosca for the primary time on the Met, and tenor Freddie De Tommaso makes his home debut. But it surely was a little bit of a letdown, miscast and missing the punch of Puccini’s breathless drama.
Properly, the third solid is a appeal. “Tosca” came back on thursday at its finest this season, with the triumphant, long-awaited return of bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, in addition to the return of soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, an incomparable Tosca on the Met in recent times and one of many best interpreters of the function right now.
Terfel has been a Met favourite because the mid-Nineties, however unhealthy luck has stored him away from the home for 13 years. He was attributable to create the function of Scarpia in McVicar’s manufacturing when it was new within the 2017-18 season, however withdrew to have a polyp faraway from his vocal cords. Then, shortly earlier than the pandemic halted stay performances, he was attributable to star in a brand new manufacturing of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, however pulled out after breaking his ankle.
You possibly can really feel a collective sigh of aid on Thursday when Terfel not solely entered Act I, however introduced it with booming resonance: certainly “con grande autorità,” or with nice authority, because the rating states. His voice, deft sufficient to personal each Figaro and Wotan on the Met, might have been barely drained by the top of Act II, however it’s nonetheless energetic and wealthy in character.
If Queen Kelsey’s Scarpia, who sang the function in November, was motivated by longing, then Terfel works in energy. His meanness modified kind all through the night, snarling within the firm of associates and darkly cute in entrance of Tosca. Every now and then, Terfel let the insanity present, flashing vast white eyes or switching to animalistic gestures.
It was a efficiency of extraordinary element and nuance, traits that Terfel shares with Radvanovsky. At one level, within the showdown of Act II, he lifted her hand to kiss it, then opened his mouth as if to swallow her. She pulled again in disgust and he let loose a hiss and growl. Neither sang, however the second was pure opera.
Radvanovski approaches Tosca with the fearlessness and freedom of a very stay efficiency. She made you chortle at first, then broke your coronary heart and made you worry for her, solely to flip the script and ask you to be afraid her. Her signature was the shrewd whisper, the flexibility to vary quantity in a single breath, turning an anguished cry right into a sound each subtly sympathetic and unbreakable at its core.
She introduced out one of the best in tenor Brian Jagde as her doomed lover Cavaradossi, who was in any other case essentially the most standard but in addition essentially the most assured singer within the function this season. Within the pit, Xian Zhang led a propulsive, even cinematic studying of the rating that will have been mild on element however had a lethal thrill.
Zhang’s baton was matched by edge-of-the-seat melodrama within the second act. However the distinction between Tosca’s routine performances and Thursday’s success is whether or not the rating’s depth surges from the pit by way of the singers like electrical energy.
When, on the finish of Act II, Radvanovsky seems down at Scarpia’s corpse, she delivers the road “And all Rome trembled earlier than him” with a jarring mixture of triumph and tearful despair. This scene alone is purpose to return to Tosca once more.
Tosca
By means of Jan 23 on the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
